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Paul Graham, a well known entrepreneur, writer, and venture capitalist, recently wrote an essay titled „The Founder Visa”. He honestly admits that public policy lies outside his usual field of expertise. That's a necessary disclaimer, as the essay is filled with fallacies.

Graham, who has been a businessman for the past 15-or-so years, clearly sees multiple government hindrances to entrepreneurship. For some reason he believes that the government intervention is a solution to problems that were created by the government interventions in the first place. The essay proposes additional state privileges to start-up founders and investors to counter-act immigration laws.

The distinction between employees and founders isn't as big as it looks. How hard is to transform a company that employs 100 people into a company that outsources its operation to a 100 start-ups and leases all the tools to those companies? American workers need protection. We clearly see that the cost of this protection is a total paralysis of entrepreneurial spirit. The entrepreneurs can use virtually anything to enhance the division of labour (uhm... damage the workforce?).

Protectionism is politically correct at the moment, but makes little sense, as always. I bet that Larry and Sergey took away more than two engineering positions at Altavista when they founded Google. When Henry Ford started producing model T, he destroyed whole industries. You know what? Nobody cared. People were too busy exploring new opportunities created by successful start-ups. I think it is now clear that there was no point keeping horse driven carriages for another century or two with government subsidies (eco-folk can differ, who cares).

Polish writer Stefan Kisielewski used to define socialism as a political system that heroically fights against problems unheard of in normal countries. Employing another thousands of government bureaucrats to overlook founding start-ups is exactly this type of insane micro-management. It's bound to misfire, and each unforeseen consequence will lead to even more government control being necessarily employed.

Graham believes that venture capital businesses should have a system of accreditation similar to those of universities. Doesn't he notice that universities are more and more irrelevant? In CS courses the curriculum degenerates into overview of Java (and/or .NET) API, whereas the tuition costs skyrocket. Many extremely successful IT entrepreneurs are college dropouts — obtaining state accredited education wasn't worth their time. I believe that similar thing will happen with obtaining state accredited seed capital.

I understand that the main problem is that „we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions”. A just government in a free country is impartial to particular interests of any groups. As current Obama's administration is „open to suggestions” we can just imagine the number of lobbyists that queue in front of the White House. Legal privileges and billions of tax-payers bailout money are given away to anybody who cares to ask. The sport is so popular, that even Graham wants to take part in it. That's a shame. He makes a better mentor for young entrepreneurs, than a lobbyist.