Daniel Henninger argues in the Wall Street Journal that Obama's economic policies (particularly the jobs bill) will lead to the rise of political entrepreneurs and to the decline of market entrepreneurs who have made America America:
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 suspect that Daniel Henninger's dislike for the intervention of the state within the economy and his idolization of what he believes to be real entrepreneurship are narrowing his perception of reality. Nevertheless, reading his arguments forces one to wonder whether entrepreneurship in itself is always a good for a country and should be privileged over anything else whether it is based on politics or on the market. To put it differently, I wonder whether in an age where a lot of entrepreneurs can go wherever they want to innovate, governments have real policy choices if they believe in entrepreneurship as a good in itself.
In any case, to come back to Henninger's strong distaste for "political entrepreneurs," I wonder if his problem is more with the politics that they are following rather than politics itself. To phrase it differently, I wonder if Henninger would be saying the same time if Obama were Bush or the venerated Ronald Reagan.
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