[BretLudwig]

Entrepreneurship is not just not often the best idea for spending one's
effort upon for Blacks and Mexicans. It's not a good idea for the majority
of people, either. Most whites fail at it too.

In ANY society, entrepreneurship _per se_ can be a successful endeavor
only for a small minority of people. The more specialized the society
becomes, the more successful the smaller fraction of successful
entrepreneurs, per se, become, and the lower the chances become of
succeeding.

In the days before franchising, many people opened burger stands and
short order cafes and grills. Their owner-founders were entrepreneurs, but
not "pure entrepreneurs": to an extent, their profits were simply common
service profits, that is, they performed the service of selling edible
cooked food and gave the patron a conditional license to eat it in clean,
enclosed, comfortable surroundings, and socialize a little with other
customers perhaps. The entrepreneurial part of their profit was for having
the specific excess energy to expend the effort of opening that particular
cafe or burger stand, in that particular place, rather than just go to
work in someone else's. They could charge a little more than a less clean
or less convenient or less congenial noshery elsewhere, in theory.

The owner/founders had to have a knowledge set over and above that of
employees of other existing businesses, and take risks those hourly or
salaried employees didn't. These conditions constituted a barrier to
entry, as did the need to have or be able to leverage capital. The reward
for successful owners of restaurants was a good profit, that is, if they
were successful. The downside was they could go broke. They had to pay any
employees their wages whether or not they made a profit, and often, went
without themselves to keep the marginal business afloat until hopefully
better times arrived. Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn't. The
less successful ones often fought hard for a long time: the least so were
mercifully "busted out" quickly and went to work for someone else. Many
failed entrepreneurs went on to success at non-entrepreneurial ventures.
Some became hotel chefs, some became assembly line workers, some railroad
conductors. One, Harry S Truman (no period on the "S" because it stood for
nothing besides "S": he had only a middle initial) became President of the
United States, and one history has looked on favorably at that.

After World War II, franchising enabled centrally managed and highly
product engineered, consistent chains to take over the vast majority of
food service businesses in the United States. The franchisees were
excercisors of a very limited entrepreneurship: they put up capital, but
greatly limited their risk and also their authority as to how, when,
where, and with whom they did businesses. Franchisors leveraged their
concepts and oversight highly: they went broke quickly (but with
comparatively little of their own money) or they succeeded on a heretofore
inconceivable basis. They also enjoyed almost godlike powers over their
franchisees.

We may therefore say that the real entrepreneurs here are the
franchisors: their success is almost purely entrepreneurial. The number of
these pure entrepreneurs is small, very small, compared to the number of
nonfranchised burger stand owners in the pre-franchise era. But their
profits are in total considerably higher. A few people-famous in some
cases, like Ray Kroc, Dave Thomas and "Col." Harlan Sanders-became
enormously wealthy.

The average employee of a McDonalds earns less, in inflation adjusted
terms, today than did a short order cook or waitress in a 1940s diner. In
fact, short order cook used to be a well-paying, if not specially
prestigious or desireable, job. Good short order cooks could hop on a
train in 1940, or 1950, or even 1960 and get off at any reasonably
populated town and be assured of working the next day. Franchising
deskilled as many jobs as possible, reducing any given franchise to mostly
minimum wage jobs with a management position or two per ten or so
employees, paying a little more on an hourly basis but requiring 60+ hour
weeks.

Conservative and self-improvement hucksters continually promote
"entrepreneurship" with no apparent understanding of the concept. That is
because they are just that, hucksters. They are selling a pleasantly
flavored and mildly noxious refreshment to the gullibards and work dodgers
and fantasy castle residents who have made them successful.

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From the late 1800s to the early 1960s there were lots of successful
black entrepreneurs. Almost all had businesses catering to other
blacks. There were black car dealers, black shoe stores, black
restaurants, black everything. Some did some white business as well,
many refused it on the grounds that they didn't want the white
merchants selling to blacks and undercutting them and they honored the
same principle. Some were very good businesspeople.

When desegregation came in blacks abandoned black businesses in
droves. The black merchants that survived were those with a
multiracial clientele already or who quickly adapted. That was a small
fraction. Most left business and retired if old enough or went to work
for big companies. Big companies sometimes hired them to reach the new
black clientele, but more often to fill quotas, and the big businesses
could pay bright blacks way more than small business afforded most.