Makini Howell, a top vegan chef and restaurateur in Seattle, has decided to take things to a new commercial level. This involves transforming herself into an entrepreneur in the classical senseāmeaning, in the Schumpeterian sense: a market maker. This, in essence, is what factories do. They not only supply markets with goods but also make/create them. And it is here we find Howell today, October 6, 2023. She's building a factory that, in Georgetown, will produce tofu, a form of food I, admittedly, know little about. But no matter. What's important to grasp in this post and as well as the video that it introduces, is that the entrepreneur in the classical sense, therefore in the correct sense, are not capitalists. They have big ideas (something that's as hard to find in the capitalist class as real living wage in the working classes) but are condemned to devoting much of their time putting all the money (financing) together to make it real. They have to resort to all manner of funding options to transform potential into the actual. For Howell, one of those options in involves a GoFundMe called Empowering Compassion.
Makini Howell's most noted restaurant is Plum Bistro, which has had, for a small business, an impressive run (it opened in 2009). The tofu factory placed Plum Bistro in the middle of a journey that began in Tacoma, with Howell's father, a vegan who made his own tofu. It also connects her father with my father in an unexpected way. True, both are dead but their spirits, by different doors, have reason to visit this place. It's obvious why the ghost of Howell's father should be in this nearly completed factory. But my own father appeared there when, with Howell's guidance, I was introduced to its ins and outs. Papa Mudede was an industrial economist. He funded, with government capital, the best market-making ideas he could find and champion. That was much of his life. And sure, if given the chance, Makini's Kitchen, the name of the future factory, would have fit the bill. Ghosts are very everywhere.
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