In defense of entrepreneurship, I would like to suggest that the true entrepreneur is one who gambles, yes, but on himself. He often places everything he would like to be and have on the table as a stake for what he thinks he can do. When he fails there is no forgiveness, and when he succeeds, he sometimes gets forgotten, or worse, chastised as an evil or greedy opportunist, when he was (from his own lights) just trying to build something that worked in the sometimes crazy marketplace of the world.

The reason so many Americans are currently well fed and housed is in large measure an after-effect of these men and women starting a working group, solving tough problems of design, logistics, production, people, market and finance, and pushing the thing ahead from all sides until it began to roll. That is how Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Hughes, and Time Warner began. These things were built on sweat. Not just the sweat of line workers, but equally the sweat of entrepreneurs who put themselves at risk to make themhappen.

If I may get a bit abstract I would suggest that anyone who turns out valuable exchange with the world, whether as a mill operator, a middle manager, or a highlevel executive, deserves a welcome and an acknowledgement for doing so. It is clear as well that the opportunities for corruption are more pronounced at higher levels, because of the power that trades in those circles -- even communists have had to wrestle with that.

Individuals do or do not do good work at their various tasks, and the weight of that is what they should be judged on, rather than sweeping categories that repeatedly are used to inaccurately praise or condemn whole classes of people.