My knowledge is unique. Few if any people have been a business consultant to nearly two thousand businesses of which more than one thousand were start-ups in the most innovative business environment in history. (Read about the Briarpatch).
I have written in many places about the ingredients of successful business start-ups and the historically extraordinary environment in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 80s. Most important is the environment of America, with the end of the hereditary class by 1960, followed by an American love of commerce and acceptance of the vigor and change that is part of everyday life; the always forgotten ingredient that the hippies had 'openness'. A willingness to help each other which is concomitant with acceptance of human diversity in all its forms.
There are always forces to stifle commerce. Just as mechanical power was brought into manufacturing. Wind mills in Holland and waterfalls in England, allowed mechanical power to be harnessed for factory production. The first high pressure steam engines in the early 1810s made many factories possible and brought labor from the farm to the cities. Since children were more productive in factories than on a farm they were extensively used.
The first and most powerful reaction came earliest from the Luddites and then in England from the awesomely powerful stories of Charles Dickens.
As the vast extent of factories began to shape French society along came the earliest antagonists to commerce, the communists in the 1840s. An intellectual who's parents were Jews, but himself a Jew hater, Karl Marx, developed an anti-commerce ideology that came to dominate the vast and growing anti-commerce worldview.
Radical new commercial growth began in the 1960s in America with the fall of the hereditary elite. With the explosion of modern commerce that followed, a new division in society became evident with the advent of a whole new generation.
The vast new commerce based on the electronic computer created thousands of billionaires (a very high proportion of whom were Jews) while the bottom class, mostly low intelligence, non-tech Latins and Blacks made the division highly visible. In the 1970s, the hippies carefree lifestyle made living on the city streets tolerable. Street living expanded to include the bottom class in large numbers by the early 2000s.
All of which combined to create a new anti-commerce worldview.
That is where we are today. As I write.
A future blog, I Know #2, deals with the ways that government suppression of modern commerce can be restrained.