Some years ago, when President George W. Bush was trying to explain France’s apparent lack of economic success, he said: “The trouble with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur”.

The great irony, of course, is that we British (and hence the Americans) don’t have a word for entrepreneur. If you look up the English synonyms for this French word you get things like “businessperson, tycoon, founder, innovator, pioneer, industrialist, magnate, impresario or proprietor.”

None of these words quite hits the spot the way that “entrepreneur” does. Isn’t it funny that, although English seems to be easily a superior language to French, when it comes to so many important concepts, we rely on a French word without there being any adequate English alternative – ambience, cuisine, decor. The English equivalents lack that je ne sais quoi. Mind you, this gap in English is not restricted to French. We don’t rely on the Germans for many things linguistic, but we really haven’t got an adequate word to replace the German schadenfreude.

On some of the characteristics of an entrepreneur we can readily agree. They should be the founder of a business and the majority, if not the entire, owner of it. Accordingly, the entrepreneur both puts money at risk and manages a business. So the ordinary manager of a corporate business does not qualify because he or she lacks the risk element. Equally, a trader in the financial markets doesn’t really qualify either because, although they take risk all right, they typically don’t manage a business as such.

Economics textbooks used to wax lyrical about a character called the entrepreneur, but few of us understood what they were talking about: in the first few decades after the Second World War, business seemed to be all about huge corporations run by managers.

Over the last few decades, however, this seems to have changed radically. The new industries of the tech, digital and AI world are dominated by entrepreneurs; that is to say, individuals who set up their businesses from scratch and continued to run them, often making fortunes in the process. Indeed, most of today’s richest people are tech entrepreneurs.

In many ways, this represents not so much a completely new development as a return to the conditions of the past. The great, top-hatted businessmen of the Victorian age who owned all those dark, satanic mills and developed markets for British exports all around the world, were typically what we would describe as entrepreneurs.

I suppose we think that entrepreneurship has been most obvious in the Anglo-Saxon world, now principally in America. You certainly don’t think of today’s Germany as the home of entrepreneurship. Mind you, German industry is dominated by family-owned, or part family-owned, businesses which at some stage or other must have been founded by someone that we would think of as an entrepreneur.

Yet entrepreneurship is largely absent from the current German business scene. Not so long ago, the German President was asked what would have happened if someone like Bill Gates had started a business like Microsoft in the garage of his house. The President replied that it would have been shut down by the health and safety inspectors.

We in Britain need far more entrepreneurs: from small acorns great oaks do grow. I have often wondered about the leap from being a sole trader to becoming an employer of others. This is a key decision point for a businessperson and a key development point for the economy. A government that wanted to boost business formation and development would concentrate on the barriers that stop someone moving on from being simply a sole trader.

Some of the barriers are psychological, and some are real. The need to register for VAT once you pass a certain turnover threshold is a psychological barrier; more important is the hassle surrounding the administration of payroll for employees, including the requirement to make pension contributions.

And hanging over all this is the risk that a vexatious employee might take their employer to an industrial tribunal, now made worse by the Government’s Employment Rights Bill. For a small business this is potentially deadly. It is not just the amount of compensation that a business might be ordered to pay, but also the significant waste of management time in having to deal with such cases.

What drives entrepreneurs? I don’t think that it is usually the prospect of making an enormous amount of money: at least, not in the short-term. Entrepreneurs are a strange mixture of dreamers and doers. But the prospect of eventually making quite a lot of money is an attraction. This is over and above the satisfaction of seeing an opportunity and having your foresight and effort rewarded by the market.

As such, it is probably difficult to stimulate entrepreneurship, but government can discourage it and hold it back. And, of course, they can drive entrepreneurs away from the country. This is a great danger for Britain today.

Naturally, saddling successful people with higher and higher tax rates, not only on income but also on capital gains and inheritance, is a disincentive to come to the UK and stay here. But a more negative factor is the welter of regulations and restrictions, as well as a climate in which rich people are somehow regarded as robbers who have gained their wealth at the expense of others.

Some years ago, the eminent journalist John Plender, who had been railing against extremely high executive pay, lamented the way that so many senior business executives pocketed huge sums for apparently taking no capital risk, unlike entrepreneurs. He said that they enjoyed “entrepreneurial rewards for bureaucratic performance”. In this country, we must make sure that we are not now offering bureaucratic rewards for entrepreneurial performance.