HMS Enterprise?

Whatever the taxation arguments, the John Redwood post was really about enterpreneurialism.

Many people, and respondents on his blog, get confused between enterprise and entrepreneurialism. Essentially enterprise is a quality that most of us possess to one degree or another. Very few people though possess entrepreneurialism. To be an entrepreneur you need to see things in a new way. To spot the inefficiency or the opportunity for a new good or service. You need to be really creative.

This differentiation between enterprise and entrepreneurialism is evident in the employment statistics. About 4 million workers are self employed. But very few of those actually created a new business based on a new product or service idea. Many just do what they did for an employer on their own account.

Entrepreneurs are those that disturb the steady state economy and send it off in a new direction. Enterprising people are not necessarily entrepreneurs, but they can be very successful, and excellent job creators in their own field.

The point of this ramble is that it is genuinely possible to teach people to be enterprising, you just need self belief, energy and ambition; but much more difficult, and I contend not really possible, to teach entrepreneurialism.

The root of our problem is an education system designed to create bureaucratic jobsworths and to supply supplicant and pliable cannon fodder into the maw of the bureaucratic state. It also has the added benefit of not creating people who will challenge the bureaucracy.

I was fortunate I went to one of the last true Grammar Schools. Loads of Old Boys of that school showed enterprise and some genuine entrepreneurialism.

So if you want more enterprise, liberate education. Trouble is the turn round round time for the UK is therefore generational, not just a couple of years.

(This is an edited version of a comment made on Mark Wadsworth's blog here)