Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

When the economy was last this bad for this long — back in the dreaded Jimmy Carter era — there was one upside: While inflation raged and unemployment stayed troublingly high in America’s big businesses, a lot was going on in America’s garages. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak werestarting Apple, Bill Gates and friends were starting Microsoft and a variety of other new entrepreneurial ventures were lining up for takeoff.

So you might hope that there’s a similar silver lining in today’s economic Slough Of Despond. But so far, that hope would seem to be unjustified.

At any rate, the latest data indicate that start-ups are becoming rarer, not more common. A new report from JPMorgan economist Mike Feroli indicates that employment in start-ups is plunging. New jobs in the economy tend to come from new businesses, but we’re getting fewer new businesses. That doesn’t bode well. …

One reason, I suspect, for a job market that looks more like Europe is a regulatory and legal environment that looks more like Europe’s. High regulatory loads — the product of ObamaCare and numerous other laws — systematically harm small businesses, which can’t afford the personnel needed for compliance, to the benefit of large corporations, which can.

Likewise, higher taxes reduce the rewards for success, making people less likely to invest their money (or time) into new businesses. And local regulatory bodies, too, make starting new businesses harder.

But I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural. Since 2008, this country hasn’t celebrated achievement or entrepreneurialism. Instead, we’ve heard talk about the evils of the “1%” ” about the rapaciousness of capitalism, and the importance of spreading the wealth around. We’ve even heard that work in the public sector is somehow nobler than work in the private sector.

Countries where those attitudes prevail tend not to produce as much entrepreneurialism, so it’s perhaps no surprise that as those attitudes have gained ascendance among America’s political class and media elite, we’ve seen less entrepreneurialism here. …

Some people, of course, will start businesses no matter what politicians and pundits say, and will do so even in the face of hostile legal and regulatory climates. But their numbers will be fewer, and so will be the numbers of jobs generated. As millions of Americans are unemployed — while millions more have dropped out of the workforce entirely — perhaps it’s time for our political class to think harder about the messages it’s sending. And perhaps it’s time for voters to send the political class a message of their own.

That message, by the way, is grossly overdue in Wisconsin.