Everybody knows that innovation comes from the private sector. Individual entrepreneurs have great ideas. They battle through the obstacles placed in their way by banks, trade unions and governments.
They succeed against all odds. Their hunger for private profit has beneficial side-effects for everyone. Jobs are created. New products and services become available. Wealth is spread around.
The extraordinary individuals who do all of this acquire the aura of mythic heroes. The blurb for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards, which receives a lot of publicity around this time of the year, provides a perfect summary of this process of deification and the ideology which fuels it:
"Everything seems to start with an entrepreneur. An innovative business model. The creation of new jobs. New industry trends.
"Throughout history, entrepreneurs have changed the economic and social landscape . . . They are our finest and most important national resource."
These mythic creatures can be identified by their outstanding qualities: "They always have passion - they live and breathe their enterprise. They have an unshakeable confidence and enthusiasm that is contagious . . . They have perseverance and courage."
Much of this is sometimes true, of course. There are brilliant, passionate, creative and driven people who do make things happen in the business world. Any intelligent society will want to encourage and support such people and Ireland has suffered from not having enough of them.
The problem, though, is that the idolatry requires a demonology on the flip side. The demon is the public sector: the State, the public service, all kinds of institutions that are not driven by the profit motive and therefore do not understand the primacy of greed in human affairs. These are the forces of darkness, good at using taxation to steal wealth from its creators and spending it on their pet schemes and projects but incapable of creating anything. Everything, after all, starts with an entrepreneur.
That all of this is nonsense ought to be obvious. Take a look at the list of winners of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in Ireland, the very jamboree that is advertised with the gushing prose just quoted. The first winner, in 1998, was Denis O'Brien, for his work as head of the Esat Technology Group and the following year's award was given to Moya Doherty and John McColgan for their huge success with the great Irish culture and business extravaganza, Riverdance. All three are undoubtedly passionate, driven, disciplined, risk-taking business people.
But did Esat and Riverdance really "start with an entrepreneur"? Clearly not. Denis O'Brien, who now chairs the Entrepreneur of the Year Award judging panel, made a fortune with Esat by getting a public resource - Ireland's second mobile phone licence - at a very low price in circumstances now the subject of a continuing investigation by the Moriarty Tribunal and then selling it on at a vast profit to British Telecom.
Some of the elements of Riverdance were first assembled at one publicly-funded institution, the Abbey Theatre and the show itself was commissioned and launched into the stratosphere of international publicity by another public institution, RTÉ. At the time of Riverdance's invention, indeed, Moya Doherty was that terrible antithesis of the entrepreneur, a public servant, employed by RTÉ.
This is true on a larger scale as well. Ireland's late lamented economic boom was founded on the extraordinary innovations in computers, communication, biotechnology and medicine of the 1980s and the 1990s: the Internet, the World-Wide Web and the revolution in genetics whose pinnacle is the Human Genome Project. And all of these were public projects, developed primarily by public servants. None of them came from rugged individualism.
On the contrary, each was made possible by a spirit and practice of co-operation in which insights and ideas were shared. None of them was fuelled by the profit motive. Instead, each was carried forward by people who did not hope to make a killing from their work.
The whole notion of the Internet was rooted in the old-fashioned, much derided principles of communal property, co-operative working and public utilities. Much of the best software for making it work - the Linux operating system, and the Apache web-hosting system, for example - was developed voluntarily and communally. The World Wide Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, an employee of the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva - not just a public body but an inter-governmental one at that - who made not a penny from it. And the Human Genome Project was carried through and protected for private corporations by public employees such as Sir John Sulston in the UK, who insisted that the data be freely available without charge.
So let's celebrate entrepreneurs, but let's recognise, too, that the notion of the lone business genius as the font of all innovation and wealth is a pernicious myth. The pursuit of excellence and the defence of public values can be just as important a source of creativity and new ideas as the pursuit of personal enrichment.