The debate we should be having about over “you didn’t build that”

A recent paper by the Kauffman Foundation — a nonprofit devoted entirely to encouraging entrepreneurship — looked at some of these issues, and they began with a fact that should force both sides to moderate their rhetoric: We don’t really know what leads to more firm creation. In fact, firm creation is something of a mystery, as it’s been eerily stable over the past 50 years, despite the radically different policy and economic environments we’ve had over that time.
You can see a lot of variation with business cycles and a bit of long-term growth (which is presumably due, in part, to population growth), but that’s about it. The 1990s, despite being a high-tax period, were, on average, better for new business formation than the 1980s. The 2000s were better than the 1990s, but this raises troubling questions for the whole focus on new business formation, as the economy of the 2000s featured a massive credit bubble and median wage stagnation.
Either way, the Kauffmann study concludes, “the period under study, the late 1970s to early 2000s, experienced a veritable explosion in efforts to promote and increase new-firm formation. The consistency discussed here suggests low sensitivity to short- and medium-term trends.” That is to say, recent history suggests that neither Romney nor Obama’s policies will have a massive effect on entrepreneurship.

if you take Kauffman’s findings seriously, you have to say that this debate is more about the kind of society we should have. Romney thinks we should do more to reward the successful and less to help the poor, and Obama thinks we should raise taxes on the successful so we can improve the lot of the poor.