A friend once told me of a survival training experience he had. It was at a cold time of the year, and he was given just one match and minimal other materials with which to survive.

He described in great detail how he protected that match. He found kindling but only got the driest of the dry. He then cut it into tiny strips. He found a place that was protected from the wind and built a pyramid of the driest strips. He then found the driest dead grass he could find and built a little pocket of dry grass under the pyramid of the thin strips of kindling.

He had prepared larger strips of dry kindling and then larger sticks and branches before he lit the match. The fear and emotional stress was very intense as he lit the match. This was his one shot. If it didn't work ... well, he didn't know what he would do.

Thankfully, it worked. He had a fire.

In any economy, the scarcest, most critical resources must be the most protected. The problem comes when we as a society disagree about what that scarcest resource really is and what role the government must play in protecting it.

Many people instinctively believe that the economy is way too important to leave to individuals. They believe that the government should play an active role in planning and controlling the economy, as well as protecting workers and consumers.

I believe that the scarce resource is individual entrepreneurial talent and that too many rules, regulations, required permissions and licenses, restrictions on ability to hire or fire workers and other government interference suffocates the scarce resource.

A dynamic economy requires faith in individuals. Rather than trying to protect existing businesses and jobs,

government should simply prepare the playing field, protect individual property rights and then stay out of the way.

But it is hard for government to have that kind of faith in individual entrepreneurs. Governments seem to feel the need to be activist - picking and nurturing the industries they think will or should win, preventing job losses from existing businesses to emerging technologies and competitors. Governments especially feel this way if the competitors are foreign.

Even the desire to protect consumers can smother great ideas. Suppose an entrepreneur wanted to put people into hollow metal tubes and send them flying over populated areas at high rates of speed and had to go to a government office to ask permission. No government official would dare allow that.

But today lots of people enjoy airplane travel. I'm glad that an activist government did not squelch the airline industry due to well-meaning-but-misguided intentions to protect consumers and save jobs in the railroad industry.

I believe the role of government should be to protect those of us who are out there in the cold entrepreneurial wilderness with just one match and a little bit of dry kindling. The courage to be out there and the willingness to take the chance are truly the scarce resources that a dynamic economy requires. Suffocating what may appear to be ideas and technologies that pose a threat to current industries or jobs will only lead to economic stagnation.

As we now face problems of escalating energy prices, environmental change and foreign competition, we must have faith. It's not up to an activist government to fix the problems or pick the winning technologies on its own. Rather, the government should step back, keep the playing field level and allow courageous individuals to strike their entrepreneurial matches.