In Openness to Creative Destruction, I distinguish the “innovative entrepreneur” from the “free-agent entrepreneur”: “a ‘free-agent entrepreneur’ is her own boss as she does something that has been done before; an ‘innovative entrepreneur’ is her own boss as she creates a new good or a new process” (Diamond 2019, 2). Here I add a qualification that an entrepreneur is only an innovative entrepreneur if she respects Nozickian moral side-constraints as she creates her new good or process. Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick defended an individual’s right to seek their own goals, subject to the moral side-constraint (Nozick 1974, 33) that the seeker not make use of “force, theft, fraud” (Nozick 1974, ix). For instance when the executives at Purdue Pharma claimed that OxyContin was nonaddictive, they committed flagrant fraud, violating the Nozickian moral side-constraint, and so while they may have been exemplars of what William Baumol called “destructive entrepreneurship” (Baumol 1990), they have no claim to have been exemplars of “innovative entrepreneurship.”
- References:
Baumol, William J. 1990. Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive. The Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5, Part 1 (Oct.): 893–921.
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. 2019. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, Inc.