Free Enterprise
Free EnterpriseFree Enterprise
"Work hard, save your money, and you can become wealthy - or, at least, "independent!" This is the motto of old-fashioned, "free enterprise." It expresses the idea that everybody in a capitalist society can participate and compete on the same terms with similar chances of success. It implies that the working class is just a collection of individuals who have not yet established their independence (worked their way up) through "individual initiative," rather than a being permanent class.
In the early 19th Century, most Americans (including Abraham Lincoln, for instance) believed this. They thought opportunities under capitalism would keep expanding forever. But what is the reality behind this capitalist thinking? In the past, working people in America have had more opportunity to go into business or to get land for farming than anywhere else in the developed world. At the time the U.S. Constitution was written, it was generally assumed that only property owners should have the right to vote and participate in government. The "Free Labor" thinking of the Republican Party before the Civil War was basically a form of the capitalist work ethic. It meant that if 1) you were free yourself; 2) your country was "free"; and, 3) there was no slave labor to take your livelihood, you could "make something of yourself," and become a capitalist or, at least, an independent producer, professional or artist. Americans in the North at that time were influenced by this capitalist "work-ethic" to under-estimate the energy of the South. They thought (as the capitalist "work-ethic" would lead them to believe) that the poverty and economic decline of the South were probably due to laziness and that this indicated that the North should be able to easily defeat the South. But the Civil War proved that Southerners were not "lazy;" it was the slave system (lacking science and industry) that caused many of the economic problems there. The capitalist "work-ethic" also caused Northerners to overlook the only chance for real progress in the South during the "Reconstruction" -- taking of the lands of former slave-owners, and their distribution to Blacks and poor Whites. They assumed, as did Abraham Lincoln, that anyone with ambition would simply work his way up. They could not understand that...
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