Teton Sand’s White Paper, In Praise of Risk, contends that cultivation of successful entrepreneurs and SMEs is not only vital for our current economic welfare and future standard of living;  it is vital for a healthy society.  Boyko's Risk v. Uncertainty is a more rigorous introduction to the subject.

Entrepreneurship’s affect on due process by way of economic influence, though, is what DPI finds relevant.  The economic impact of government policies restricting entrepreneurial activity is of particular interest.  In examining the issue, it is helpful to contrast potential economic consequences of underutilizing entrepreneurs with the historical underutilization of two other intellectual capital resources: African-Americans and women.

The moral tragedy of civil rights and other due process abuses, segregation, Black Codes, and slavery for some 4 million residents is well documented.  Less is known about the effect on GNP.  Many argue repression of human capital caused the relative economic frailty that defeated Confederate armies.  Comparing free labor Northern productivity to vastly lower slave based Southern productivity offers perspective, perhaps more so than the single product (cotton) production analysis’s now in vogue.  The economic penalty paid for repressing generations of unknown Booker T. Washington’s and George Washington Carver’s, however, is impossible to measure.

Although ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920 did not end attempts to relegate women to exclusively domestic roles, the suffrage movement helped facilitate a doubling of America’s intellectual capital.  As opponents feared, it led many women to look beyond domestic duties and seriously study outside their immediate curriculum.  How quickly American factories could have been converted to munitions production during WWII without changes previously brought about by expanding due process rights for women is an intriguing question.

Though entrepreneurs are vastly outnumbered by African-Americans and Women, their economic contributions cannot be ignored.  Factories that ground down the Thousand Year Reich were there when needed because of former pioneering efforts by countless wildcatters, Henry Ford’s, and Alexander Graham Bell’s.  SBA recently reported SMEs create more than half of all U.S. employment growth.  A companion study found SMEs create some 70% of technological innovation.  In Small is Beautiful, Boyko reports SMEs accomplish this with minimal capital investment: roughly half the value created by the U.S. economy was pioneered with less than 10% of new capital invested in economic growth.

America’s “entrepreneurial engine” is under siege as never before.  Access to institutional seed stage capital shrank by 90% the past decade.   In Should Securities Industry SROs..., former SEC Commissioner Karmel states “whether SROs are subject to due process protections is unclear.”   SEC delegation of early stage space to state securities commissions subjects seed capital formation to a patchwork of contradictory regulations.  State regulators regularly engage in self dealing and worse while depriving entrepreneurs of basic due process rights.  Meanwhile, seed stage companies face an onslaught of unencumbered innovation and technology from abroad.  

Opportunity often arises from adversity.  As Due Process Institute’s Seed Stage Advocacy White Paper points out, resources are emerging to help entrepreneurs face their new challenges.

As a voting block, entrepreneurs lack numerical clout at ballot boxes.  They cannot hope to match campaign contributions made by large cap companies.  It is DPI’s belief, however, that certain attributes shared by most entrepreneurs uniquely qualify them to obtain access to due process rights through the judicial system.  DPI devotes educational and other resources to help entrepreneurs use the advantage to full effect.