Efficiency vs. Equality

self-ownership:

It always frustrates me when Obama is on TV so passionately talking about how much he cares about small businesses. He seems so genuine about creating an economic environment to help people start their own business and people actually believe it.

More regulations and red tape is not the way to help someone create a business. THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT.

Leave people alone. Nobody forced these people to make these websites or gave them taxpayer money to do so. Entrepreneurs saw a business opportunity for online specialty vendors and other entrepreneurs saw an outlet to sell their goods. Everyone’s happy!

If you want to create an economic environment that will help create economic growth, stop trying.

Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist, and one of the first mega-billionaires in the US. Elementary school dropout.

[…]

Charles Culpeper, owner and CEO of Coca Cola. Dropped out of high school.

[…]

David Karp, founder of Tumblr. Dropped out of school at 15, then homeschooled. Did not attend college.

[…]

Jake Nickell, co-founder and CEO of Threadless.com. Did not graduate from college.

[…]

Michael Dell, billionaire founder of Dell Computers, which started out of his college dorm room. Dropped out of college.

Back in October, I was baffled to see Jacob Weisberg at Slate lose his cool over an effort by Internet entrepreneur — and libertarian — Peter Thiel to make kids consider not going to (or at least not finishing) college.

Weisberg’s description of the program: “The Thiel Fellowship will pay would-be entrepreneurs under 20 $100,000 in cash to drop out of school.”

Sounds promising to me, but Weisberg flipped out, calling it an “appalling plan to pay students to quit college” and a “nasty idea” without ever quite telling us why. It’s not as if Thiel was paying kids to become prostitutes or divorce their parents, or something most of the culture would believe was self-evidently bad. Weisberg, however, treats dropping out of college as being on that level of so-bad-I-don’t-need-to-explain-why-it’s-bad.