Bureaucracies and special interests encroach on small businesses and residents, sapping the creative energy from local entrepreneurs and pushing their investments and growth toward more hospitable environments. In the late twentieth century, suburban and rural areas have provided the economic climate best suited to small business development. As a result, more than two-thirds of all new jobs in the 1980s and 1990s have emerged in the suburbs. The extent to which cities erect obstacles to entrepreneurship can be quite numbing. Take, for example, the case of taxicabs.
Taxicabs are, potentially, one of the purest forms of entrepreneurship.
The business can be established with a car, a driver, and someone with the savvy and gumption to recognize an unfulfilled need in the market. Sitting in her apartment, Lisa, an aspiring college student, mulls over ways to pay her tuition at the local university. She could earn money at those times, and spend the day studying and attending classes. Local regulations have made the realities of starting up a taxicab business far more complicated and costly. These regulations add tens of thousands of dollars to the normal start-up costs of new companies.