Tigerhawk suggests that the decline in entrepreneurship is due to added regulations (one regulation at a time) and decreasing reward.
Or perhaps Americans are starting fewer businesses because our local, state and federal governments, in a thousand little steps, have increased the risks and lowered the rewards. When (to pick one obvious example) you massively increase the financial and managerial cost of simply being a public company, you have effectively lowered the exit returns for start-up investors and therefore raised the hurdle necessary to attract the financing to found the business in the first place.
Perhaps local venture capitalist Brad Feld can weigh in on this (see sidebar). Also, I was up in Breckenridge the last few days and the Summit County newspaper had a front page picture of a lemonade stand supporting an article about the increase in the number of new business licenses being issued. I suspect these are not businesses that need venture capitalists however.
