The KickStarter Option to Big Government Inc.

In 2009 I attended a competition for what I thought was a small business grant, but later I found was "an investment". I made this mistake in part because I learned of it through the Maine Art Commission which had been sending announcements all year about the availability of stimulus grants - but when one opened the link, it was inevitably and exclusively for non-profits. When The Maine Arts Commission announced a competition for small business investment from an anonymous source I assumed it was a grant for a variety of reasons, including that it was for a very modest amount and that the source was anonymous. I wasn't paying much attention to those details as I had never entered such a competition before and there was a lot to processing taking place in a short amount of time. As later became apparent the anonymous source was the Small Enterprise Growth Fund, an investment corporation chartered by the Maine legislature to serve as an "instrumentality of the state"

Throughout the entir…