Free Enterprise Never Happens By Force

 "The government can supply no substitute for enterprise."

Calvin Coolidge (1872 - 1933)

And why should it?  Gubment cannot provide all it takes for people to dream, desire, create, self motivate, risk, strive, or work.

Work you say?  Free enterprise requires work?  Free enterprise requires self discipline, self motivation, and personal leadership?

Some definitions follow, gleaned from my old-fashioned Oxford Dictionary on the shelf over my desk.  I refer to it daily, often times many times a day.

Enterprise noun  1 a project or undertaking, especially a bold one.  2 bold resourcefulness.  3 a business or company.

Enterprising adjective  1 showing initiative and resourcefulness.

From the Latin prehendere - to catch or capture, to occupy, to seize or grasp, to take hold of.

But wait?  Didn't gubment take on the huge and bold projects of entering and developing space, or the interstate highway system?  Yes.  But it was all accomplished through private industry, individual thinking, the resourceful working together of thousands of entities and individuals.  These were engineering feats both.

How can free enterprise be legislated?  It cannot.
How can free enterprise be organized bureaucratically?  It cannot.
How can free enterprise practitioners all be made to be the same?  It cannot.
How can free enterprise be created by gubment edict?  It cannot.

Free enterprise never happens by force.

Entrepreneurs practice bold resourcefulness; show initiative; undertake personal plans; satisfy personal desires.  None of that can be organized by gubment.  Outcomes can never be legislated.  People will never all be the same.  One size seldom fits all, including the marvelous wonders put forth by infomercials.

People by nature will not, and cannot for long, be caged and produce their best by being boxed into tightly-defined behaviors!  And if they are by some tyrannical force or individual, the society will stagnate and putrefy.  We have seen that over and over and over.  Look around the world today!

Free enterprise never happens by force.

And when the independent, thinking people are so boxed in, what happens?  They find work arounds!  They alter their methods!  They will even go black market!  Rebellion!

How did our Founding Patriots deal with the Stamp Act?  In two ways - smuggling and revolt.

And they found the ultimate work around - they separated themselves.  And us.  Permanently from tyranny.  And permanently from a monarch who thought he, and his system, was the grantor of "rights."  The Founding Fathers were practitioners of free thinking and free enterprise, and all that the gubment, a monarchical gubment, tried to substitute for it.  They would not be subjected to force and they would not be subjects to force.  Again ...

Free enterprise never happens by force.