A longtime colleague pinged me in Facebook today regarding the Friedman article I plucked from Twitter threads and blogged about yesterday. His question, and it’s a good one: “Does it need to be one or the other?” My reply: Not at all. I think this is mostly concepted in cartoon. But I mainly like the notion of helping entrepreneurs and small business (no thanks to American Express) do their part in reviving the economy.
If we’re meant to be in the quote-unquote Creative Economy, with our number one export being or soon to be intellectual property, we’ve got to get behind the innovators, the visionaries, the guys in a garage thinking up the Next Big New Thing that the big boys (in tech, in auto, in government, in aerospace, in manufacturing/distribution, in the energy sector, etc.) will roll up into their big machines to pump it all out to the masses for, yes, the Greater Good.
But, again, yes, I agree, it’s not black-n-white, all or nothing, this or that or, particularly, Left or Right … this economy and its constituent stakeholders is an ecosystem as complex as the human body. Let’s just keep a focus on what’s good, what’s positive, what can bind us all together to harness all the hope out there and spin it into gold, that would be nice, but also food, water, shelter, comfort and confidence. Ever-forward….
He replied: “I agree. How do we get people to “unclench their fists”?
Now that will require some pondering, along with, for good measure, clicking the heels of ruby slippers and repeating “there’s no place like home … there’s no place like home … there’s no place like home…”
Posted by: Colin Mangham