1) Globalization has made it almost completely impossible to make things in the US unless they are massively overpriced goods (ex. luxury items or niche specialty goods). Customers simply won't pay enough to cover your costs. And there's a good chance that if you are successful, someone will copy your stuff, make it in China, and sell it for half your price within 12 months.

2) In California at least, costs are pretty ridiculous for small businesses. Between state, county, and city taxes, high labor costs, ridiculous healthcare costs, rent, insurance costs, etc. etc. It is far more expensive to start a business today as a percentage of expected revenue than it was a few decades ago.

3) The US IP protection and regulatory systems are out of control. Fending off patent trolls, tiptoeing around trademarks, dealing with licensing systems specifically designed to be too burdensome for small companies to bear, spending time and money to deal with regulatory compliance, etc. puts small businesses at a massive disadvantage.

4) Unpopular opinion, but I think today's workers are less suited to small businesses than they used to be. Many younger workers say they want to work for startups, but what they really want is a venture-backed cushy office with catering and perks completely untied to actual business revenue. These types of businesses account for a tiny percentage of actual small business starts in the US, which are often not places today's workers want to work at, let alone stay loyal to.

I can buy all sorts of US made shit, that is profitably sold, at reasonable prices, overalls, jeans, mattresses, washing machines, boots, cars - its that the margin is lower in the states as it costs 2-5% more to make something here.

The issue is, many things here cannot be made here with any ease, because the ecosystem for them no longer exists.

I'm willing to pay 10% more for american made things - I suspect most americans would be too, given the option.

The real problem is that we absolutely suck at manufacturing anything other than items that only really make sense to manufacture locally (certain food items, detergents), where in terms of exports we only exceed at certain types of heavy machinery along with certain chemical and polymer products.

If US made was only 10% more, I would go out of my way to purchase only domestically produced goods, but when it's 100+%, it's really hard to justify.

https://lcking.com/collections/jeans-pants

All US made stuff, decent quality and long lasting too - first link is made in Oklahoma, second on in Tennessee.

Start there - good boots are expensive no matter where you buy them - I have 100 dollar cowboy boots though, that are US made.

Boots of various styles, mostly western though - all US Made: https://www.justinboots.com/footwear/men_collections_shop-ma...

Like what?

Just to give you an example - in Los Angeles, the county assess a tax on unsecured property that has absolutely no bearing on your revenue. That's a tax on your office equipment, furniture, machines, etc. The city also assess a tax on revenue, not profit, in excess of $100,000. And even if you don't make a dime in profit, Corps and LLCs still pay a minimum state tax. If you own a building for your business you're also going to pay property tax, and if you don't you're going to pay it in the form of higher rent as well.

To your last point, you need to add an "if" to make it accurate. California is a far better choice than the Midwest or South if you can start a small business with high enough margins to cover the much higher costs of basically everything.

The minimum LLC franchise fee is $800. A real business can afford that, a pretend business cannot.

Double-Irish structures don't work to shield US income. They never have, so US companies can't use them to reduce their US taxation either, regardless of size.

And finally, you chose a pass-through form of taxation, meaning you chose to be taxed as an individual instead of as a separate entity. That's on you--not on California. That same choice would screw you over pretty much everywhere there's a state income tax--meaning all the states where people actually want to live.

#4 somewhat relates to #2, where costs as often put on the employees to keep small businesses afloat. Large companies have the sizes to keep costs down. I would love to work for a small business, but it would mean x5 increase in healthcare and insurance costs.

That was mentioned along with a litany of other things in point 2.

These days you have to work like a maniac to get a 10% chance of success. It's not very motivating. It's better to save yourself the mental trauma, take a cushy job and get a 90% chance of being able to retire.

One of the undervalued skills in entrepreneurship is the ability to not only find, but successfully hire and retain, excellent employees. It's never been easy.

I agree on the point that you can't just say "kids these days..." as every generation blames the one before and kids are always "lazy".

I would have started my own business by now ... heck I'd probably have started and failed several by now if not for one thing. Well three:

1) you cannot afford prescription drugs in America unless you have good health insurance. At least in my state (Alabama), the federal health marketplace offers exactly one option from exactly one provider. It has a ridiculously high deductible and is (no shit) not accepted at nearly all doctor's offices in my town.

2) I cannot afford to lose my access to prescription medication and healthcare, because my wife has diabetes and I survived cancer a few years ago. We're in fine health now, but we DO have medical expenses ... things that should NOT be that expensive (yearly CT scans and insulin are hardly breaking technology), but have been SO inflated in price by a bogus, rigged third-party-payer system that we literally can't afford those things without "insurance".

3) I had kids early in life, and since my adult working career began, it has been an absolute baseline requirement that I be able to get them medical care and otherwise provide for them.

ok ... having kids early was my decision, and I'll accept that this decision limited my universe of personal options. Getting sick. Having a wife who got sick. These were not personal decisions. They are just things that happen to people.

Our system in America is designed to keep me at my desk, working for someone else, doing mostly meaningless work. Why? Because it'd be a complete nightmare for those at the top, if every last one of me out there in the workplace could afford to take a risk that might not work out.

There'd be a helluva lot more competition out there.

America is dying because of this. Not just our economy. But our society. The world would genuinely be a better place with the companies I would have started in it. And that is true for every other stymied inventor/would-be-entrepreneur in america.

There is always a downside to risk, and there is always a risk involved in starting a new Enterprise. But what we have right now is so far out of whack that taking even a minor risk, can straight up kill you or your kids for lack of access to proper medical care.

My wife could afford to start a few small businesses over the years only because I have health insurance from my employment, and can get her, and our kids, to the family plan.

If Obamacare did something good to people not on lowest-paid jobs, it is giving at least some options of health care to entrepreneurs who are not yet raking in millions (that is, most of them).

Since we are talking about anecdotes - whenever I mention some success in my business, most friends get bored. Yet if they get to another create-a-crud-form job - this is being celebrated like some kind of achievement. I still hear talks about how small business is celebrated in the USA (i am immigrant), but I do not experience it in practice.

Historically, lots of small businesses are started not by healthy, young, single childless people, but by midcareer people that have savings to invest and professional networks and experience-based insights to build a business around.

So, when those type of people lose opportunity to start businesses, then total business starts drop.

Also, young people starting non-VC backed businesses have often relied on older midcareer relatives supplying financing, networks, and supporting experience, so many of the same things that hurt older people starting businesses (including healthcare costs, which—with common insurance schemes—not only tie you to wage labor but also still require you to maintain capital reserves for co-insurance, which reduces the attractiveness of using savings for speculative, long-payoff, high-risk business investment) also have a similar, if somewhat lesser, negative effect on younger people doing so.

I don't really understand where that's coming from because it takes a minimal amount of research to figure out that the BLS unemployment statistic tells us virtually nothing(even Adam Ruins Everything covered that). Wages have been stagnant in comparison to productivity since around the 1970's(adjusted for inflation), the labor force participation rate is in decline, I don't know anyone who doesn't think housing and rent is absurd right now, Americans are buried in debt, medical care is expensive and often enters scam territory, etc.

And we're supposed to become entrepreneurs? lol

Things aren't adding up, and we're probably not going to even accept that we're in a decline until we're well into it.

The problem with much of these things is that we're on a hedonic treadmill that we refuse to get off, even as further expansion of consumerism is destroying our planet. The big problem we have is policy that has promoted a society of which economic growth and even wage gains fails to provide a meaningful improvement in peoples lives.

Policy reforms could allow for the majority of people to live in cities in relatively new buildings serviced by public transit all at a lower cost than what we have now given our current system of inflated land values and high automotive transportation costs (i.e. cost of new construction is still relatively affordable when compared to the cost of land and public transit is far cheaper to build and service than automotive infrastructure). Reforms around healthcare that currently restrict the availability of doctors and enable overcharging of medical components would go a long way as well, and lastly, reducing the overhead around university administration while restricting lending would go a long way.

tl;dr: We aren't in decline, we just need reforms around housing, healthcare and education as their costs make poor economic sense and are only high due to protectionism and loose lending/insurance laws.

That however stopped translating to things being good for the average American in like the 50s

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages...

Essentially, up to the 1970s, wages followed closely with productivity. Quite suddenly, wages stopped growing while productivity has continued to grow with no sign of catching up.

Take a look at this chart from the BLS:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJ9l_q6VYAERRDt.jpg

What we can take from that is while prices for certain things have declined(e.g. technology, new cars, software, toys, clothes), the price of arguably more important things (child care, medical care, college tuition, textbooks, housing, food) has gone up. Sure, we've been bearing those costs, but the maximization of profits from those expenditures will inevitably cause an adjustment when Americans can't pay for those things anymore.

Americans might technically have a higher buying power than 1900, and especially 1930, but not necessarily in every area or even the areas that are important. If we were to say that Americans have more access to food, clothing, computers, education, etc., it doesn't mean that Americans are actually paying for those things; a lot of the wealth we think we have is coming from record amounts of debt that were unseen in the early 20th century. The things that make it seem like we have more spending power than we did a century ago are being made possible by what could be a ticking time bomb.

I think our leaders just said “why not both?”.

It’s going to be an interesting few decades.

That is, once the dollar dropped the link to gold, and money could be printed, a lot if things went increasingly haywire, down to the circus of bailouts in 2008 and "quantitative easing" afterwards.

What’s to say that currency won’t be tied back to commodities? What makes you so confident?

That's plenty of time for an entire generation to be raised with an awareness that any entrepreneurial enterprise they may attempt can be crushed and consumed in short order by a competitor with the backing of the moneyed elites. If you try to manufacture a quality product in the US, and bootstrap your business, the instant you prove there is a market for it, someone will gather up some financing, knock off your product in China, and run you out of your own business. If you build a fun game app, Zynga or King or some other chop-shop with their model will instantly clone it and kill you with their marketing. If you open so much as a lemonade stand, the city will come round asking about inspections and permits.

Advancing technology has enabled a greater economy of scale as well as mass customization beyond what was possible, thus increasing the competitiveness of large businesses.

Examples include customized shoes from big brands, e-commerce recommendation algorithms taking the roles of local shopkeepers, IT systems reducing the costs and increasing the effectiveness for managing far-flung enterprises.

"the sharing economy"

no, seriously. I have family that ran busineses. I have run businesses. Most successful small business don't pay much better than driving for uber, and driving for uber is a lot less risk, a lot less effort. (there's also a lot less upside, but let's be honest here... making a small business that pays better than working for google that isn't just contracting, even when you have the same skills, is extremely difficult.) - if you drive for uber, at least the capital you blew is on something that is still useful after you quit the business. I know a lot of people with a bunch of branded cups and other junk from their previous failed ventures.

I mean, I had some pretty marketable skills when I started my own business, so I did better than the uber driver, but I worked hard and made like 1/4th of what I get working for other people.

The other thing is that unless you are in the business of getting funding, it's way easier to start a business when the economy is shit. In '09, nobody tried to undercut me. Now? I would not want to be in that market anymore, just 'cause there is so much competition that is willing to lose money to buy marketshare.

In '09, I was able to pick up good people who were temporarily unemployed as employees; now? if you wanna hire someone good, you are competing with people willing to pay netflix level money.

(I mean, all this, I think, is actually pretty great. But it is not so good for facilitating a small self-funded company)

When the economy is shit, most large companies outsource a lot of work because they can't afford or don't have the workers for the amount of work they have. So if your a freelancer, business can be pretty good.

When the economy is great, those same businesses try to bring all those efforts in-house, so all those contracts dry up.

Not sure how it relates with entrepreneurship, but this guy had to quit freelancing and get a full-time gig (which is how I met him) because no one was handing out the contracts he wanted anymore.

Business startup by necessity has gone down. It's much easier to get hired by an international company in a niche field and work from home now, so people no longer are required to start a business to work in the field of their choice

It's more difficult to start something really innovative, related to the slowdown of Moore's Law

It's more difficult to start a business in an established field, as licensing laws have come to cover so much more of the landscape. You can no longer just decide to become a barber and hang out your shingle.

In my experience, it's been a problem with banks and small business loans being hard to obtain these days. Banks want a LOT of leverage, you have to already be doing pretty well.

Folks that are already pretty well-off aren't going to take the types of risks that create small businesses.

As an individual example: in 1998, Intel's top-of-the-line CPU was the Pentium II with about 8 million transistors. In 2008, they released the Core 2 Extreme QX9770, with about 820 million transistors; this is a 100-fold increase in 10 years, which is almost exactly what Moore's law predicts.

Fast-forward another decade to 2018, and Intel's highest-end Xeon chips have something like 7 billion transistors, which is less than a 10-fold improvement in the same timeframe.

EDIT: that said, I think it's a real stretch to go from "the slowdown of Moore's law" to a sweeping claim about innovation in general being more difficult. There are a ridiculous number of different fields in which someone could start a business; relatively few of them are dependent on enormous, ever-increasing amounts of computational power.

I'd love to see a production cell phone that is already thick with a relatively huge battery, more rugged case, and a slightly better protected display. I'm willing to bet there's a market for this, just based on otterbox sales, and the sales of backpack battery covers.

Similarly a home media player like the roku, shield tv or fire stick are plenty small. That has nothing to do with being able to innovate and create newer or better experiences.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/process

All this whiz-bang shit startups do like AI, machine learning, really even any kind of custom software or process innovation, just isn't possible when you're small. There's no scope for it.

The reason it's a bigger problem now is because we have bigger markets globally and better tools, both of which create winner-take-all effects.

20-30 years ago you might start an auto parts distribution or manufacturing business, or a niche software business, or something else. It's a lot different when you have to compete with the best of the best globally from day 1 without any of the advantages the incumbents (e.g. data, existing channels to market, established brand) can bring to bear.

One angle: A lot of stuff is moving online. Good luck with Google, Facebook, Amazon having their own interest$ etc being gateways to your site. Most people will not make it, so why even try? Risk vs reward.

Using banks as an example, look at the market share of total assets over the last 20 years: https://www.peakprosperity.com/sites/default/files/users/u31...

The largest banks (JPMorgan, Citi, BoA, etc.) have decimated regional and mid-size banks while credit unions have essentially maintained the same role at the bottom. The big banks have more resources to invest in new technology and financial initiatives, thus having the ability to be market leaders and capture more money. In my opinion, digital also makes a huge difference. For example, JPMorgan is able to spend $10B on technology a year, which is more than the total assets of many small banks and credit unions. The banks that are midsize are in the hardest position because they don't have the capacity to outpace a big bank in R&D or IT, and are stuck in a position of being a lagging trend follower since they also can't spare a lot of risk tolerance. Further, it's hard to even leverage branch access and customer service as more individuals rely on digital banking to handle their finances, which actually pushes the big banks ahead in consumer satisfaction: https://assets.sourcemedia.com/dims4/default/0e422a4/2147483...

From a business side, it looks like we are headed down the path of oligopolist megacorps unless there's major changes. Money is the name of the game, and even in the startup world, the end-goal for investors is to pull off a lucrative exit (which usually means selling to a monopolistic megacorp) or IPO. Ask a megacorp CEO how much is "enough" for their business, and the goal will be to have as much as they possibly can.

I don't know if entrepreneurship is actually dying, but my speculation is it's getting tougher to build a reliable business to employ others and depend on for one's livelihood within the remaining territory left. So much has been taken over by huge companies, it's difficult to find a niche or market opportunity to feasibly "disrupt". It feels like the megacorps have already cleared the fields and claimed the land and the rest of us entrepreneurs have a choice of: i) work for the megacorp that owns everything, or, ii) try to find solace in the few options left.

It's not healthy, and no matter what the consequences will be, I cannot envision an outcome where any of this leads to positive things. But maybe it's just my own "bias" that I have positive associations with not being a subject to a hive mind of centralized power and control.

I think we're already here, or closer than a lot of people realize.