Supporting and Encouraging Entrepreneurs - Do We Need an Entrepreneur’s Union?

 The entrepreneur is considered crucial in economics: so crucial that they are even described as a factor of production, listed alongside land, labour and capital. Supply side economic approaches often recommend policies that will encourage and support entrepreneurs, as a way of stimulating the economy.

Allister Heath writes in the Telegraph that there are more entrepreneurs in Britain than ever before, and they will be creating the companies that will allow us to begin rebuilding our prosperity.

He thinks that we need an entrepreneurs’ union:

"a slick, professional pressure group relentlessly fighting for wealth creators and promoting mass entrepreneurship as the answer to the crisis of confidence that is currently engulfing capitalism ... Britain is in urgent need of a savvy, hard-hitting campaign that speaks up for entrepreneurs, a distinct group of business leaders who tend to be very different, in temperament, attitude and interests, to the more managerial, career types who run long-established larger enterprises ... Permanently dissatisfied with the status quo, (entrepreneurs) are agents of creative destruction. Those who create and grow new businesses, more than anybody else, know what it takes to get things done, to invent new products and more efficient processes.”

Powerful stuff. Not everyone is totally convinced, and in 2012 economist Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Entrepreneurial State got a lot of attention. It asked us to be less easily impressed by the argument that the government just gets in the way of enterprise, and the state and its regulations should shrink in order to create more space for dynamic entrepreneurs. Her central point was that government is crucial in driving innovation.

Here are some international comparisons of entrepreneurship and venture capital investment levels. Does entrepreneurship flourish in the US because of government or despite it? That’s a question that will divide both economists and politicians!

A few years ago we seemed to be united in Britain in the view that shows like The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den stimulate enterprise. I remain unconvinced! So I smiled when I came across this article in The Huffington Post that suggested they have the potential to really put people off business!