It’s not the funding that’s in short supply. And it’s not that the ideas are new and untried. The shortage is, here and elsewhere, good people to turn those ideas into good businesses. There are a lot of sharp people out there with no experience. There are a lot of people out there with experience but lack the creative genius. And even if you have sharp, creative, experienced people, they need to work together as a team.

The “taxi” idea is one that would work better in Indiana or Michigan, where you have people with the manufacturing skills. It has a major problem in that the federal government has added so darned many restrictions that don’t exist for motorcycles, that the team needs a lot of legal work before the first taxi rolls off the line – which means a lot of extra capital to get started.

But there are a lot of good ideas that can be started part-time by one person, with relatively little investment. For instance, there are a lot of people around here with expertise in chocolate. Making sinfully-rich versions of popular cheap candies – say, a gourmet peanut butter cup – could be a fairly good business for a family.

They’re talking on the Food Network all the time about “creme fraiche”. Not available in local stores. It’s fairly easy to make, sorta like making yogurt. Big enough demand to be worthwhile for a family business, not big enough demand to be worthwhile for someone like Rutter’s or Turkey Hill.

The rabbit chow sold in pet stores is for raising rabbits for feed. It puts on weight fast, but if you have a pet rabbit, you want it to live for a long time, so you should feed it oat hay. Oats are cheap to grow: they don’t take any fertilizer, any herbicide, or any pesticide. You could make a deal with a local farmer to raise an acre of oats for you, and bale it. You’d need a warehouse or several garages to store it. You’d need to split up the bales into 6″ slices, shrink wrap them in plastic, then sell direct to rabbit owners online, or wholesale the slices to pet shop owners. Invest $2,000 and over the next year, you should be able to make $100,000 in sales. And the only labor you need is your family!

I like micro-businesses like that. You don’t depend on Janet not getting pregnant, or Tim not getting a great offer from some big company, and you don’t need to borrow money. They say “you need to invest money to make money” but most of the people saying that, haven’t made much. The more you invest, the more you’re likely to lose.

Your thoughts dovetail beautifully with what I was going after in this post–that local entrepreneurs have good ideas that need funding. It’s unlikely that anyone with a mindset based on an obsolete economy is going to want to invest in new and untried ideas. So if we do want to foster new ideas and new enterprise, we do need to find new money to fund them.

I do hope someone brings locavesting to Lancaster soon and in an effective way. And as for those taxis, I look forward to riding across town in one.

I’m not knocking Lancaster County’s economy. Forbes says this is the 10th-best place to ride out the recession. On the other hand, everything I know about enterprise, I learned from my father, a farmer. Admittedly, some of the things I learned were things to do, and other things were things not to do, but planting seeds now to harvest later is one of the biggies on the “to do” list.

One of the larger local industries is printing, and it’s going away. No, not nearly as fast as the newspaper industry, but it’s still going away. People laughed when the computer people talked about the “paperless office”, and then paper sales boomed, but what has happened is that people are no longer entering data on preprinted forms, and they are printing reports on demand instead of printing up a bunch of them and shipping them where they go.

When recession hits, the companies that survive are the ones that are cheapest and those that are best. Customers for the best products don’t need to scrimp, but customers for the broad middle go downscale, and customers at the bottom go without.

In the past, the cheapest products have been mass-produced, but that’s no longer true. Something that’s custom produced for your needs is less expensive to produce than in the past, because of computers, and may be the cheapest way to go. That’s a threat to big companies, and all the people who work for them.

John DeLorean tried to produce expensive sports cars on a small scale, and he failed, primarily because he couldn’t build demand for them as fast as he needed to, but there are hundreds of guys out there making tricycle motorcycles have succeeded, because they have flexible production facilities, unlike DeLorean’s “think big” factory in Ireland.

So what if three guys got together and decided to build electric taxicabs? Spacious, comfy cabs like the old Cheker? You design it with an easily-swappable battery pack, so you’re charging up multiple battery packs in your garage while the car is on the road 24 hours a day. The taxi has great acceleration because you have smaller battery packs that don’t add a lot of weight. You don’t use any power when you’re stopped at a red light, or at a taxi stand. You build the car mostly using off-the-shelf components, often heavy duty components like truck brakes, to minimize maintenance. There aren’t drivers sitting idle, waiting for a tuneup or for valves to be ground. Fleet owners can expect a million miles. Taxi companies should really love a vehicle that’s intended for their particular needs instead of having to buy cars that are designed for other needs.

What’s more, you’re not trying to set up dealerships all across the country. You sell direct to taxi fleet operators, and build to order, instead of maintaining inventory.

That is the kind of enterprise we need in Lancaster County. The value-added is regionally exported rather than being a matter of local people taking in each others’ wash.

Taking in each others’ wash isn’t as bad as it sounds. During the gold rush, there were clipper ships hauling laundry across the Pacific to be cleaned at real Chinese laundries. It does just as much good for the local economy to eliminate an import as it does to create an export.

But when we build a new supermarket that employs 150 people, and they take enough business away from existing supermarkets that they reduce employment by 150 people, we haven’t gained much. Presumably, the new supermarket owner has done his homework, and it’s able to serve us better than the old stores, so I don’t oppose retail growth. And in some cases, retail is helping to promote tourism, which does boost the local economy.

But retail is not nearly the economic engine that the manufacture of regionally exportable goods is. We’re going to be losing much of the dead tree printing business over the next ten or twenty years; we need to be planting seeds for the manufacturing industry to replace it.