Independence Day is Entrepreneurship Day

Independence Day is the closest thing we have to Entrepreneurship Day.

I’m a geek about Independence Day and the Declaration of Independence. If you haven’t read the entire document, I encourage you to do it. (Be ready to goggle some word definitions.)

Certainly, freedom, liberty, equality and justice are fundamental elements of the DoI. That’s the stuff we all have heard quoted over and over and over. But that’s all in the just first quarter of document. There’s much more in there! Warning: baseball, hotdogs and apple pie are not mentioned anywhere. But what is mentioned is entrepreneurship.

If you read the other three-quarters of the DoI (the parts that are almost never quoted) you’ll learn the “why” of the DoI, i.e., the list of the “long train of abuses and usurpations.” That’s where you’ll find that one of those abuses/usurpations was:

“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”

I.e., the King won’t let us do business. In the closing section of the DoI, only four things are listed as examples of the Powers that want; three of them are related to war and peace… the fourth is to “establish commerce.”

America’s trajectory toward the ideals of the DoI have been imperfect. But entrepreneurship has fared well.