On Wednesday I testified before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. The title of the hearing was “Perspectives from the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Creating Jobs and Growing Businesses through Entrepreneurship.”
It was a less-formal type of hearing than I have done before. There were lots of witnesses, no formal oral statements, and we could more or less raise our placards whenever we wanted to talk.
In my one-minute introduction, I noted that George Mason University came to national prominence in 1986 when James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize here for his pioneering work in public choice. (Vernon Smith, another active researcher in the field of public choice, would become Mason’s second Nobel laureate in 2002). I then said:
Public choice focuses on the ways in which government policies are actually determined and carried out. And I think this weighs on entrepreneurship, in particular. I, too, appreciate the ecological metaphor. I think it is a really appropriate metaphor. Recently, I’ve been looking at the public choice ways in which the ecology of entrepreneurship can sometimes be interfered with. Just like a natural ecology, entrepreneurial ecologies need to be a bottom-up process. And quite often can be subject to interference from governments.
I was pleased that the Committee’s chairwoman, Senator Landrieu (D-LA) largely agreed with me. Channeling her inner-Hayek, she replied:
That is an excellent point and I hope that we’ll have a little bit more of thought provoking comments about that. Just like governments can ruin physical infrastructure—I mean physical and natural environments—governments can also, with the wrong policies, disrupt the… I don’t know if you’d call it ‘natural,’…but the strength, the dormant strength or natural strength of a people to grow jobs and produce wealth.
Unfortunately, not all of her comments were so Hayekian. Another of the witnesses was tech-entrepreneur-turned-academic, Vivek Wadhwa. Today he wrote about the hearing in the Washington Post:
Government leaders — at least some of those present — actually seemed to believe they could, through legislation and spending, increase entrepreneurship and innovation. They asked questions such as: What legislation can we enact to build innovation ecosystems, facilitate mentorship, and teach entrepreneurship? They didn’t seem to understand that these are things entrepreneurs do—not governments.
I couldn’t agree more.