Collateral Damage: The Venture Capital Outlook and Potential

Can we, as the current administration hopes and plans, grow our way out of the “no” or “slow” growth box? Taking the long view, we can ' at least we have in the past and very successfully. But the impetus, the sine qua non ingredient in our success, has been our system of generously rewarding risk takers ' from William Penn to William Gates. If, as current trends suggest, our cultural mandarins, our press, our law enforcement personnel, our academics, our opinion makers (from Talk Radio on up) … if all the above (driven by their internal metabolisms and/or perceptions of their personal advantage) are bent on (worst case) criminalizing risk, on making business failure at least a tort and perhaps a crime, on raising the bar of managerial responsibility until it is insurmountable, of bureaucratizing the private economy ' of, in a word, reintroducing the once-discredited theses of command, top-down economies ' we are on our way to a different economic and social outcome in the years ahead. And the signs are ominous. One of the most disturbing is the growing influence of tort lawyers on the political process – rich enough to buy ball teams (Angelos), a Senate seat and even (perhaps) the Presidency (Edwards).

A couple of years ago, I wrote a bullish piece, forecasting a bounce back from the busted 'bubble,' based on a number of positive factors I saw in the tech and human tech sector. Let me quote selectively.