Me too, but the problem is starting up. There is no cash to start. If you've got an idea and it takes some capital to bring it from PoC to finished product, you're stuck because banks _are not_ lending to small business, full stop.

That's why I see the SBA coming to the forefront with direct microlending and guaranteed super-low interest rates for mom and pop loans.

Not everyone has a business idea that can get the attention of YC or TechStars. It sometimes takes a nudge to get things going. It's a big country, with people that have varied skillsets, education levels, and means of opportunity. If we want to encourage entrepreneurship, we need to either empower them directly with tax dollars, or we give those dollars to banks who may or may not do it for us.

What we obviously can't do is cut taxes for the rich and corporations and hope they hire the unemployed, because I'm sure you'll agree that it obviously hasn't happened.

I am not sure if I want to use coercion to achieve said goal of encouraging small business and entrepreneurship.

I prefer the method of cutting down regulations and coercions put out by government then see if it help small business stack their advantages against big business' disadvantages.

I also dislike favoring anybody, even the little guys.

Well, in a fair world, we'd have zero regulations or need for taxes or government at all (except for enforcement against personal abuse like murder, rape, theft and invasion), and as an example, oil companies wouldn't ever have spills because of the extremely high potential to be sued by the people living in the regions where spills occur and actually _lose_ these lawsuits, which effectively means going bankrupt and forced out of business paying back all the damage awards. That's the ideal Libertarian solution to the outsized hand of big business on both market and customer. It's similar to the Xeer stateless government, as adopted in Somalia. Maybe it can scale to a country of 305 Million, but that truly is a "grand experiment" likely left as a thought exercise for now.

In reality , though, the solution is a simple matter of tax revenue arbitrage. Instead of providing tax breaks to the lethargic corporations that will take those tax breaks but won't hire anybody anyway, give it as a guaranteed loan to a small business who will use it to directly hire workers and consume products and services expressly for business continuity and growth. Spread thinly enough, while the failure rate outpaces the successes, the succeeding companies have the potential to hit it _really_ big, spurring ancillary and supporting feeder companies sprouting around it and possibly creating a new industry.

As OP points out, some things like outsourcing might save big business money, but they turn around small businesses from impossible to possible.