To help small business, U.S. should reconsider antitrust law

It’s a little ironic that even though ours is the era of the Entrepreneur As Hero — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are feted like World War II generals were more than a half century ago — we live in a decidedly non-entrepreneurial age. The number of new businesses in the U.S. has been falling steadily for decades. In 1985, 13 percent of all businesses were less than two years old. Two decades later, that share had fallen to 8 percent. It’s commonplace to blame those zany millennials (those of us born roughly between 1982 and 1996), and their supposed lack of entrepreneurial spirit for this decline. The “Millennials in the Mist” genre — lazy stereotyping disguised as cultural anthropology — has accused millennials of murdering all sorts of American traditions, including marriage, dinner dates, home ownership, beer, cars, napkins, cereal, running, golf and the restaurant chain Applebee’s. (In the last case, we can only hope.)