The American myth about entrepreneurs is dying, Eric Garland, Eric Garland Blog, May 20, 2014

America used to have a myth that it supported and honored entrepreneurs. I was certainly raised with it. My father owns a farm store, my mother ran a pie shop, my sister has a dance school, my Italian grandparents had their own bakeries, et cetera. I always thought that owning your own business was not only possible, it was preferable, somehow more noble than working in the boiler room of someone else’s company. I am an American, and it wasn’t until I arrived in Paris that I realized that this was a myth which had not been internalized by everybody, everywhere. In France, I was forced to confront the notion that some people saw small business as being a petty, money grubbing merchant who could not survive in the larger, more important world of state institutions and major businesses. Quite a shock, really.

Yet this is a myth I still cherish and here’s why: small businesses tend to produce the greatest job growth. Huge companies are more dominant in an industry, but small companies are the most likely to grow and create a new position with wealth, a tax base, a market for other businesses and all that good stuff. Yet our policies are making the world more friendly to the big and more hostile to the small. There was a guy who wrote about this a lot in the 18th century: Adam Smith. In his Wealth of Nations, he saw large businesses protected by the government as unjust and inferior to smaller businesses with accountability to their neighbors. His theory was called capitalism and we have gotten away from it in recent years.

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