To recognize a need to foster opportunities for new enterprises may require some shifts in the way we view the business arena.

It may be helpful if we can come to regard our economy as a kind of ecosystem—perhaps somewhere between a garden and a forest, in terms of scale and manageability—and ourselves as its citizen-stewards. In this view, our job is to ensure a healthy supply of the basic ingredients for its various life-forms to grow and thrive, and to step in on an exception basis to rectify certain imbalances that threaten the interdependent vitality of the system as a whole.

Effectively implementing such an approach will require us to step outside certain accustomed constraints of the political status quo.

At present, our options are too often limited to an unrealistic dichotomy between liberals treating all business and profit-making as somehow suspect, and conservatives treating any kind of intervention in the purportedly perfect workings of the marketplace as equally suspect,  merely in a different sort of way.