That phrase just begs definition, because of how different modern business has become from the old industrial model on which that vivid image is based. That is, once upon a time, during the Industrial Age, when a business went belly-up, it usually meant selling off the factories, or the machines in the factories, to people who could quickly restart the factories or set up the machines somewhere else. Those were the days when there actually was an element of creativity in creative destruction...the days when there was a carcass to divide up.

But nowadays? What physical plant? It's not so much that business has gotten somehow "virtual" as it's gotten rarified and standardized to run on a standard generic "platform". The physical housing is tilt-up generic office buildings furnished in standardized cubicle hardware. Business needs only three generic office machines: The computer, the telephone, and the printer. And the telephone will soon be absorbed by the computer. So, the point being, there's not much economic energy released in the destruction of most businesses these days. It just releases generic resources into the environment when such things are already dirt cheap. Commercial real estate vacancies go up and rents go down. Yawn.

The bitch of it is that the destruction when businesses die is mostly human and not particularly creative. An ironic twist to the story is that while modern work is mostly done on a simple generic platform, that's allowed people to specialize and, naturally, thereby become less independent. Like a key looking for a lock or a protein looking for receptors, modern workers need to match up with compatible employers. Mobility is constrained. The consequences of failure are more severe than in earlier, simpler times. And you can rant about it being "socialist" all you want, but I think that in return for catering to the needs of business by specializing, business owes more loyalty to its workers than its shown in a long time. You get demands for the government to "do something!" when people shirk their responsibilities.

It occurs to me that the way to achieve smaller government is to make people better. Right?