One hears a lot, from American 'thinkers', about the need for greater good ole fashioned American entrepreneurship, say a lot more of moving and shaking 'grinds'.
Prestowitz wrote a book, about 10 years ago, called Three Billion New Capitalists....must be a lot of entrepreneurs among 3,000,000,000 capitalists. How many capitalists, how many entrepreneurs, is enough? Can you have too many?
Does it matter whether they are your citizens, or somebody else's? If so, how much does it matter, a lot, or a little, or did you think about it yet?
There are a lot of bright new thinkers, in abundance, in the developing world, armed now, thanks overwhelmingly to us, with knowledge, technology,and set free to innovate.
What has been the history of innovation, re patents in the US, to the limited extent intellectual property protection really means much anymore? Apparently, most of them have been going to others elsewhere in recent years. R&D closed down or offshored.
Back when the US did innovate relatively more, up to the mid 20th Century, most of this innovation was taken, licensed, bought, stolen, or imitated, and capitalized on elsewhere, not in the US.
So, given that history, why push for entrepreneurship here to ignite a 'domestic' economy?
What do I suggest?
This is not all about just criticism of the status quo.
I recommend reform towards the type of nation state systems that have been operating against our weak federated system. Everyone without blinkers has been able for a long time to see the results of the differences. Books have been written about it.
The notion of a developmental state is not new, or even just 20th Century in origin. Some people refer to 17th Century Holland as the first, but one can go further back really. There were attempts to move the US somewhat in that direction from the beginning. They were not that successful, past a certain point. You have to look at the history of the North and the South and the world, commercially, in the 18th and early 19th Centuries.......
Lincoln's was the last 'serious' attempt (I say 'serious'), and was a major reason for the Civil War. He had hoped, before the war, to see the South developed, more similarly to then existing industrial development in the North at that time, under what was called the American System, a plank in the Republican Party, not merely to continue the patterns of core and hinterland, foreign trade and competition with foreign manuracturing, and foreign and Northern investment, which had existed in the US for some time by then.
But he was killed. He had also turned away from the theme of Southern development by say 1862. His pre-war intentions were not later carried out. I doubt whether they even could have been, given the flawed political structure he was struggling even to salvage, and the pressures on such an enterprise from all quarters.
There are a lot of different reasons why a transition to a more developmental domestic commonwealth would be difficult now too, but some reasons remain the same.
What are the alternatives? I am not going to get into Shield's or Shell's 'possible worlds' (not 'possible worlds semantics'), because for this topic, one doesn't have to.
Perhaps something remotely like a modern version of the Spartan City State system, but without its virtues.
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