"Market entrepreneurs like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Hill built businesses on product and price. Hill was the railroad magnate who finished his transcontinental line without a public land grant. Rockefeller took on and beat the world's dominant oil power at the time, Russia. Rockefeller innovated his way to energy primacy for the U.S.
Political entrepreneurs, by contrast, made money back then by gaming the political system. Steamship builder Robert Fulton acquired a 30-year monopoly on Hudson River steamship traffic from, no surprise, the New York legislature. Cornelius Vanderbilt, with the slogan "New Jersey must be free," broke Fulton's government-granted monopoly.
If the Obama model takes hold, we will enter the Golden Age of the Political Entrepreneur. The green jobs industry that sits at the center of the Obama master plan for the American future depends on public subsidies for wind and solar technologies plus taxes on carbon to suppress it as a competitor. Politically connected entrepreneurs will spend their energies running a mad labyrinth of bureaucracies, congressional committees and Beltway door openers. Our best market entrepreneurs, instead of exhausting themselves on their new ideas, will run to ground gaming Barack Obama's ideas.
I totally agree! Freedom, individual and economically is what born free capitalism and the middle class. A good article by John MacArthur Jr. hits the nail on the head on this topic.
ReplyDelete"The Reformation became the triumph of individualism. The triumph of personal salvation, the birth again of salvation by grace through faith, and people realized that God loved them like he loved the priests. That a man had as much value as a priest did even if he was a shoemaker or even if he was a farmer who plowed a field or even if he was a servant. He had dignity. He had value. He was made in the image of God. He could know God as personally and as intimately and as uniquely and as wonderfully as any hierarchical individual in the church.
And so men personally begin to find salvation in Jesus Christ. Men begin to realize that they had value and they had dignity and they had worth and out of this came tremendous economic changes in the world. Capitalism, for example, was born in the Reformation. Free enterprise was born in the Reformation. Man said I have value, I have dignity, I have worth. I have freedom to act under God, to be myself, to chart my course, to glorify God with my shoemaking, to glorify God with my plowing of the field. And free enterprise was born and capitalism was born and a middle class was born where there had been none and the great puritans who followed were a middle class people, a proprietor type people with their own businesses who were revealing that God wanted individuals to manifest their value and their dignity and their creation in his image. It was a triumph then of individualism. It was a triumph of the dignity of man in that he could have a personal relationship with the living God and he didn't have to be subjugated to the confusion and darkness and chaos of an institutional church.
And from the Reformation came the view of a new world. Spawned the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and all of the tremendous history of man where he began to invent, where he began to create, where he began to become educated. Where education reached the common man, where the printing press took the Bible to everybody, where people began to read, where they began to learn, where they began to think independently and all of the wonder of that gave rise to the fact that people said the world is going to get better. There were advances in science and medicine. Inventions were made. People were becoming aware of the world around them. As you move toward the 20thcentury, communications increased and men had the euphoria, the feeling that everything was going to get better, that man was grappling with his problems, and man would solve his problems."
http://www.gty.org/Resources/Sermons/1287_The-Triumph-of-the-Resurrection?q=constantine