John Podhoretz makes an interesting observation in the latest Commentary (subscriber link here) about the impact of Obama administration policies on entrepreneurship in the United States:
I think that Obama and his people ? believe that the people of the United States can and will retain their entrepreneurial drive, their creative spark, and their willingness to take personal risks to make new fortunes and invent new ways of doing things no matter what. They would like to enjoy and make use of the benefits of the extraordinary energy of the American people in their pursuit of happiness, and so they believe they can act almost at will.
They can?t, though. A statist culture hospitable to individual achievement is a contradiction in terms. If the government of the United States makes it clear through word and deed that entrepreneurship is acceptable primarily because it provides funds to enlarge the government itself, and then moves aggressively to collect those funds at an accelerating rate, it will create both spiritual and practical disincentives to individual effort.
The question is: How much can government take before its efforts amount to slamming the brake on the nation?s entrepreneurial drive?
And we must not forget one particularly salient point. The social-welfare states of Europe were made possible by a grant from the United States Department of Defense. The role of the United States as guarantor of the Cold War peace and its position as the only nation in the West willing to assume leadership in military matters freed the nations of Europe from any other pressing budgetary obligations.
There is no one to take on that role if we decide to withdraw, to look inward, to accelerate domestic spending at an unheard-of rate while defense spending is frozen or actually begins to shrink.
