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Catapults, subsidies, and benefits: Bongonomics explained

Our VC's on FIRE at Burning Man and the Paralytic Games

¡Bong! "Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it"
- Mao Tse Tung from Oppose Book Worship (1930)

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. Greetings, fellow entrepreneurs!

By the time you read this I shall be on the playa at the Burning Man Festival with my personal assistant มาลัย (which means Garland of Flowers in Thai) - the birth place of the Gift Economy and an endless stream of Class A chemicals. Since มาลัย is now employed as President of Crowdsourcing Outreach (Mentoring) at Bong Ventures we were both fast-tracked through US Immigration, as befits the vital status an internet capitalist has in today's global knowledge economy. Thanks to Rohan at No.10, once again, for greasing the skis, so to speak. FULLSTOP NEW PARAGRAPH.

Nevada is but a short-hop from Wyoming, from where I am dictating this column. STOP. The Central Bankers Conference officially begins today, but by the time the Nobel Prize-winning economists and the titans of fractional reserve banking line up for their first barn dance, I will have departed. For the real movers and shakers, guys like me, Jeff Jarvis and Peter Thiel (along with Mumford and Sons, naturally), the important work is done behind the scenes, before the event officially starts, and the dead-tree media arrive to transcribe Benny from the Fed's speech.

Our primary concern this year, we agreed, was the increasing lack of faith in quantitative easing. These banker guys literally print money, and nothing attracts a red-blooded, go-it-alone, Ayn-Randian capitalist like free money rolling off a printing press.

Let me be clear. I'm philosophically 100 per cent against Government intervention in the economy, of ANY KIND. It saps the MOJO right out of capitalism, as surely as that Samsung guy in The Bible had his strength drained by the hairdresser chick.

(Speaking of Samsung, I'm lighting a candle for my Korean campadres who have been so cruelly mugged by Apple shills in the so-called independent justice system of California. Back at Bong Ventures, a candle has been lit for CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon, and it's burning right next to the candle มาลัย has lit for the albino fugitive, Mr Julian Assange.)

So subsidies are bad. Bokay?

But not if they're Community Investment Catapults. Or Enterprise Capital Funds Or RVCFs. Or IIFs.

Subsidies are what dinosaur-era metal-bashers and boffins get to prop up their old-world businesses, or muck around in the chemistry lab with their silly and pointless new materials, like graphene. Catapults are what vital new social media agencies and innovation imagineers - like BongVentures - get to deliver the weightless, frictionless post-profit new media open data economy.

So, if there's any money going round, then I'm at the front of the queue. I call it pump-priming. And I'm quietly confident that 2013 will be the year of the Catapult.

Next page: Paralytics

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