Word: entrepreneur
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...capital and heavily dependent on borrowed funds to meet payrolls and to keep shelves stocked. Orders from recession-wary customers are tapering off, but interest rates are not coming down as fast as sales. And the cost of carrying these ever growing inventories is soaring. James Edelen, an entrepreneur who started his own welding supply company in 1976, now wonders why he ever opened shop. Says he: "In this business you've got to sell in order to buy supplies. If I had known how hard that was four years ago, I probably would have been better off working...
Along the way, Daly legends sprouted. While rebuilding a newly bought but burned-out plane in London in 1956, the tightfisted entrepreneur saved cash by sleeping for more than a month in the same limousine that he used to visit bankers. In the last days of the Viet Nam War, Daly organized, paid for and flew on a World mercy flight into Danang hours before the North Vietnamese captured the city. The self-styled "old bastard" pistol-whipped and kicked mutinous South Vietnamese troops who tried to board the refugee flight...
...form of Gresham's Law, bad planning by government drives out good planning by private people. No detailed plan emanating from a computer bank in some bureaucracy could ever store the information necessary to tell the would-be entrepreneur to open a new corner carry-out or Revlon to launch a new Charlie. No plan could foresee the economic effects of the overnight success of some new Xerox or IBM. Modern industrialized economics are far too complex to permit a rigid master plan. The state can provide its fallible view of future economic developments, but the best planning is still...
...philosophy in the 18th century, it represented a scandalous revolution in a world in which the individual was merely a subject of caste, church and state. Europe for centuries had been under the sway of authority and tradition. Everyone had a place, and there was no place for an entrepreneur. The early Church Father St. Jerome had said it all: "A man who is a merchant can seldom if ever please...
...avoid catering to a definite ideological clientele." But again this is a matter of degree. Circulation pays for barely a quarter of his paper's monthly cost, and advertising provides only an incremental addition. Because of the low literacy rate, "Readership is so limited that the entrepreneur does not think it worthwhile to advertise." The result: "You've got to be damn rich to subsidize your paper...