The Competitive Enterprise Institute has started the Center for Entrepreneurship, headed by former Investors' Business Daily writer John Berlau. It will:

look at the areas of public policy entrepreneurs face when starting or building their businesses. If unnecessary rules prevent businessmen and women from launching their innovations, no other regulations matter.

The Center starts out with one question: If entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Sam Walton, or eBay's Meg Whitman were starting out today, what would be the barriers to them raising capital to get their ideas off the ground and keep their businesses growing?

The center will look at the increasingly burdensome mandates in the area securities law, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and accounting rules. It will also study innovations in financial markets to capital formation for small businesses, and whether public policy is hindering those innovations.

This is a welcome addition to the think tank world. Too little attention is being paid to financial regulation and accounting issues, despite their tremendous impact on innovation and economic growth. It shows that if a topic, however important to the public weal, can be made sufficiently esoteric and incomprehensible, then its high priests will be able to run it free of interference from outsiders.

For a good example, see CEI's The Stock Options Controversy And The New Economy; an issue very important for innovation and industrial organization got treated as a minor accounting exercise.