A Culture Of Failure

I think it's worth talking about one of the worst and most dangerous parts of American 'culture'- The Business Mulligan.

The willingness to subsidize, insure, or look the other way in the name of business and capital, recklessly enabled by the two other major bugbears of Credit and Insurance. 

Elsewhere in the world, starting a business that fails and goes under? An embarrassment. Go bankrupt? A disgrace. Here, it’s just... accepted? Another part of the process? 

I know full well the kind of person who likes this about the US.

They might raise some money, have a go and screw it up. What then? Obfuscate with legalese to finagle themselves a do-over. Fail to learn or plan properly and screw up again? Never really seems to be a problem.

The sort who willingly and knowingly makes mistakes, and thinks just because they're not yet dead, it means they deserves the possibility of redemption, despite having no idea what that actually might entail, and wrongly thinking it means 'the opportunity to make another attempt'.

No proper thought given to the necessary and correct penalties for failure. Or even to compensation for employees who trusted them, and whom they failed- those without the ability or authority to prevent such a failure but stricken with the burden of it nonetheless.

Defenders of such foolishness might say that much of American culture is defined by failing and learning from those mistakes. Many 'successful' people seem to wear failures and restarts like badges of honor. But that's just a disguise, and simply not true. 

An outlook like this emphasizes ego-driven determination supplemented by financial chicanery and dubious legality. It spurns adequately ethical planning and leaves no adequate recourse for the human side of collateral damage brought on by failure. It attempts to impose an intrinsically flawed but ~profitable~ version of reality over what actually exists, and simply expects the new version to work. That sometimes works quite well with magic- but it should never work in business.

Failure has to come with penalties- financial, legal, and social, because enterprise obliges responsibility.

That doesn't happen properly here. But it must.