[This was originally a social post]
Pro-entrepreneurship is not the same as pro-business.
You can support new ideas, competition and experimentation, and still be skeptical of incumbents. Being pro-entrepreneurship means backing good-faith attempts at something new: letting teams iterate, letting bad ideas fail, and letting good ones scale.
Pro-business too often means protecting whoever already holds market power. That’s not the same thing. In fact, the academic research says the opposite.
Economist William Baumol spent decades arguing that entrepreneurship only thrives when institutions reward experimentation—not when capital protects incumbents. (Unproductive versus productive)
David Audretsch and Zoltan Acs showed that regional economies perform best when new-firm dynamism increases—not when we concentrate decision-making in a few dominant firms.
That’s why “business-friendly” policies can still be anti-entrepreneur: tax breaks for the largest employers, regulatory capture, lobbying to block new entrants, and mergers that eliminate competition.
Look at the numbers:
- Consolidation is up across most industries since the 1990s
- Firm entry rates are down compared to the 1980s
- And the share of young firms in employment has steadily declined
That didn’t happen because we loved entrepreneurs. It happened because we protected incumbents. Pro-entrepreneurship is pro-ideas. Pro-business is pro-capital. They aren’t the same.
So ask yourself: Do you want vibrant competition… or do you want to guard the castle for the companies already inside? Because one of those futures helps workers, communities and upward mobility. And the other just keeps power still.