Michael Arrington Quotes
Best startups generally come from somebody needing to scratch an itch.
Arrington, Michael. TechCrunch, AOL, 2007.
This is a very important economic-political quotation. One conservative mantra in the 20th and 21st centuries was that business growth and development will be spurred by tax cuts in the marginal tax rate that the businessperson would have to pay. “Marginal” means the additional tax for each additional dollar of income. However, the development and growth of most businesses, especially the entrepreneurial ones that tend to create the most new high wage jobs. Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Thomas Watson Jr. and other creators of great business enterprises, in general do not even consider their potential profit as the most important reward. They are almost always on a mission to change the way people function in the world. They generally want to make money but the driving factor is really the change in society that they will produce. While Gates and other great business creators do not change their business behavior on the bases of marginal tax rates (or any other kind to tax rates for the matter), the 2nd and 3rd generation of business manager who takes over existing companies is motivated in great part by marginal tax rates. Summers and many others argue that not only are the best jobs created by those who are unmotivated by tax rates, but they are the same businesses that tend to produce most of the great innovations of society. Therefore, find other ways to incentivize the entrepreneurs rathefr than marginal tax rate policy.
The willingness to fail with a policy or program is very rare amongst politicians and almost nil with government bureaucrats. For the latter the main reason is Congress which pillories the Civil Servants or their and their political bosses for any failure. So nothing innovative gets tried in most administrations. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who went to the people with the intention to try. many different things and would fail with many, was tolerated by a Congress which he dominated and a public that was so desparate as a result of Hoover’s trying nothing to ameliorate the Great Depression that they were willing to accept some failures. And indeed there were a number of failures, some very large and significant. But there were also many successes and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, experiments, failures and all was the most popular President in American history and was elected to 4 terms before his death.
J. Michael Arrington is the American founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in America and elsewhere. Magazines such as Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the Internet. In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world.
