The Great Reboot

The Economist highlights a few amazing stats of what has made the US the economic engine of the world - "Between 1996 and 2004 it created an average of 550,000 small businesses every month." That's nearly 7M new businesses a year! The Economist also seems to believe that the powers that be have taken things for granted and are making the lives of entrepreneurs more difficult: making it more difficult to innovate, navigating tax laws and reducing the pool of other entrepreneurs and talent from around the world (immigrants).

I'd go further and add finding funding to the additional list of barriers being created. The impending legislation on the financial services sector that will make it more difficult to find lenders who must meet ever rising hurdles to even exist and higher taxes will make it more difficult to find angel investors who are willing to invest. Recessions should be cleansing events - the US government's response may end up handicapping any recovery well into the future. Instead of a simple, clean reinstall, it's like replacing Windows XP with Vista (nevermind the increasing government involvement - read death of innovation - in such industries as healthcare and education).

That said, for a more positive article - and even more unconventional source (at least for me), Time has a somewhat inspirational article on the startup Motormouths.com. [Side note - an interesting footnote on terminology of startup/small business: "The difference between a start-up and a small business, by the way, is that a "start-up is designed to grow — it's scalable"]