do entrepreneurs serve as pawns for economic development?
swombat: It's quite extreme and overly simplistic...The danger, as always, is that there is some truth to what you say, but that truth is stretched and blurred in various direction so as to be mostly meaningless.Almost every high-reward human endeavour, from drug dealing to movie stardom or stock trading, generates large amounts of competition. That's one of the main reasons a free market is a productive way to allocate resources - it places high rewards on things of high value, and allows anyone to compete, so that more people will provide these high-value things, thus driving their price back down. In that way, your suggestion is true.However, there are three implicit assumptions in your thesis that are very, very shaky.The first and least harmful is the idea that "being a pawn" is somehow implicitly bad. You haven't established that at all. There is no absolute "bad", so you must be implying that it is worse than something else. I'd be curious as to what that thing is, in your mind. Perhaps, if you dig, you might find that actually, being an entrepreneur (pawn or not) is quite a good deal, better than most others.The second false premise is that there is some kind of specific group of people who are deciding this, manipulating this system for their benefit. There is no such group. Or rather, there is - this group is all of us. We all benefit from a system which encourages innovation and competition and rewards it. There is no conspiracy to exploit entrepreneurs by somehow making them compete against all odds. Nobody sat down and thought "I wonder if I can get all these useful idiots to start lots of innovative businesses so that... what?"The third misconception is the idea that entrepreneurs are somehow being manipulated by this system beyond their understanding. If anything, I'd say it's the opposite. Entrepreneurs set out to shape the system around them to provide them with rewards.The fact that some types of businesses have high failure rates (I still don't really believe those 95% business failure rates... I strongly suspect very shoddy statistics that have a very poor definition of "success") doesn't mean that somehow most entrepreneurs are being suckered into starting business.I think you need to rethink this idea from the ground up, carefully examining your assumptions as you go along, and maybe talking to some entrepreneurs too. You will, I believe, find it has no substance in reality.