Free Enterprise in United States

Work hard, save your money, and you can become wealthy or, at least, free lance This is the motto of old-fashioned, free enterprise. It expresses the idea that everybody in a smashingistic ordination can participate and compete on the same terms with analogous come abouts of success. It implies that the functional class is just a collection of individuals who arrest non yet established their independence (worked their office up) through individual initiative, sort of than a world permanent class. In the early 19th Century, roughly the Statesns (including Abraham Lincoln, for instance) believed this.They thought opportunities beneath capitalism would keep expanding forever. But what is the reality potty this capitalist thinking? In the past, working people in America have had more opportunity to go into business or to pull back land for farming than anywhere else in the sustained world. At the succession the U. S. Constitution was written, it was generally assumed that simply property receiveers should have the salutary to vote and participate in government. The Free Labor thinking of the republican Party before the civic War was basically a regulate 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 go through them to believe) that the poverty and economic decline of the South were probably due to tree sloth and that this indicated that the North should be fit to easily defeat the South.But the Civil War proved that Southerners were not lazy it was the slave system (lacking erudition and industry) that caused many of the economic probl ems 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 antecedent 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 capitalism naturally limited opportunities, because the majority would have to be histrions, not capitalists. With no land or other economic basis to start from, most workers in the South would have no way of lifting themselves from poverty. Strong competition with other capitalists, who are constantly nerve-racking to gain a big market by offering a cheaper produce, forces the beginner to keep putting everything back into his business. He must garment in more sophisticated equipment in recite to be able to produce more cheaply with higher quality, and on a larger scale.He must do this in order to improve his pro duct or services, and also capture a larger share of the market, until he has reached a level where there is no immediate threat of being put out of business by his competition. This means having the most modern machinery and getting the most productivity out of his workers. This huge need for capital also forces the capitalist to rely more and more on tertiary parties. Making the capitalist borrow from banks to keep his capitol at a safe amount.They simply hire employees to make all the management decisions, design and develop the product, etc. Free enterprise thinking forgets that a worker has only his labor-power to swap in order to earn his living. He competes with other workers to sell his labor-power at the cheapest price. The average price of labor-power (the workers wages) is the amount that it takes to make ends meet under the given social settings in a country. The laws of economics determine that if the worker works scurrying, he creates a cheaper product. But this eve ntually cheapens the amount which the capitalist must pay him in wages because there are eternally unemployed workers somewhere willing to work for the bare necessities.Working faster increases competition without increasing their earnings. Because of these realities, workers learn to work smart according to their own understanding. Working smart for the worker means withholding his labor power, working more slowly and learning the tricks of the trade, better known as bargaining. These things abide the price of his labor-power. This in turn forces the capitalist to concentrate more on improving productivity through better machinery and production processes in order to increase his profits.