What happens when a major capitalist myth dies? Myths give us hope, until we no longer believe them. Having seen proof for a generation that most Mom and Pop businesses get smashed like bugs by large established businesses, people aren't buying the entrepreneurial myth anymore. Nonetheless, the same big businesses that do the smashing keep trying to perpetuate the myth, in part by paying mercenaries at think tanks, universities, and consulting firms. (Or, following the Amway model, we can break our own piggie banks and pay entrepreneurs to sell us dreams of entrepreneurial success.)
Big businesses cannot give us all jobs, and with automation, layoffs, and other forms of labor cost-cutting often the surest way to improve stock prices, the trend is ever toward increasing the mass army of the unemployed. But they will not allow government to provide full employment. That might cause a larger inclination to reorient the means of production and distribution to greater democratic control. That leaves the mythic small businesses to fill the gap.
In 1980, according to the Census Bureau data, roughly one in eight companies had been founded in the past year; by 2015, that ratio had fallen to fewer than one in 12. The downward trend cuts across regions and industries and, at least since 2000, includes even the beating heart of American entrepreneurship, high tech.
Although the overall slump dates back more than 30 years, economists are most concerned about a more recent trend. In the 1980s and 1990s, the entrepreneurial slowdown was concentrated in sectors such as retail, where corner stores and regional brands were being subsumed by national chains. That trend, though often painful for local communities, wasn’t necessarily a drag on productivity more generally.
Since about 2000, however, the slowdown has spread to parts of the economy more often associated with high-growth entrepreneurship, including the technology sector. That decline has coincided with a period of weak productivity growth in the United States as a whole, a trend that has in turn been implicated in the patterns of fitful wage gains and sluggish economic growth since the recession. Recent research has suggested that the decline in entrepreneurship, and in other measures of business dynamism, is one cause of the prolonged stagnation in productivity.
(mobile.nytimes.com/...)
Oh well, there is always the traditional fascist coping strategy of blaming the other. That is the essence of MAGA.
And there is always being on one side or the other of the drug war. Small-time drug entrepreneurs have to worry about being smashed like bugs not only by entrenched firms but also by law enforcement.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is two legs of Trump’s three-legged stool. He will ensure that we keep public and private prisons full with non-white and poor Americans, and bail bonds and court costs sucking up the milk and rent money. And if he can't get rid of the Dreamers, he will make sure we blame them for our economic problems.
The other leg of the stool is walking the dog with a large security detail. (www.washingtonpost.com/...) If he can't be the environmental watch dog he can at least walk the dog in full gangster style.
Trump is the perfect distraction for a post-entrepreneurial myth U.S. Far from helping us to believe in the American dream again, he is keeping us from blaming the big corporations for the emptiness of their rhetoric. Until we recognize that Trump is merely a distraction, albeit an existentially dangerous one with nuclear weapons, we will fail to articulate truly democratic solutions to a dead American dream. Robert Mueller will deal with Trump, let's hope, but only we can deal with our own lack of vision. As long as our vision is limited to capitalism, we will still be blinded by myths such as entrepreneurialism in which we no longer believe.