WASHINGTON – Jim Tankersley reports in The Washington Post, (May 23, 2016), that “The recovery from the Great Recession has seen a nationwide slowdown in the creation of new businesses, or start-ups. What growth has occurred has been largely confined to a handful of large and innovative areas, including Silicon Valley in California, New York City and parts of Texas, according to a new analysis of Census Bureau data by the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan research and advocacy organization.”
Death of the U.S. small company
Holman W. Jenkins writes in The Wall Street Journal (Trump for Blow-Upper in Chief?, May 21-22, 2016) that the Kauffman Foundation noted that there is a marked “decline in small business entrepreneurship” in America. Jenkins also cites a Brookings Institution report pointing out that business closures now exceed business starts in the U.S.
Well, what could be the reasons behind this rather ominous trend in what used to be the land of private enterprise? May be the cause of all this is in another fact cited by Jenkins in his WSJ piece. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, last year Congress passed 114 laws. But it issued 3,410 new regulations. These amounted to 80,260 pages in the Federal Registry, close to a historic record.
Regulations suffocate small enterprises
So, here is my simple theory. Whatever its intentions, the Obama administration in its effort to regulate and restrict almost every economic or commercial activity is slowly strangling U.S. enterprises, especially small and medium-sized companies that simply lack the resources to ensure compliance with this myriad of confusing federal rules. Please, do keep in mind that these companies are the true engines of the U.S. economy. These are the innovators and the jobs creators.
Killing capitalism
So, here is the thing. You do not need a proletarian or a social-democratic (Bernie Sanders-style) revolution to kill capitalism. A death by a thousands cuts inflicted by federal regulators will do just fine. It seems that government bureaucrats are quite capable of destroying capitalism on their own.
And so the most successful economic system ever devised in human history will wither and die not because of a popular uprising staged by the angry masses, but because of the suffocation caused by an avalanche of regulations that make it almost impossible for small businesses to stay viable and grow.