He's a clever fellow, Richard Branson. You realise early in the conversation that he is a man who was probably just born with a knack for business. Yet for all his success, he seems happy to pass as just another bloke.

During a recent swing of his through the island, I had the opportunity to have breakfast with him. On a terrace overlooking the sea, we drank coffee and talked of the global crisis. The conversation ranged over many issues, but one strand seemed to weave itself through every branch of the conversation: the challenges of entrepreneurship in difficult times.

He is no stranger to the topic. He started what would become his Virgin empire in the 1970s, a time when Britain hardly seemed friendly to business. It was rather a time of seeming decline, and fearful clinging to tattered traditions. His sort of visionary, optimistic entrepreneurship hardly sprang from that context. Instead, it anticipated a time that he would, in fact, help define.

Like any visionary, he sees what most of us don't. When it came to the recession, for example, he voiced little of the heavy pessimism we're hearing, and described downturns as times of opportunity. As businesses fold, assets become cheap. Dynamic new firms then have a chance to expand their operations. Ultimately, the economy benefits. It is like slimming down for a big race: painful, but worth it for the victory.

It's not a vision for everyone, of course. Dynamic firms feast on the corpses of the less competitive ones - what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. The result is an economy in which the strong survive, but the weak are left to - well, to do things other than be entrepreneurs. Trying though it can be, especially in times of recession, when it works, what results is a faster-growing economy.

So it was hardly surprising to me that Branson had little time for bailouts. He judged that if a financial sector was healthy, the rest of the economy would make it through in the end. He reckoned Western governments have done the right thing in bailing out the banks: no matter how odious their behaviour had been during the boom days, it would be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face to let them collapse during this bust they helped create. Nonetheless, when it came to, say, car-makers or airlines, he felt that consumers would suffer if governments kept running to the rescue.

The conversation took place shortly before the Jamaican government responded to the clamour from our business community and announced its own rescue package. Impressed by the government's apparent fiscal prudence, and our solid banking sector, Sir Richard had remarked that Jamaica was the sort of country in which he could do business. It would be intriguing to know if Jamaica's bailout changed his opinion in any way.

Branson's message

For, the gist of Branson's message - although he used a gentler language to express it - was that those who cannot take the heat should leave the entrepreneurial kitchen. The government should use its scarce resources to protect the weakest people in its society, but not the weakest businesses.

And what is the best way to look after the weakest? In part, at least, by allowing a competitive market to determine who prospers in business, and who doesn't. For all the difficulties of the moment, Richard Branson remains convinced that when the most dynamic firms can thrive, the most people will end up with jobs.

His faith, and optimism, is unshaken: he believes capitalism is going through a rough spell, but that it still works.

John Rapley is president of Caribbean Policy Research Institute(CaPRI), an independent think-tank affiliated to the University of theWest Indies, Mona. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.