Ryan Daniel Moran outlines how government and entrepreneurs should divide responsibilities. Government should protect property rights and security, while private enterprise solves problems like food ethics. He cites John Mackey's framework and points to Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat as examples of entrepreneurial solutions, favoring challenge prizes over direct government intervention.
Tiffany Ryder asks, in an ideal world, what would be the most effective relationship between government and private enterprise?
At Freedom Fast Lane Live this past December, I think John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, gave a pretty good framework for how things can get done. And he said, if anything can be done profitably, it should be done by private enterprise. If something cannot be done profitably, then it should be done by nonprofits. And if something is too big to be done through either of those, then it needs to go to government. I think that is a decent, rough outline for determining the roles of entrepreneurship and the role of government. I think it just changes over time. So some things that are not profitable right now will become profitable 10 years from now. For example, there are things that the government invests in because it thinks that it needs to be stimulated and that might have had an argument 25 years ago. We look at health care, it might not have been as profitable 25 years ago or today. Private organizations can pretty much handle just about everything and don't need outside funding from the government because we can raise money privately to do things. Now, I would love to be able to look at you and say that I'm an anarcho capitalist that believes that there is no role of government, that private individuals can handle everything. I'm just not there. I think that the government can have a role in certain things. I think that the government. I think that capitalism assumes that you have protected property rights and that the government can be an efficient way to guarantee private property rights. Of course, when you get into questions of like eminent domain, where do those lines blur? That's a tough one. But I think capitalism assumes that you have a government protecting your ability to earn and your ability to keep what you earn, and that you have safe borders and that you are protected from outside threats. So I think that is basically the framework for me that you protect freedom from a government level. Everything else is done by government. I have heard some proposals that the government can basically issue certain challenges, kind of like the X Prize does, but for challenges that are facing the nation, for example, like, who could something that's passionate to me, who can come up with a way to better take care of livestock, which is weird for me to talk about, but to be honest with you, I think we'll look back on our generation 50 years from now and say the way that we treat the animals that we eat is kind of an ethical problem. The way that we mass produce meat that, like, it's hard for us to justify what we do here. Now you have private enterprises like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat that are basically reverse engineering the amino acid profiles of meat and then creating plant based options that are basically engineered meat products. That is a kind of like the X Prize idea. I think PETA had a kind of X Prize bounty on who could create the ideal plant based burger. Like the idea of creating challenges that companies then organize around to be able to.
Entrepreneurial ways of getting that prize money. Can the government get involved in that? I've heard ideas in that that are somewhat attractive. I think that would probably be the least bad type of of government intervention. Barack Obama signed legislation that said that all vehicles had to have a certain type of fuel efficiency by I think it was 2030. I don't think that is the best use of government, but I think putting that type of a limit or structure around how entrepreneurs need to adjust in order to meet certain regulations is a less bad form of government than the government actually going in and doing something. I think creating a challenge for an entrepreneur could be beneficial or could have benefits or at least less negative effects than the government going in and trying to do something themselves. So ideally I want the government as removed from entrepreneurs as possible, but at the same time I think it does assume certain property rights and certain protections. So there will always be a role of government. I just think it is a lot, lot less than what we have right.
