From the Introduction:
“One day, when scientists discover the cure for cancer, the world will erupt in joyous celebration. And rightly so. Cancer is a horrible disease that each year destroys the lives of millions of people, and finding a cure will be recognized as one of history’s greatest achievements.
There’s another disease that destroys vastly more lives each year than cancer. And we’ve found the cure for it – but no one is celebrating. Indeed, hardly anyone seems even to have noticed that we’ve already figured out how to rid the world of its most destructive scourge.
This disease is poverty. And the cure for poverty is the Free Market. That’s because the Free Market is the only environment in which entrepreneurs can flourish. And it’s the entrepreneurs – and only the entrepreneurs -- who create the jobs that lift us all out of poverty.
Let’s begin at the beginning:
The dictionary defines entrepreneur as “a person who organizes and manages a business undertaking, assuming the risk for the sake of the profit.” When we think of entrepreneurs, we tend to think of famous people like Bill Gates of Microsoft, or Apple’s Steve Jobs. But that nice man who lives down the street, and who opened a new auto repair shop last month, is also an entrepreneur. So is the woman who stopped by your house yesterday to see if you might be interested in buying some of those fancy cookies she’s baked, or that couple you hired last month to paint your house. Farmers are entrepreneurs, and so are dentists. So’s the kid next door who mows your lawn. In short, anyone who launches any kind of business whatsoever – who sells goods or services and who doesn’t have an income until someone purchases these goods or services – is an entrepreneur.
Why do some countries have entrepreneurs while others don’t? It’s for the same reason there’s life here on Earth and none on the moon: Life requires a specific atmosphere to support it – nitrogen, oxygen, traces of argon and carbon dioxide with some water vapor. We have that kind of atmosphere here on Earth; the moon doesn’t.
The “atmosphere” that entrepreneurs require to survive and flourish is called the Free Market. The Free Market is comprised of property rights, the rule of law, a modest level of taxation, competent regulation, and a government that protects its citizens by assuring the country’s defense while doing the everyday things a government is supposed to do, such as building roads and bridges, operating schools, and delivering the mail.
Because the Free-Market “atmosphere” that entrepreneurs require to survive and flourish is political and economic – rather than chemical, like the Earth’s atmosphere – there’s no one formula that any competent technician can look up in a textbook and then follow. Maintaining this “atmosphere” – monitoring it constantly and making the adjustments needed to sustain it as political and economic conditions change -- is as much an art as a science. It takes a combination of technical knowledge, hard work, vision, and that unquantifiable “gut feel” for what to do and when to do it.
And it’s the responsibility of every government’s leaders to get this combination right. Simply put, maintaining an “atmosphere” that will result in more and better jobs is largely what we elect our government’s leaders to do…….”
