Is America's entrepreneurial culture dying?

More than one economist is worried that America's entrepreneurial culture is dying -- statistics and other indicators here, including some damning differences in the creation of "start-up" jobs between the United States administered by Barack Obama and that of his predecessors.

There is an argument over the causes and consequences. From the linked post:

Hudson’s possible suspects for the slowdown: a) higher business taxes, b) Obamacare, c) an IRS crackdown on US employers that hire U.S. workers as independent contractors rather than employees, and d) a steady barrier erected to entrepreneurs at the local policy level. But whatever the cause of the entrepreneurial decline, two possible impacts: 1) A less productive and innovative economy, and 2) higher profits for big business thanks to fewer upstart competitors on the horizon.

The consequences seem probable to the point of being obvious, to which we would add a poorer future for our posterity and less opportunity and joy from the innovations to come (cue Brad Paisley). To the Hudson Institute's list of causes, however, we would add several more:

The end of the IPO exit for venture investors, which, obviously, means a lot less venture capital. Some of the cause is merely the market at work -- so many investors lost money when the "Dot Com" bubble burst, there are fewer individuals and professional money managers willing to buy shares in "pre revenue" IPOs. But some of it is regulation. Sarbanes-Oxley not only massively increased the costs of going public, but the requirement for an "internal controls" audit can and does hurt the ability of small public companies to capitalize on their main advantage, which is their own entrepreneurial culture.

There has been under President Obama a huge increase in heavy-handed regulation in three of our most dynamic industries -- finance, energy, and health care. There is a reason for each with which one might agree or disagree (the financial crisis, climate change, and the Obama Administration's belief that the FDA was not adequately safeguarding the public health), but there is no denying that both the overhead burdens and the sheer regulatory uncertainty has increased in all three of these sectors, which combined account for more than 30% of GDP.

Finally, the current administration, in a thousand ways large and small, reminds prospective entrepreneurs that it neither understands their challenges nor appreciates their accomplishments. We see this in new regulations to increase the leverage of employees over employers, the now-abandoned effort in the face of a terrible job market to eliminate the secret ballot in unionization votes, the huge increase in approval times to bring new regulated products to market (such as in the medical device industry), taxes on revenues instead of profits (which by definition are brutal for start-ups), subsidies for politically-connected businesses ("green tech" boondoggles) that cannot raise money in the private sector, and the constant political attacks on the "rich" (all entrepreneurs being, in their own mind, aspiring rich people). To name but the smallest fraction of such offenses.

All is not lost. Cultural change does not happen in just a few years. We can recover our inner animal spirits we start celebrating enterprise, and elect politicians who understand that they cannot live their redistributionist dreams if they also do not care for the golden goose. This is something that Bill Clinton understood, and Barack Obama manifestly does not.