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I do not disagree with you that the small startup businesses are crucial to our growth. Indeed, most new products, even those sold by big companies, started out with some one person who had an idea, worked out how to make it into a salable product, and then sold that idea, either to the general public himself, or sold it to the big company that then manufactured and marketed it. McDonald's started out as a single hamburger joint, Dell computers started out with a single geek building computers for his friends, etc. My point was that it takes 'profit' to be able to expand a business, hire people, etc, and yet our kids are being told in most schools that profit is somehow 'unfair', 'greedy', or even 'dishonest'. If you listened to interviews with the YOUNG people in the Occupy group, most of them seemed very clear that in their minds, businesses should sell their products 'at cost', because 'corporate profits' are evil. They seemed to have no understanding at all that those evil 'shareholders' are taking money that they could use to have a higher lifestyle, and instead risking those dollars by investing, in the hope of growing them, usually for the goal of having something to live on when they get too old to work any more. If you tell those kids that much of the money invested in the stock market is from pension funds and IRAs and 401Ks, they have no idea what that even means. Explain it, and they still do not grasp the idea that old folks know that they will have high medical bills in the years when they have no earning power except from their savings, and that is why they want their investments to make a profit. By the way, the number of 'leveraged buyouts' that wipe out companies to profit the investors is much smaller than the number of equity firms who actually rescue businesses that were going under unless someone came in and changed things to make them profitable again. Sure, it looks hard when the buyers come in and fire a bunch of non-productive people, but if those people had been producing a profit, the company would not have been in trouble in the first place. And no, I don't mean all the people fired are bad workers. Some of them are great workers, trying hard, but at a job that is itself not a worthwhile job. That's one reason that a lot of fired workers become successful in their own businesses, or at their new jobs. But if a company if focused on, for example, just doing things the same way they always did them, while things have changed so much in what we do and how we do it, they are going to end up failing. Sometimes, tho, it takes new management to see what should be kept, and what should be changed or eliminated. Remember, successful equity firms are the ones who turn most of their purchases around and make them profitable, not just sell off parts.