Leadership Quote by Ronald Reagan

Reagan’s line is less an economic footnote than a political weapon disguised as a compliment. By crediting “entrepreneurs and their small enterprises” with “almost all” U.S. growth, he compresses a messy national economy into a clean moral story: the little guy, unshackled, does the real work; everyone else mostly gets in the way. It’s a sentence built to smuggle a policy agenda through the front door of common sense.

The phrasing matters. “Entrepreneurs” evokes risk and grit, a cinematic American type, while “small enterprises” broadens the halo to the neighborhood shop and the family contractor. The pairing lets Reagan speak to both Silicon Valley avant la lettre and Main Street nostalgia, welding them into one constituency. “Responsible for” assigns agency and virtue; “almost all” adds the swagger of inevitability. The claim doesn’t need to be airtight to be effective - its job is to reset the burden of proof. If growth flows from the small and scrappy, then taxes, regulations, unions, and big-government programs become suspects by default.

Context sharpens the intent. Coming out of the 1970s malaise - inflation, energy shocks, and public distrust - Reagan sold supply-side economics and deregulation as liberation. This quote flatters the audience he wants to empower while quietly sidelining other engines of growth: large firms’ scale, public research, infrastructure, monetary policy, even organized labor’s role in building a middle class that can buy what businesses sell.

It’s classic Reagan rhetoric: optimistic, confident, and consequential. A national myth deployed as a governing theory.