The Stewardship of Wealth: Successful Private Wealth Management for Investors and Their Advisors, + Website

Creative Capital and Vibrant Societies

Private capital is critically important because it is the progenitor of all other forms of capital. Governments possess capital, but only because they tax it away from private individuals. Corporations possess capital, but only because individuals have voluntarily invested their capital in corporate stocks and bonds. Colleges and universities and charitable foundations and nonprofit groups of all kinds possess capital (in the form of endowments and operating funds), but only because private individuals have donated that capital.

Because private capital is, at least initially, in the hands of hundreds of thousands of free individuals, individuals who can, within the limits of the law, do with their capital as they please, that capital is deployed with a diversity and richness impossible to imagine were the capital in any other hands. Private capital is the most flexible capital available to a human society, and the more of it the society possesses, the more competitive that society will be.

Ideas drive civilization, and capital is the rocket propellant behind ideas. Therefore, societies that encourage the production of wealth and its creative deployment will be far better off, far more vibrant and resilient, than societies that discourage these activities.

In America, entrepreneurs are heroes, daring individuals who incur great personal risks to pursue ideas that will make America a better place. Most of them fail, suffering the consequences ...