America’s Entrepreneurial Capitalism: A Night on I-465

Laura Hollis was driving through Indianapolis at 2:30 AM on a cold November morning. The city’s 11-hour drive from Mobile, Alabama, had taken longer due to traffic and construction around Music City. As she circled I-465, she marveled at the sheer number of businesses—many not open but with brightly lit parking lots and neon signs.

This scene, often taken for granted, represents an investment of time and money; blood, sweat and tears that those who have never started a business cannot begin to understand. We assume without much thought that if we need food, it will be at the grocery store. If we need clothing or shoes, there are plenty of places—bricks-and-mortar stores and online retailers—where we can find them.

Services as well as goods—trash removal, lawn care, window washing, carpet cleaning, repairs—are provided by countless businesses. Even the services we think of as being provided by government depend upon private enterprise. Those highway expansions use expensive equipment designed, built and sold by businesses. The U.S. Postal Service can’t deliver without vehicles made by auto manufacturers.

Law enforcement needs uniforms, firearms, vehicles, electronic equipment. The police station, the courthouse, the mayor’s office—nearly all government buildings are built by private contractors using supplies and equipment provided by private businesses. We have some of the most beautiful and well-equipped colleges and universities in the world, and both private and state schools depend upon the generosity of donors who give the funds to build the academic buildings, the dormitories, the laboratories and libraries, the sports facilities.

There is probably not a single institution of higher education in this country that doesn’t have a donor’s name on a building. And if those donors themselves weren’t entrepreneurs, someone in their family’s history was.

Why does this matter? Because America was not built by “capitalism,” per se, but by entrepreneurial capitalism. America’s government, culture and economic structures are such that anyone, anywhere can start and grow a business—without social status, without connections, without needing to know someone in government, without bribes or graft or corruption. Sometimes without even speaking English.

And frankly, a lot of Americans—especially those in academia, in the media and in government—do not understand anything about entrepreneurship. You say “business” to these folks, and they think “big business”; they think of scandals like Enron, WorldCom, Bernie Madoff, and FTX. But most business in America is small business. According to the U.S. Census, there are about 30 million firms in the U.S. in any given year. Most aren’t even incorporated.

And only a few thousand of those that are corporations are publicly traded. More than half of the new jobs created each year come from firms that have fewer than 20 people. You don’t need to wonder what America would be like without a culture of entrepreneurial capitalism; you need only look at the most impoverished nations in the world.

They don’t lack entrepreneurially minded citizens; everyone can figure out how to provide goods and services that others need and want. (Even during war; black markets are proof of this.) But aspiring entrepreneurs in poor and underdeveloped countries are suffocating under government structures—like Islamic fundamentalism, dictatorships, socialism and communism—that make it impossible to grow a business.

Even wealthy and prosperous countries can see their robust economies destroyed by oppressive government policies. Venezuela is a good example. That’s why the election of Muslim socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City should set off so many alarms. Mamdani—like all his ilk— has zero experience with or understanding of what it takes to start a business, to make it successful, to meet the needs of larger numbers of customers, clients, patrons and patients.

To socialists and communists, financial success is just proof of greed and exploitation. This is appallingly ignorant and absolutely false. But the support Mamdani enjoys—in New York and elsewhere— only shows how many Americans don’t understand entrepreneurial capitalism or its relationship to the availability of goods and services we take for granted.

Those of us who understand what has made America free and prosperous must evangelize for entrepreneurship and small business; they are as fundamental to our foundation and freedom as the Constitution and Christianity. We must demand changes in our educational system and promote forms of government, society and culture that make it possible for innovative and solution-minded people to build and grow ventures around their ideas.

The proof of the successes of America’s entrepreneurs is everywhere—even on an interstate highway in the middle of the night. If you don’t understand entrepreneurship, you don’t understand America. If enough Americans cease to understand and appreciate entrepreneurship, we will lose America.

Professor Laura Hollis is an attorney and university professor who has taught courses in law and business for more than 30 years. Her legal publications have appeared in the Temple Law Review, Cardozo Law Review and the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. As a nationally syndicated columnist her work has been featured in dozens of print and online publications. Read reports from Professor Hollis — More Here.
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