The following is only a sketch of the complete argument since that would take pages to write and time I don't have. The most basic law of economics is that prices are determined by supply and demand. An entrepreneur naturally chooses to provide goods or services to a market niche where a high potential demand faces a low supply so that he can sell his goods/services at high prices. An employee on the other hand imposes on himself a limit of one customer. He artificially limits his market and thereby reduces the price he can get for his skills. Although he can potentially quit his job and work for someone else this is associated with additional transaction costs in comparison to self employment. That the company indirectly markets the employee's skills to a larger market does not alleviate this price reduction since it's not the companies interest to maximize employee's salaries. So why would anybody choose employment over self employment? It is because most people lack the fundamental skill to market their own skills and a market of one customer is still better than zero. The important question now is why people lack this skill. That is a complex thing, but one factor is that our culture does not encourage risk taking, sales talk and other important entrepreneurial skills. There is still a strong bias of preferring a "honest worker" over a "capitalist pig" which simply prevents most people from developing their marketing skills. And that is what is meant by the original quote. Imagination is based on culture and our culture cripples people's potential to imagine what it would be like if they were entrepreneurs instead of workers.