Entrepreneurship as anti-politics

At the Mises Circle event in Oklahoma City, the panel “Entrepreneurship Beyond Politics” makes a claim that sounds naïve until you notice how rarely it is even attempted: the best entrepreneurs try to make problems boring. Not “solved” in the press-release sense, but routinized—pushed into the realm of repeatable processes, prices, and accountability. The podcast discussion (published by the Mises Institute) frames entrepreneurship as a form of coordination that thrives precisely when it is not treated as a public morality play.

That is the quiet heresy: markets work by depoliticizing decisions. They convert disputes over values into trade-offs over costs, time, and quality. A restaurant doesn’t need a national “Food Justice Strategy” to discover that customers hate stale bread; it needs a competitor willing to take their money. Entrepreneurs, in this view, are not merely “innovators” but anti-bureaucrats: they shorten feedback loops and punish self-deception.

The state’s instinct is the inverse. When private actors make a problem legible and solvable—payments, identity, transport, energy, housing—politics tends to re-enter as licensing, inspections, procurement rules, and “safety” regimes that quietly harden into cartel protection. The panel’s point is not that law is unnecessary, but that government routinely substitutes administrative permission for genuine consumer consent.

This is why today’s bipartisan romance with “industrial policy” is less a plan than a reflex. Once politicians decide some sector is “strategic,” the market’s verdict becomes politically unacceptable. Prices are treated as sabotage. Profits become evidence of “gouging.” Losses become justification for subsidies. The result is predictable: firms optimize for Washington rather than customers. If you want to kill entrepreneurship, make success contingent on compliance departments and relationships.

The state often justifies this politicization as a response to “market failure,” while simultaneously disabling the very mechanisms that reveal failure early: entry, experimentation, and bankruptcy. Procurement systems reward incumbency and paperwork competence. Licensing regimes convert would-be competitors into petitioners. Oversight expands, accountability diffuses.

The Mises Circle conversation also hints at an uncomfortable cultural fact: entrepreneurship is an affront to the modern managerial class because it creates power that is not granted. You don’t need a seat on a committee to build a better product; you need nerve, competence, and customers. So the political system does what it does best: it redefines voluntary exchange as a regulated privilege.

If entrepreneurs are trying to make problem-solving less political, the state is trying to make politics the only permissible form of problem-solving. One produces abundance and error-correction; the other produces forms, hearings, and the comforting illusion that someone is “in charge.”