Evening Must-Read: The Epicurean Dealmaker: Occupy Galt’s Gulch

From a while ago: The Epicurean Dealmaker: Occupy Galt’s Gulch: “‘Each of us in this room has warmed ourself at fires we did not build, and each of us has drunk from wells we did not dig.’ — Mark Shields, as heard, October 1997….

The exposure and ridicule of hubris among the Great and Good, the not-so-great and not-so-good, and the patently pathetic yet surprisingly lucky has been an overarching concern and even gleeful entertainment in these pages…. To date, what has typically stayed my hand is an acknowledgement that any efforts to puncture the iron-clad self regard of the self-appointed financial elite would be doubly futile… my targets have historically been both too impervious and too self-evidently ridiculous to bother. What has tipped my hand at last has been the appearance, at Megan McArdle’s blog site, of a really excellent guest post by entrepreneur and investor Jim Manzi. Mr. Manzi’s capitalist credentials are indisputable, so I was both impressed and heartened to read the words he excerpted there from his newly published book:

Many entrepreneurs hold the opinion that “I did it all on my own”…. The entrepreneur relies on an ecosystem of venture capitalists, risk-taking purchasers, and so on. This ecosystem itself rests on a deeper foundation of collective, government-led enterprise. The delivery of our software, for example, depended on the existence of the Internet, which is the product of a series of government-sponsored R&D efforts, in combination with subsequent massive private commercial development. Government funding has been essential to much of the university science that entrepreneurs have exploited. Honest courts and police are required for functioning capital markets and protection of assets; physical infrastructure is required for the roads and running water without which we would not spend much time thinking about artificial intelligence software. At the absolute foundation, national armed forces protect the whole system against external aggression. All of our exciting technical and economic innovations ultimately require men to stand watch all night looking through Starlight scopes mounted on assault rifles—and die if necessary—to protect our commercial, law-bound society. Would you do this to protect a billionaire hedge-fund manager who sees his country as nothing more than lines on a map?