The nation’s engine of growth in new jobs, historically, has been the young and emerging enterprise. Twenty years ago, companies less than one year old generated nearly five million new jobs. Currently, one-year old startups are creating a shade above three million new jobs.

The driver behind new job creation is the new business startup. And, the arithmetic makes clear why new job creation in the United States is the lowest in memory. According to the Small Business Administration, the failure rate of young firms is roughly on par with the rate of new business formations. Again, twenty years ago the number of new business formations handily exceeded the number of companies which failed.

It is no wonder that the United States is nowhere in the top ten of nations for spinning up new companies when compared to the number of existing businesses. When looked at in this way, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) calculates that the United States is second from the bottom ahead of only Canada. The OECD methodology punishes advanced economies as they have a larger base of established businesses thereby diminishing the ratio of new business startups. Even so, the United States ranks behind Austria, Israel, and the Netherlands – hardly impoverished nations with thin industrial bases – in the OECD rankings.

I can think of no greater threat to our democratic spirit than our inability to inspire, if not incent, young entrepreneurs to take the plunge. The rate at which entrepreneurs ages 25-54 – the prime years for throwing caution to the wind – choose to risk it all is about half what it was three decades ago. Millennials, the offspring of the digital age, who should be best poised to launch a low cost, technology inspired, entrepreneurial enterprise have proved to be risk-averse and now account for the least represented demographic responsible for new business formations. The evidence is muddled as to why this demographic behaves the way it does. Is there no wellspring of ideas coming from this group? Is this a group whose inspiration has been sapped by the creature comforts provided by their parents or by one government program or another?

Consider this, Mike Rowe, former host of the Dirty Jobs television series which featured Mr. Rowe doing disgusting jobs – which apparently no one else wanted to tackle – launched a scholarship fund for high school students willing to take on a skilled trade like welding, plumbing or electrical. And, despite Mr. Rowe’s largesse, he can’t give away scholarship money fast enough because few applicants are willing to step up to an Oath of hard work and hard study.

I started my first business – a delivery service – with all of $500 in start-up capital at the ripe young age of nineteen. I started my business because I was motivated to be my own boss, make my own money, work my own hours, and because, in the end, I had “ants in my pants”. To my way of thinking, there is no better definition of an entrepreneur than an individual who has ants in his pants and who is never satisfied with his station in life.

In contrast, I don’t believe that sporting a sheepskin emblazoned with “Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship” will make an entrepreneur of the person. The $50,000 per school year investment that most colleges call for is money better spent in an entrepreneurial venture.

Regardless, the lack of representation by Millennials in the entrepreneurial ranks is all the more serious given that as of 2020 Millennials represented the largest age segment of the population at about 22%. Clearly, the confidence, passion, and ambition of our latest generation has eroded to the point where it now seeks refuge where rewards are more in line with pursuits involving little or no attendant risk.

THE GOVERNMENT’S ROLE IN NEW BUSINESS FORMATIONS

The French nineteenth century free-market economist Frederic Bastiat, insightfully warned of the cost of overwrought government intrusion: “The real cost of the State is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that do not exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us.” Sadly, over one-hundred years after Bastiat’s admonishment, we still have not learned that less government is always best.

The continuing onslaught of stultifying regulatory prohibitions (licensing, permitting, and other forms of red tape), is a serious impediment to the young start up. Community bank credit, the source of about 60% of the nation’s small business lending, has been decimated by the suffocating compliance provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The Act, passed in 2010 by the Obama Administration in response to the financial meltdown of 2008, was intended to address the abuses of large banks.

Unfortunately, the Act’s nearly 2,300 pages made few provisions to address the operating characteristics of thinly capitalized banks whose purpose it is to deal with the special needs of their local communities. As a result, since the passage of Dodd-Frank, nearly 2,000 community banks have gone out of business. And, those that have survived have seen nearly 25% of their net income sucked up by compliance costs. It is no wonder then, that new business formations so heavily dependent on the lubricant that is Community bank-lending have suffered so dramatically.

If stifling regulations, and reluctant bank credit weren’t burdensome enough for the young entrepreneur to deal with throw in, for good measure, a tax code of mind-numbing complexity, and confiscatory tax rates. Now comes the lockdown measures implemented by many States which, for largely political reasons, have sought draconian responses to the outbreak of the Chinese Communist Virus. This factor alone has the potential to extinguish whatever spark might be left in our young entrepreneurs.

AMERICAN DREAM OR SOCIALIST NIGHTMARE?

It seems hardly surprising, therefore, that the brightest young minds seek sanctuary in menial, corporate, or government jobs where innovation will hardly move the needle on the nation’s global competitiveness. In this context, the United States might learn something from the pro-business regulatory, and tax regimens that have been enacted in both Dubai and Panama – small, albeit financially astute nations – as I have written in separate essays.

The numbers tell the story: according to the World Bank Rankings for 2019, the United States ranks 55 out of 190 nations – behind countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Albania, and ahead of Niger – for the ease of starting a business. The World Bank’s metrics factor in the minimum capital required to launch a commercial or industrial start up, the licensing and permitting required, and the time and cost to get started. One can quibble with a methodology that attempts to compare 190 economies but if the World Bank’s calculation is only half right the United Sates would still not rank near the top.

More troubling is the nation’s lack of innovation coming from young firms. Here again, the United States is a laggard. Patent applications on a per-capita basis ranks the United States behind Korea, Japan, Switzerland, China, Canada, and Germany, and ahead of Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. But that doesn’t tell the whole story as patent filings in the United States are dominated by large, deep-pocketed corporations which are able to finance the legal, administrative, and accounting work necessary to process a patent application, and defend it if challenged. In this connection, it is a known fact that industry-disruptive technologies are less likely to spring from established market leaders – which are largely motivated to preserve the status-quo – than from entrepreneurial companies.

The United States has no option but to restart the nation’s entrepreneurial engine of growth in order to rekindle its democratic and free-market principles. In the absence of anything less than an overhaul of the educational, regulatory, fiscal, and legislative climate at the federal, state, and local levels impinging on new business formations The American Dream will remain a lost slogan.

The Chinese Communist Virus has not only killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans but it is now the most recent foil used by organizations around the country to kill service to the customer.

In telecommunications, hospitality, education, banking, retail, healthcare, and countless other business sectors of the economy the virus is cited as the reason why organizations are slow or unable to respond to the needs of the consumer. Government services, which have never been known to respond to the needs of citizens with alacrity, have become congealed in a combination of fear and ineptitude.

The virus now takes its place in the pantheon of reasons which organizations have long proffered for barely lifting a finger on behalf of the customer. Lousy and trivial excuses for not serving the customer now seem more grave and sincere because the virus is involved.

A handful of examples will suffice to make the point:

• Comcast Corporation, the nation’s largest internet provider with over 28 million broadband customers, and over 21 million TV subscribers has a long history of slapdash service and high cost. The virus, however, is now used as a reason for the further degradation in service. A telephone caller can now remain on hold for an hour or longer before someone at the other end will take the call. Worse, it can take days for the Company to address a technical issue either remotely or in person. The reason? As a supervisor explained it to me: “Because of the virus, our technicians are having to work from home.” Again, we’re not talking about an upstart piker in the phone business but about the largest telecom company in the United States with monopoly markets in many metropolitan areas of the country.
• The prestigious Boca Raton Hotel and Resort in South Florida continues to bill its members a monthly fee of nearly $1,000 despite the fact that all of its facilities have been shuttered and most of its workers furloughed for months. The place is a shambles with few amenities. Only recently was the resort moved to issue a meager one-time $500 credit to its members. “In appreciation of your support,” reads the communiqué from the resort’s President in announcing the spending credit.
• Universities continue to charge full tuition for students to participate in what is essentially an online class curriculum. Dartmouth college, for instance, charges over $55,000 in tuition for nothing more than so-called “computer”learning. It is no wonder that the college is facing a $5 million class action suit from parents for its failure to mitigate the cost of tuition and fees. Dartmouth is not a solitary offender as approximately one-hundred other universities and colleges are facing similar lawsuits.
• Major banks such as HSBC and JP Morgan Chase have closed many of their branches not only to foot traffic but to drive-through traffic as well. Private bankers whose value to their clients rests on personal relationships coupled with an in-depth knowledge of financial products are largely missing in action. The fallback service provider for these banks is as ineffective now as it was before the virus, namely the call-center attendant in Manila who although effusively polite is unable to help a customer except with the most mundane of requests .
• David Wohl, a California Criminal Defense Attorney, recently visited his favorite haberdasher, Men’s Wearhouse. When Mr. Wohl arrived at the store he was not allowed inside due to “social distancing.” He was instead asked to stand outside in 103˚ weather. After about fifteen minutes of waiting in the sweltering heat Mr. Wohl asked if he could enter, “No, the manager said, and if you have an issue with it you can go somewhere else.” The Men’s Wearhouse chain has over 700 stores and is owned by the financially troubled Tailored Brands. The Company has negative equity and negative earnings. It is $1.4 billion in debt and it has seen its share price drop from $5.96 a year ago to $.65 at the most recent close.   Blame the virus all you want but the problem with this retailer runs much deeper than that.
• According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) hospitals rated 75 points out of 100 with consumers in 2016 in satisfaction. By comparison, government services rated a paltry 68 points out of 100. In school, the former score would earn you maybe a C grade. The latter, no better than a D+ in your report card. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has railed against a local hospital charging $150 for a virus test. But predatory pricing is what awaits the patient who visits a hospital emergency room. Cases abound of hospitals gouging patients by charging thousands of dollars for visits to the ER which at times have been devoid of a swab test for the virus.
• The court system in the United States is at a virtual standstill as judges have postponed trials and hearings. Only a few jurisdictions have sought to use technology such as remote video and teleconferencing to conduct business. Clearly, a failure to adapt to the new reality brought about by the virus could have serious implications for people with immediate problems including those in prison awaiting trial, individuals in need of a restraining order or those in need of a custody judgment. Worse, individuals facing indictments are getting a free pass while the court system is shut down. When the court system reopens, the unprecedented backlog of civilian and criminal litigation will bring chaos to the courts to the chagrin of both litigants and law professionals alike.
• New York City has experienced an increase of 53% in shooting victims to 636 and an increase of 21% in homicides to 178 for the first six months of 2020. And, after a spate of violence over the Fourth of July Weekend Mayor Bill de Blasio, attributed the uptick in violence to the virus. “This is directly related to the coronavirus,” said the Mayor. Outlandish if not bizarre, the Mayor’s explanation failed to mention the city’s new bail reform which puts convicted criminals back on the street, defunding the Police Department to the tune of $1 billion, releasing inmates from Rikers Island, and disbanding the city’s anti-crime unit.
• Election officials in twenty-one states made changes to election dates, procedures, and administrative procedures presumably to accommodate citizens dealing with the virus. That states such as Alaska, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and others would allow votes to be received after election day renders the whole idea of a National Election deadline meaningless. The upshot was that the general election of November 3, 2020 was the most fraud-ridden election in our nation’s history.

The state of affairs described above is a confluence of supplier behavior best epitomized by the glib phrase “we’re doing the best we can,” and consumers who no longer have an expectation that their suppliers can deliver excellence in service. At the dawn of the twenty-first century it appeared that consumers were emboldened to become more demanding than at any other time in history due to techno/economic trends that shrunk the globe, increased consumer choices exponentially, and thus leveled the playing field for rich and poor consumers alike. Now it seems that our optimism was unfounded. The Chinese Communist pathogen has taken care of that.

We are experiencing a service meltdown that is ineffable despite decades of lip service by executives of organizations large and small about the great and wonderful job they are doing on the service front.

And, I am not optimistic that suppliers, in the main, will relinquish their obsession with financial rewards or other perquisites and suddenly become more disposed to work in the customer’s behalf.

THE CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS REQUIRED FOR EXCELLENCE IN SERVICE

There are four critical success factors needed for excellent service to result. These factors must work holistically – as a system – so as to deliver unimpeachable service. Leave any of these elements out and you suck out the oxygen needed to contribute to the growth and vitality of the customer-focused organization.

What follows is my take on the critical success factors of service based on my experience starting and running numerous business for nearly fifty years:

1. Leadership from the top – The key issue that catalyzes all other critical success factors is leadership. The customer-focused organization demands a special kind of leadership. The customer-focused leader must have his ear to the ground, the moral courage to challenge long-held assumptions, make tough decisions, implement needed reforms, and, in the end, raise what is intellectually sound to an emotional level. In the absence of this kind of commitment service will continue as nothing more than an afterthought, something to deal with only in the face of serious customer discontent.
2. The customer as the centerpiece of strategy – The customer-focused organization centers its strategy around the customer. Reaching out to the customer in a thoughtful and meaningful way forms the basis for a strategy which gives direction to a long-term vision, a mission statement, financial goals, organizational structures, technology initiatives and so on. The alternative is a strategy formulation process which only rewards the technocrats in the ivory tower.
3. A service ethic – The organization that is genuine about its commitment to the customer needs to actively promote and enforce an ethical standard that, above all else, celebrates and rewards employees for satisfying customer needs, and for always acting with integrity. Lapses in integrity erode trust, and this, in turn, erects barriers to the free exchange of candid information so vital to the pursuit of excellence in service. A service ethic can only thrive in an environment of hard-hitting, frank, and open discussion both inside and outside the organization.
4. Power to the front line – Human capital, intelligent, skilled, and properly supported and equipped is the fundamental resource that adds value to the customer-focused organization. My definition of a frontline worker is, therefore, correspondingly broad: anyone who has contact with the customer is by my definition on the frontline. Service at the front, the mechanics of which are just as much art as they are science, pivots on the competence, preparation, support, and dedication of individuals distant from the executive suite.

A full expression of service to the customer can only be found in an environment where these critical success factors work in harmony. No one critical success factor, working in isolation, can be the determining factor, regardless of how much organizational might is put behind it. A failure to appreciate the interplay of the four factors, and to execute in the light of their complex nature leads to myriad rationalizations such as those described above and whose current scapegoat is the Chinese Communist Virus.

It is now roughly one hundred years since the world became enamored of Socialism. In the intervening decades, the infatuation with the socialist experiment has led to environmental despoliation, mass starvation, the demise of entrepreneurial initiative, and the spread of a welfare mentality.

The rise of demonic monsters such as the Castro brothers, Mao Tse-Tung, Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jung Un, among others, was the direct consequence of the extinguishment of individual initiative, human dignity, and citizen freedoms.

Currently, in the United States, political leaders with an unquenching thirst for position and power are at it again proselytizing to the public that Socialism is in the best interest of the nation. They count on the economic illiteracy of the citizenry to vote them into power on the strength of a myth that Socialism renders equality for all.

The florid rhetoric of Socialist fanatics aside, Socialism is unworkable the moment central planners substitute their actions for the myriad actions of players in a free-market society.

At the heart of the unworkability of Socialism and why it is always destined to fail is that, as the great Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises asserted, the absence of the private ownership of an enterprise it is impossible to establish market prices that reflect actual market conditions. And, in the absence of true market prices it is consequently impossible to make judgements about the most effective uses of economic resources.

Rest assured, proponents of Socialism are not able to cite one historical antecedent where the egoism and presumed “wisdom” of central know-it-alls were an able substitute for the actions of countless sovereign consumers and producers in a free-market society. The irony of America’s greatness, however, is that both demagogues and democrats have an equal opportunity to stir the masses.

Left unsaid, of course, is that violence is part and parcel of the Socialist calculus. As Lenin famously said, “We must not depict Socialism as if Socialists would bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history without violence. When violence is exercised by the working people…then we are for it.” Who is to say but that the violent convulsions we are now experiencing in our nation’s cities are not faithful to Lenin’s precepts.

The defense of America comes easily to those who are united by the uniquely American principles of liberty, democracy, equality of opportunity, the rule of law, individual choice, and the sanctity of private property. Citizens who fail to grasp these “self-evident” truths owe it to themselves to undertake self-study, if not self-examination, to reaffirm that the American Dream is indeed not a slogan but a unique experiment that can only be realized in our great nation.

It is now common knowledge that China muzzled – if not eliminated – its own medical professionals who sought to sound the alarm on the coronavirus outbreak for months. The critical time that was lost led to countless innocent lives being sacrificed at the altar of China’s totalitarian ego: an ego suffused with fraud and data manipulation. How many Chinese were butchered by the Red Communists in this manner will likely never be known.

Less well known are the reasons why the World Health Organization (WHO) has been complicit in the Chinese fraud. The WHO is an agency of the United Nations, presumably impervious to political pressures and agendas, mandated to act on health issues across the globe. Indeed, the WHO’s stated mission is the “attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.” The chasm between mission and execution, however, is vast.

The Director General of the WHO, Mr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is an Ethiopian politician and member of the Marxist-Leninist Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). China has long-courted infrastructure investments in Central Africa and it should therefore come as no surprise that China is now Ethiopia’s largest trading partner, investor, and lender. How cynical does one have to be to believe that Tedros refuses to call China on the carpet for its deception on the spread of the coronavirus for the simple reason that he would be turning his back on his masters.

Tedros is not a medical doctor. And, leaving aside the folly of choosing a director who is not medically trained to lead the WHO, it did not take a medical doctor to realize that his own country suffered widespread devastation from several cholera epidemics. The epidemics were repeatedly affirmed by health professionals across the world but Tedros refused to acknowledge them as such.  In the end, Tedros was more concerned with his own political gloss than he was in saving the lives of his countrymen. That Tedros’ cholera cover-ups did not disqualify him ipso facto as head of the WHO speaks tomes about how China was able to wield its influence, money, and power to ensure that Tedros was elected as the new director.

Further indicting Tedros’ executive judgment came soon after his appointment to head the WHO as he reached out to name Zimbawe’s strongman Robert Mugabe as “Goodwill” Ambassador to the organization. It took a firestorm of international opposition for the appointment of Mugabe to be rescinded.

In December 2019 when Taiwanese health officials warned about the infectiousness of the coronavirus Tedros refused to share Taiwan’s warnings with the rest of the world. One doesn’t have to be a geopolitical genius to see that the WHO was doing China’s bidding. Taiwan, at China’s behest, is boycotted from participating as a full-fledged member of the WHO and thereby from sharing its epidemiological expertise with other nations.

Tedros’ fulsome fawning of China’s deception knows no bounds. He has heaped praise on China for its “openness to sharing information” on the coronavirus and he has also called upon nations “…not to limit travel to China.” He, of all people, has warned against “politicizing” the outbreak.

The WHO’s most flagrant breach of the public’s trust occurred January 14 when it stated that “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.” This statement, clearly propaganda devoid of any scientific fact, came more than a month after researchers in the city of Wuhan – the epicenter of the outbreak – found ample evidence of human-to-human transmission.

The United States – surprise, surprise – is the largest contributor to the coffers of the WHO. In 2017, the United States was assessed $111 million or 22% of all member states’ assessed contributions while contributing an additional $401 million to the WHO budget. What the United States gets for its largesse is hardly an impartial arbiter on international health issues but a marionette which shamelessly does the bidding of the Chinese. President Trump has justifiably suspended any further funding of the WHO pending a review of its practices. But rearranging deckchairs won’t get the job done. Tedros and his acolytes at the WHO must go before America opens up its pocketbook again.

Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of Economics, made clear that in Economics, as in all walks of life, causality rules the roost. “All things are subject to the law of cause and effect,” said Menger, and “this great principle knows no exception…”

If a nation seeks lower unemployment, for example, it should expect to deal with a higher rate of inflation and vice versa. The cause and effect relationship in this case might perhaps be obvious although there have been periods of time when this inverse, or Phillip’s curve (named after economist William Phillips), relationship did not hold. Less obvious is the explanation that lies behind the exponential increase of 260% in the cost of college tuition or the 200% increase in healthcare costs from 1980 to the present. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), by way of comparison, has notched up only 120% during the same period.

Classical economists explain, ad nauseum, that prices are the result of supply and demand. These same economists place a lot of stock on the cost of production as a means of determining prices. The aforementioned uptick in the CPI of 120%, therefore, should be a close approximation of the increased cost of production across all sectors of the economy. True, both of these sectors of the economy are cost-based payment sectors with few, if any, economic incentives to work more cost-effectively. Even so, that still leaves a yawning gap in what consumers are paying for college tuition and healthcare.

So, what explains a buyer’s willingness to pay no-matter-what for tuition and healthcare? Isn’t a higher market price an incentive for buyers to consume less and an incentive for sellers to produce more? And, what about competitive suppliers who now have an opportunity to operate under the umbrella of higher-priced, low service providers? In postsecondary education, at least, the law of supply and demand might be working after all. How else can one explain the fact that student enrollment in for-profit colleges has grown on the order of five to one over conventional institutions during the last twenty years and now totals over three million students but that for-profit institutions deliver better value and better service? I’m not altogether ready to have my faith restored in supply and demand curves, however, as the sharp increase in the cost of services with little or no productivity gains and the unquenching demand for those services remains a quandary.

TO THE LOSERS GO THE SPOILS

Economist William Baumol has suggested that the rising cost of services is the direct result of the nation’s rising affluence generally. Mr. Baumol’s explanation or Baumol’s “cost disease”, as his explanation has come to be known, is predictably pessimistic: as worker productivity in the manufacture of tangible goods increases, there is a corresponding increase in wages. So far so good. But according to Mr. Baumol, the further consequence is that wages in all sectors of the economy, not just manufacturing, will increase. The rise of wages in sectors without productivity gains, says Mr. Baumol, comes from the need of employers to compete for workers who are holding or might have held jobs that paid higher wages. Mr. Baumol’s thesis requires the huge leap that all labor markets are tightly connected.

Again, what happened to supply and demand? Higher wages in a sector should increase the supply of labor such that a decrement in prices begins to take hold. And, it’s not all about money. Does a federal government agency fairly compete with a technology startup for the services of a computer programmer no matter how much money is thrown at him? In my view, it is likely that low productivity individuals gravitate to low productivity sectors of the economy. This might be a more logical explanation for the meteoric rise in the cost of education and healthcare in the absence of meaningful productivity gains. (I’m tempted to call my explanation “Pupo’s productivity disease” but I’ll let that ride for now).

In the vernacular, Mr. Baumol’s argument is that a “rising tide lifts all boats.” But not necessarily, as hourly wages have grown by only 115% since 1973. Again, this is a far cry from the vertiginous rise in the cost of tuition and healthcare. Worse, these labor-intensive, low productivity sectors are not just riding a vortex of ever-increasing costs but they are also, in the process, dishing out miserable customer service. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) government services rated a paltry 68 out of 100 with consumers in 2016 for customer satisfaction. Hospitals fared not a whole lot better at 75 out of 100. In school, the former score would earn you a D+ in your report card. The latter, a C grade.

Approximately 80% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 80% of our employment base is engaged in services.  Most of the sectors which make up the services component of our GDP might create value – as might be the case with healthcare, retail, education, leisure and hospitality, social services, and government programs – but they do not create wealth for the nation. It is no wonder that the service economy of the United States is in the red zone as I argue in a separate essay.

INDIVIDUALS ARE LED BY AN INVISIBLE HAND FOR THE GREATER GOOD

Adam Smith’s aphorism above cannot be denied despite the protestations of central planning advocates. Many of the lethargic service sectors of the economy are beyond the reach of the free-market for the simple reason that they owe their existence to monopolistic or regulatory protections or are safely ensconced in the government’s purview. Interference in free markets, however, is the best way known to inhibit growth, increase cost, and render slipshod service to paying customers. It is no wonder that history is littered with the failed economic experiments of one central planning regime after another.

As economist Julian Simon stated in his pioneering book, The Ultimate Resource, “Not understanding the process of a spontaneously ordered economy goes hand-in-hand with not understanding the creation of resources and wealth.” Simon’s book was countercultural when it first came out in 1981 – and might still be in some liberal circles – when he argued that the limits to economic growth have all to do with not having enough skilled workers endowed with liberty to exert their imaginations and nothing to do with a shortage of natural resources. Mr. Simon’s observation was an obvious riposte to proponents of limits to growth who from the time of Thomas Malthus, in the late eighteenth century, have argued that continued levels of population growth would return us all to subsistence-level conditions.

Notable among contemporary doomsayers is Paul Ehrlich who in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970’s. Clearly, no such thing even came close to happening. The key, Mr. Simon further states in his book is “…that human imagination can flourish only if the economic system gives individuals the freedom to exercise their talents and to take advantage of opportunities.”

Still, there are some that are calling for more government intervention to spur economic growth. The Economic Policy Institute, which has disparagingly referred to our nation as the “Unequal States of America”, has called for a whole panoply of interventions including increasing the minimum wage, making it easier for workers to form unions, creating a path to citizenship for illegal aliens, changing how employers schedule employees for work, having taxpayers foot the bill for childhood education, meddling in monetary policy to achieve full employment, and so on as part of its Twelve Point Plan.

It is doubtful, however, that slow growth, and low productivity can be overcome through additional and more aggressive government intervention. Especially if, as Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman says, “…we continue to authorize a “new class” of civil servants to spend ever larger fractions of our incomes…Sooner or later, an ever bigger government would destroy both the prosperity that we owe to the free market and the human freedom proclaimed so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence.”