This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 18, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

At the core of many of our current economic woes, regulation.

So says Robert Strom, director of entrepreneurship research at the Kaufman Foundation.

Strom spoke at the Cato Institute's Conference on the Future of U.S. economic growth.

People asked me why it came to the Coffin Foundation, I said, I think it was a great sense of guilt.

I probably started a thousand lectures with three words, assume a firm.

And you can't assume a firm.

Firms come from somewhere and the interesting question is where they come from and how

they come into being and how they grow and not once they're around what unique price

quantity combination they set to maximize short-run profits. So it's so the notion

of firms is important and one of things I realize is you got to talk to

entrepreneurs and in talking to entrepreneurs regulation is one thing that's you know there

are a lot of things of the fringes, but they feel like they're, I'll call

them regulation takers instead of regulation setters. I mean, they feel that they, that others,

the big companies,

the big guys set the rules in regulation

to satisfy them and that prevents small firms

from starting and growing.

Yeah, taxes are an issue, all these other things are issues,

but at the courts, at the courts regulations,

so I'm extraordinarily sympathetic to that.

...