Entrepreneurs and dunderheads

We live in the golden age of the entrepreneur. High schools, technical institutes and universities are rushing to establish programs to teach entrepreneurship. Universities are advised to become more entrepreneurial in their teaching and research activities: responding to market forces; seeking patents on inventions and research breakthroughs; partnering with corporations; selling places in medical schools to rich foreign students; seeking intellectual market niches. The entrepreneur is presented as the hero of our age: the mover and shaker; the courageous risk-taker and innovator; the creator of new wealth; the icon to worship; the role model to emulate. If the market is the new religion, then the entrepreneur is the new priest, overseeing the mysteries and rituals of entrepreneurial truth and revelation.

Perhaps we should pause in our blind worship to carefully consider just what an entrepreneur is and does. We should also examine the record of the entrepreneur in modern history. According to the Oxford dictionary an entrepreneur is "a contractor acting as intermediary between labour and capital." He or she assembles the capital (usually other people's) for investment in a business enterprise, and then hires the labour needed to produce a commodity for the market in order to make a profit. The origin of the word is French. One can accept the definition of entreprendre as "to undertake." Or one can go deeper to the roots of the word: entre meaning "between," and prendre meaning "to take." Now we are closer to the essence. An entrepreneur is a middleman who takes.

Let's insert this into the real world of business. Entrepreneurs create economic activity as they pursue private profit. They raise capital from investors (for example banks, pension funds, or stock players) with a view to putting it to work in order to earn more than the cost of using the capital. So they take from investors. They pay workers as little as they can, certainly far below the value produced by the workers' skill and effort. So they take from workers. Once they present the commodity in the market they seek to sell us something for five dollars when it is only worth 75 cents. So they take from consumers. This is shrewd business practice and some get rich doing it while creating economic activity that may or may not be socially benevolent. The entrepreneur's sole motivation is self-enrichment.

This is not the first golden age of the entrepreneur. The first golden age spanned the period from the Industrial Revolution to the end of World War II. The entrepreneur dominated governments and government policy was thoroughly driven by entrepreneurship as world markets were sought, control of natural resources around the world imposed, the Third World plundered, indigenous peoples wiped out, and millions of Africans enslaved. The results of this golden age are well-documented: world wide genocides (the largest of which was the estimated 15 million lives lost among indigenous Americans from 1492 on); many European wars in the 18th and 19th centuries; two world wars in the 20th century; and the Great Depression. The fact is that as an historical figure the entrepreneur is drenched in the blood of others sacrificed in the pursuit of private profit.

Today this figure is being rehabilitated, but only with great difficulty. Scandals like Bre-Ex, WorldCom, Enron and Martha Stewart keep reminding people just what an entrepreneur really is. Then there are the American wars of conquest in Iraq in pursuit of control of world oil supplies, the profiting by entrepreneurs of the advanced world from the blood diamonds of Sierra Leon and Angola, and the international arms trade that further enriches entrepreneurs in the advanced nations while encouraging endless strife and blood-letting in strategic and potentially profitable regions of the Third World.

As children growing up in the 1940s and 1950s we learned about the entrepreneur from our parents. Entrepreneurs had to be controlled, steered, contained and disciplined or they would lead us into another war or another economic collapse. This view was widely held. There had been revolutions against capitalism and imperialism in Russia, China and Cuba. Social democratic and socialist parties had arisen--the CCF in Saskatchewan among them--to impose rules and controls on the entrepreneur and to steer economic development in the public interest.

Entrepreneurs were driven out of certain areas of activity deemed best served outside of the market--health, education, utilities, and so on. Regulations were imposed; laws were passed to control the voracious greed and notorious social irresponsibility of the zealous entrepreneur. Strong and militant unions to protect workers were established and won concessions.

"Dunderhead" is an excellent word to describe politicians who fail to recognize the dangers of unfettered capitalism and who allow themselves to be swept up into the nonsense about the magic of the free market. From the 1940s to the 1980s the dunderheads were largely driven from public office--even Tories and Liberals accepted the need to control and regulate the entrepreneur and to build a strong public sector and a secure social security net. As we enter the second golden age of the entrepreneur we are slipping back into a politics controlled by dunderheads.

Politicians--even most social democrats--now increasingly accept the old lies about entrepreneurs and the old dangerous myths about the magic of free enterprise and unregulated markets. We have had a taste of the politics of the dunderhead--Mulroney, Devine, Vander Zalm, Harris, Campbell in BC--and the resulting social and economic wreckage has been heartbreaking. The worst may yet be to come. If the entrepreneur again rises to dominance and if our politics again become dominated by the dunderheads who echo the mindless cant and doctrines of entrepreneurship, then our future will not be a happy one.

Entrepreneurs only get their way in democratic societies when dunderheads are in power, and the dunderheads are on a political roll.

John Conway is a University of Regina political sociologist and the author of The West: The History of a Region in Confederation.

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