Something may be puzzling to some. Why do people regard entrepreneurs the same way vampires regard garlic, otherwise known as the stinking rose? Is there something stinky about building a business around what began as an innovation like the plane, the car, the light bulb, the Macintosh, Levi Jeans, Coke, or the more recent DeVinci mentioned by George Savage on the Main feed?
America still has the longest list of billionaires by far, most are self made, their businesses grown by customers with the free will to buy their goods and services. In comparison, the list of the billionaire rich people in other countries is very short, perhaps because too often the political class are the wealthy, enabled by their public sector (insert country name here, e.g. Russia, China, Zimbabwe).
In corporations, key executives will hold on to a role and organizational structure long after it has served its purpose because the structure is a source of their power.
These companies eventually go bankrupt.
We have certainly seen far too many of the political elite in many countries hold on to their power and seek to get more power, no matter the life and death consequences for their citizens and their country's economic health. In history, the battle for centralized power by political elites against the decentralized power of entrepreneurs has been the battle of the last century. Yet here it is again but now in America. Some of my professors at McGill University taught me that capitalism was not a good system and would implode by 1985. What actually happened, the Berlin Wall imploded instead.
Communists believe that the place for entrepreneurs is in front of the firing squad. Marxists see the use of keeping business owners alive, but to put the stinking, greedy entrepreneurs in their yoke, pulling the plough to give off jobs and a larger share of salaries for workers. The business owners duty, above all,s is to pay larger tax returns because the entrepreneur did not plough that field by themselves. Somebody helped them and they owe those somebodies more, more, more.
The unions are about gaining power over the dynamics of entrepreneurship and the free market. If unions were about the health of the company, they would know the customers pay their salaries. And by customer, that does not include the government using tax payer money to create artificial demand.
Marx created the word capital - Das Capital. They are also trying to make all business owners be known as vampire squid face suckers or whatever they were calling Goldman Sachs. This view of business owners is gaining rapid traction. When Ms. Warren, a Harvard professor can recite the Das Capital playbook, and then the President repeats this ideology, this is a rallying call for revolution. It is a call to shift power, in my humble opinion, to unions and centralized control by government.
What do you think? There are some business owners who deserve to be called vampires (cough...Goldman Sachs). Do people put all business owners in the same category as large, public corporations? Does the distinction matter? Do people see companies with a paid CEO or a family business owner differently? What can businesses do about this image of "you did not build that by yourself."
