We love to talk about "jobs bills" and projects to stimulate the economy from Washington, D.C. but real long-term jobs come from hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs trying to start new businesses.  Policy wonk George Gilder used to write that the best sign of a robust economy was small business failures because it meant people were still trying to create businesses and the economy was weeding out the weaker businesses.

Edward Glaeser has a fascinating piece up at City Journal in which he argues government needs to reduce regulations to encourage entrepreneurial activity.  Glaeser looks at Detroit, MInneapolis and Seattle for different reasons.  An excerpt:

"Entrepreneurship doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s rarely the direct creation of government. Bureaucrats aren’t experts in finding unexpected market niches, so politicians are prone to throwing money at the fad of the moment, like 'green jobs.' Also unhelpful are policies that privilege older, big-firm industries. My research with William Kerr has found that places blessed—or cursed—with natural resources, such as coal or iron mines, 100 years ago still have larger firms today, across all their industries, and that the employment picture there is correspondingly bleaker than in cities with fewer natural resources. So we should worry about policies like auto bailouts, which are the artificial equivalent of coal mines, encouraging big, stagnant companies at the expense of job-creating start-ups."