Entrepreneurship – The Failure of the Economy Has Brought America Back to Its Roots

“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.”

Thomas Alva Edison, American, Inventor & Entrepreneur, (1847-1931)

If the first thing you do when you get home from a hard day’s work is to flip on the evening news, it is no wonder to me why we, as a nation, have lost our edge in leading the world economically, technologically, and spiritually. We have lost our way. We were once the nation that was responsible for the creation of the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell, 1876), the automobile assembly line (Henry Ford, 1913), the airplane (Wilbur & Orville Wright, 1903), the light bulb (Thomas Alva Edison, 1879), and even discovered electricity itself. However, there has been a steady decline in American inventiveness that has lead to us to this moment in our collective economic history. Rather than nurturing our greatest asset (creativity) and continuing to lead the world on the strength of our intellectual and creative genius, we have devolved into nothing more than a nation of consumers of foreign products. This is a documented fact that has resulted in an ever growing trade deficit that, unless we drastically change our ways, will keep us in national debt, forever.

For the past few decades, we have only mastered the appearance of being busy. We have given up on all our dreams, found a “comfortable”, minimally stimulating job with good pay and “benefits”, and turned off our creative brains. Although as children, we imagined, created, composed, and envisioned fantastic solutions to problems we encountered, as adults, we keep busy at our jobs, in front of our idiot boxes, and in our super-sized malls consuming, that we can not even imagine having time to think for ourselves. And in this way, advertisers and big business have us where they want us.

“Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.”

Thomas Alva Edison, American, Inventor & Entrepreneur, (1847-1931)

America still creates and develops the most incredible and cutting-edge intellectual property and products in the world, however it is big business with Wall Street connections that dominates the vast majority of these creations. Huge corporations like Microsoft (with billions of dollars in stockholder and investor money) would acquire all the rights to any potentially promising (or competitive) programs only to impart its corporate brand of mediocrity to it. The eventual result is a product that has been limited in vision and stripped of all its heart and creative passion. This is how we, as mutual fund investors, are subsidizing America’s creative failure and promoting our national indebtedness. This is invention in the new, consumer nation of America.

In this new corporate, Wall Street-run state, the inventions to change the world for the better are fewer and further between. And the creators who imagine them, who put their blood, sweat, and tears into them, and who dream of the better world ahead because of their invention are seldom familiar with the ways of business and copyright law and other measures of intellectual property protection. And to them, a few hundred thousand dollars would make a significant and immediate difference in their life. And all too often, the unfortunate end of the story is an idea or invention squandered, a few hundred thousand dollars mismanaged and lost, and an American economy that is incapable of competing against nations that nurture their intellectual talent.

Plenty of creative people hold on to their ideas, however without financial capital, many world-changing ideas die on the vine. Where is the financial support for these ideas that would elevate our economy, as well as, our national pride? Why are we spending billions of dollars bailing out banks and huge corporations that have failed by their own unethical actions without considering that financial support for entrepreneurs and small business, who make up over 50% of the American economy and employ millions more people than big business, would be substantially more effective in keeping our economy from failure? The determining factor was and is that there aren’t millions of dollars spent on lobbying for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

Bailouts for big business is not the solution for an economy that has been languishing since we have displaced our focus from creating and developing intellectual property and products; it will be the entrepreneurs and small businesses that will power the economy back to strength. However, this can only happen when policy makers create a more supportive environment for entrepreneurs and small businesses. As the credit market continues to be extremely tight despite the big banks being recapitalized by our tax dollars, small businesses, the employers of millions of Americans, suffer to maintain their business operations and pay their employees because of limitations imposed by their big bank creditors. It is a case where those companies who acted selfishly in the first place, were entrusted with tax payer money to act differently-should we really be surprised by their same old selfish actions?

“Be courageous! Have faith! Go Forward!”

Thomas Alva Edison, American, Inventor & Entrepreneur, (1847-1931)

Although all seems like doom and gloom, it is as Thomas Edison said: “Have faith!” Entrepreneurs do not have the luxury of a lot of things, most of all, pessimism. In spite of the concerns of small businesses and entrepreneurs having thus far fallen on deaf ears, this is not enough of a reason for the true entrepreneur to become discouraged. So, I am incredibly encouraged when I see that in this depressed economy, more and more people are seeing and seizing the opportunity. Since the beginning of massive layoffs and the stock market collapsed on the news of the coming recession, there has been an increase in the number of small businesses started. See what happens when creative Americans unplug from their daily “busy work” and have time to dream and imagine again!

To be an entrepreneur is to be courageous. Not much is truly certain, however here is what is certain-lenders, by definition, will and must lend, and so, that day must come around again. And history has shown us that there is no better investment than the passion and drive of the American entrepreneur.