Europeans pay a formidable price for their beloved security and stasis. It is no surprise that the 5 percent of the world's people represented by the population of the United States raises more than half of all the world's venture capital. But 70 percent of venture investments in the United States is poured into new technologies and new firms. By contrast with Europe, America is afire with invention. Americans love risk.
Corporations grow, too, from the American spirit of creativity and enterprise.
Americans have pioneered in the development of small companies into larger ones. The business corporation has been the voluntary association through which Americans have wrought the economic revolution that changed the world's horizons. Not only is the full story not told, however, but in the bits and pieces that are recounted, the antibusiness biases of historians are an unpleasant fact of life. The core principle guiding my thought on the corporation, here and in earlier work, has been that business is a serious vocation, open to both moral and immoral behavior. Thus, in approaching the question of the business corporation in this book, I have devoted a considerable amount of time to clarifying some basic conceptions and, I hope, to raising some deeper issues for study.