This idea of public/private partnerships is nothing
more than crony capitalism. Some
businesses thrive off of taxpayer money and regulatory hurdles. In order to be successful, these companies,
along with their political enablers, need to suppress competition and
innovation.
For most of human history there has been
technological stagnation with a few hiccups of advancements. The last couple of centuries have been
unique. We are witnessing innovations
that no one could have comprehended decades ago.
Yet, there are those who don’t appreciate the entrepreneurial
spirit. To them it’s a dog eat dog
world. These miserable bastards believe
anyone who succeeds is greedy slavers who earn their money off the backs of the
poor. They want a great leveling. They want a return to the horse and buggy
days of stagnation and general misery. These
people, who are filled with hate and envy, want to use government regulations
as a means to punish. All the while,
mindlessly using the technology and products these very same entrepreneurs helped
to create.
Carolina Journal Radio published an interview with
Fred Smith, a founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, on the entrepreneurial
spirit and the consequences of stagnation.
Here is an excerpt. You can read
the rest by clicking the link below.
Kokai: Many
of us who are not entrepreneurs by nature would see the entrepreneurial spirit
in action and say, “Wait a minute, this is just too hard to take.” Why is this
something that we have to take and say, “Look, entrepreneurs, do what you do
because this is beneficial”?
Smith: Creative destruction is the core of that question because every act of change does some damage to the existing world. The automobile put out of business the buggy makers. The Internet has threatened the whole journalism world we grew up in. … We see the wreckage in the past of the change, but we fail to understand the incredible future that is opened up by that way.
Over the last — well, mankind over the last 10,000 or 30,000 years almost always lived in a stagnant world. Some improvements, but the improvements were critically eaten away by population growth and so on. It’s only when we found ways to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit — the Industrial Revolution — that mankind began to live better and better and better and better.
And yet those very forces of change have made us complacent to some extent. Well, life isn’t so bad. Maybe we ought to slow down a little bit.
Well, individually, perfectly fine: Many of us slow down as we get older. We retire and so forth, and many of us take occupations that a wealthy society can afford. Not economically remunerative, but wonderful jobs we like to see. The public policy world is very much like that as we both know.
But the challenge is to keep those forces of stasis from trying to say, “Change is too disruptive. Let’s only have it when we decide it’s safe.” Because that misses the whole point. Entrepreneurs themselves aren’t sure what the hell they’re doing. They certainly don’t know what in the world they’re going to bring about.
Bill Gates, when he was inventing his products, actually thought computers only needed 32,000 pieces of memory. Who in the name of God would ever need more than that? Well, if Gates didn’t understand that, it’s obvious no one else did, too. Everyone thought they were going to have 100 computers in the whole United States. And Apple came along and realized that aesthetics could be merged with the technology, and now it would be … almost like a painting in a room. All of those changes which now we reckon, “Well, of course now, obviously anyone could see that.” Nobody saw it coming, including the entrepreneurs themselves.
To wait until the bureaucrats understand what’s going on means we’ll have a stagnant society forever. Holding innovation down to bureaucracy speed is a recipe for disaster, for no future at all. And whether we care about that for ourselves or not, we should care about it for the people of the world, many of whom, one-third of whom, are still locked in a-dollar-a-day poverty. Only innovation can bring about the wealth and knowledge to bring those people to our standard of living.
Kokai: Does it help when making this case to point to something like a smartphone and say, “Hey, 20, 25 years ago, no one would have even known that something like this could exist,” and if we block change and entrepreneurship now, the great things like the smartphone of the future won’t come about?
Smith: You can try it, but it’s amazing how difficult it is to get people to accept that. “Well, wait a minute. Everybody knows about smartphones.” Just like everybody knew about cars and everybody — at one time — knew about railroads. We take for granted what already exists. The future seems so uncertain, so risky, so dangerous. What are the smartphones that maybe 20, 30 years from now we’ll need?
Again, Wayne Crews points out, … one of the phrases we’ve gone through a lot is, “Most of the wealth the world would need in 30 years hasn’t even been envisioned yet.” It’s not only we don’t have it yet, we don’t even know what it is going to come from. We know possibly nanotechnology could be a wonderful breakthrough area, 3D printing could be incredibly amazing, totally specializing and decentralizing production for many, many products in our society. Cell biology with a possibility of decoding the reasons why cancers [exist].
All of those areas are incredibly interesting paths to the future, just beginning to be explored, just beginning to be trod upon. And every one of them is threatened by [Food and Drug Administration] regulation, by [Environmental Protection Agency] regulation, by local opposition, by the forces of stasis. We always have to recognize that change is disruptive, but stagnation is deadly
Smith: Creative destruction is the core of that question because every act of change does some damage to the existing world. The automobile put out of business the buggy makers. The Internet has threatened the whole journalism world we grew up in. … We see the wreckage in the past of the change, but we fail to understand the incredible future that is opened up by that way.
Over the last — well, mankind over the last 10,000 or 30,000 years almost always lived in a stagnant world. Some improvements, but the improvements were critically eaten away by population growth and so on. It’s only when we found ways to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit — the Industrial Revolution — that mankind began to live better and better and better and better.
And yet those very forces of change have made us complacent to some extent. Well, life isn’t so bad. Maybe we ought to slow down a little bit.
Well, individually, perfectly fine: Many of us slow down as we get older. We retire and so forth, and many of us take occupations that a wealthy society can afford. Not economically remunerative, but wonderful jobs we like to see. The public policy world is very much like that as we both know.
But the challenge is to keep those forces of stasis from trying to say, “Change is too disruptive. Let’s only have it when we decide it’s safe.” Because that misses the whole point. Entrepreneurs themselves aren’t sure what the hell they’re doing. They certainly don’t know what in the world they’re going to bring about.
Bill Gates, when he was inventing his products, actually thought computers only needed 32,000 pieces of memory. Who in the name of God would ever need more than that? Well, if Gates didn’t understand that, it’s obvious no one else did, too. Everyone thought they were going to have 100 computers in the whole United States. And Apple came along and realized that aesthetics could be merged with the technology, and now it would be … almost like a painting in a room. All of those changes which now we reckon, “Well, of course now, obviously anyone could see that.” Nobody saw it coming, including the entrepreneurs themselves.
To wait until the bureaucrats understand what’s going on means we’ll have a stagnant society forever. Holding innovation down to bureaucracy speed is a recipe for disaster, for no future at all. And whether we care about that for ourselves or not, we should care about it for the people of the world, many of whom, one-third of whom, are still locked in a-dollar-a-day poverty. Only innovation can bring about the wealth and knowledge to bring those people to our standard of living.
Kokai: Does it help when making this case to point to something like a smartphone and say, “Hey, 20, 25 years ago, no one would have even known that something like this could exist,” and if we block change and entrepreneurship now, the great things like the smartphone of the future won’t come about?
Smith: You can try it, but it’s amazing how difficult it is to get people to accept that. “Well, wait a minute. Everybody knows about smartphones.” Just like everybody knew about cars and everybody — at one time — knew about railroads. We take for granted what already exists. The future seems so uncertain, so risky, so dangerous. What are the smartphones that maybe 20, 30 years from now we’ll need?
Again, Wayne Crews points out, … one of the phrases we’ve gone through a lot is, “Most of the wealth the world would need in 30 years hasn’t even been envisioned yet.” It’s not only we don’t have it yet, we don’t even know what it is going to come from. We know possibly nanotechnology could be a wonderful breakthrough area, 3D printing could be incredibly amazing, totally specializing and decentralizing production for many, many products in our society. Cell biology with a possibility of decoding the reasons why cancers [exist].
All of those areas are incredibly interesting paths to the future, just beginning to be explored, just beginning to be trod upon. And every one of them is threatened by [Food and Drug Administration] regulation, by [Environmental Protection Agency] regulation, by local opposition, by the forces of stasis. We always have to recognize that change is disruptive, but stagnation is deadly
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