Heroic entrepeneurship after the Restoration

According to the Whig/Marxist version of history, the roots of the Industrial revolution were in the Glorious Revolution, which represented the rights of man and the rising political power of businessmen.

There are several problems with this story. One is that the rise of China decisively proves that the rights of corporations matter a whole lot more for economic development than the rights of man, and if you are looking for the origin of the rights of corporations, you are looking at the Restoration.

The other is that in practice, we are always ruled by priests and/or soldiers. The capitalist class is not the kind of entity that can rule. It is not really an entity, and capitalists, unlike soldiers and priests, find it hard to get together to form a single entity.

The modern world, technology, and industry, comes from science and technology. Technology comes not from scientists, but from Ayn Rand’s heroic engineer scientist entrepreneur, who organizes other people’s capital and other people’s labor to give effect to his value creating innovations. Ayn Rand’s heroic engineer chief executive officer has recently been exemplified by the heroes of Silicon Valley, though lately Silicon Valley seems to be switching, like the rest of the American economy, to crony capitalism, with engineers and scientists reduced to interchangeable insignificant menials, far away from where the important decisions are made, the important decisions being made on the revolving door between regulators and regulated.

So when did modernity start?

The most immediate effect of the Restoration on economic development was that King Charles the Second raised the status of science, setting off a status competition among gentlemen to be scientific. Science did not immediately produce practical results, except that Thomas Sydenham advanced the art of medicine, and made doctors somewhat less useless and dangerous, and Robert Hook advanced the art of making scientific instruments.

King Charles the Second also freed the joint stock corporation of inconvenient restraints, encouraging an environment where wealthy men, instead of managing their own investments, sponsored entrepreneurs.

Andrew Yarranton, before the Restoration of King Charles the second, was a capitalist on the older pattern. He personally invested his own money in equipment, employed people to make stuff, and sold it. During the civil war, politics dominated business, so he engaged in politics to acquire the property of Royalists, the equivalent of today’s revolving door between regulators and regulated. Upon the Restoration, these past misdeeds, legal at the time, but suddenly highly illegal, got him in hot water, but he was soon released from prison, and resumed entrepreneurship – but now on the Silicon Valley / Ayn Rand pattern

Where previously he produced iron the way it had always been produced with his own capital and his own employees, now he discovered new and innovative ways to create value, spread knowledge of these new ideas, new technologies, in order that other men, what would now call angel investors, would provide him with capital to give effect to his innovations.

Before the Restoration, big business was the equivalent of today’s revolving door between regulators and regulated, and that is where you found Andrew Yarranton. After the Restoration, you found him doing heroic innovative entrepreneurship, probably the first person in history to exemplify Ayn Rands’ hero engineer CEO.

John Dwight was a scientist CEO, another example of Ayn Rand’s heroic scientist entrepreneurs creating wealth through innovation. Before the Restoration, preachers ruled, religion was the important thing, religion and religious teachers had status and power, and John Dwight was busy with religion. After the Restoration, soldiers ruled over priests, religion lost status, science gained status, and he immediately switched to scientific entrepreneurship.

If we look at the great scientists that appeared shortly after the Restoration, they seem rather virtuous, other worldly, and out of contact with the everyday practical matters of life, love, politics, and people. The hero scientist entrepreneurs of the Restoration on the other hand, show a Bill Gates type eye for the main chance. Like today’s Silicon Valley hero engineer CEO Bill Gates, they had a tendency to head straight for opportunity, trampling over anyone in the way, savagely elbowing anyone else heading for the same opportunity, grabbing opportunity with both hands, not letting go, and kicking and biting anyone who tried to take opportunity away from them.

While Ayn Rand generally depicts her hero engineer CEOs as noble and good in every way, and her looters as completely evil, degenerate, destructive, and self destructive in every way, she also depicts some hero entrepreneurs who switch between looting and heroic value creation as the environment permits, which seems to be more typical of actual hero entrepreneurs.

After these two, we see a steady stream of hero entrepreneurs, but these two are the first, and they switched to heroic entrepreneurship from other activities shortly after the Restoration.

The wealth of the modern world comes from innovations in value creation. Innovations in value creation come from heroic scientist engineer CEOs, and this type appears immediately after the Restoration, and continues to the present day.