Free Enterprise

Another speech by Ronald Reagan about free enterprise April 16, 1979:

Our free market system is usually termed capitalism and by that definition capitalism has hardly been around long enough to deserve all the evil for which it is being held responsible.

Most of us aren’t really conscious of how recently the capitalist system came into being. Possibly we look back and think of the extravagant luxury of kings and emperors and see that as capitalism. We have a modern counterpart today in the rulers of Marxist nations.  Maybe our trouble is caused by the term capitalist itself. Actually all systems are capitalist. It’s just a matter of who owns and controls the capital--ancient king, dictator or private individual. We should properly be looking at the contrast between a free market system where individuals have the right to live like kings if they have the ability to earn that right and government control of the market system such as we find today in socialist nations.

We have a very visible example of the contrast between the free market and government ownership in a household necessity we take for granted. The invention of Alexander Graham Bell--the telephone offers us irrefutable proof of the superiority of the free market.

As recently as 1880 there were only 34,000 miles of telephone wires on the whole North American Continent. There were dozens and dozens of small telephone companies using several different kinds of equipment and there was no inter-connection between these different companies. The same situation prevailed in all the other so called advanced nations.

If someone had openly advanced a plan to put a phone in every home, on every farm, in every hamlet and city and hook them all together I’m sure someone would have said, “only government has the resources to do that.” Now strangely enough in most other countries government did take over the telephone system and to this very day the telephones in a great many countries are part of the postal system. In America the government wasn’t bulldozing it’s way into the free market place as it is today. For that we can be grateful. The scattered, competing phone companies were left to the magic of the market place. And that magic worked as it always does.

We take the phone so much for granted it’s hard to realize things weren’t always this way. We can dial directly to any point in the country and to a great many outside the country.

With no intention of insulting anyone I have to say it only takes a few days trip in many of those other countries to where the telephone is a government service to realize there is a difference. A long distance call there can be quite an adventure--so can getting a phone installed.

But here we have them in our cars if we like, in private or corporation owned executive planes and on boats. We bounce long distance calls off privately owned satellites and use telephone lines for network radio and remote broadcasts of sporting and special events.

And all of this came about because private individuals wanting to make a profit for themselves kept thinking of better services to offer, confident that we’d want that better service.

Source: Reagan In His Own Hand.