CHAPTER 6
Private Enterprise HE
WHO WORKS FOR HIS OWN INTEREST WILL AROUSE
MUCH ANIMOSITY.
— CONFUCIUS
chapter the role of government and its conscious and unconscious effect on international economics was discussed. Governments seek to control what they often see as an adversary: private enterprise. Private enterprise, for its part, also sees itself in a relationship with government that is rarely ideal and, on many occasions, confrontational. Government relies on business to generate jobs and tax revenues, while business seeks government protection as well as a host of other services, including infrastructure and subsidies. This is true both domestically and internationally.
IN THE PREVIOUS
Change of Command Government and private enterprise are always jockeying for control of an economy. Domestically, companies must deal with national, regional and municipal governments to comply with an ever growing list of regulations. Global companies now often negotiate with several national governments simultaneously, so that each nation is guaranteed its fair share of jobs and tax revenues. As they have done for centuries in their domestic markets, companies are not beyond playing one government off against another. Governments play a similar game when approached by several large corporations seeking to penetrate a new foreign market. FIRST WORLD CHANGES
For many decades after the Great Depression of the 1930s, most economists and most of the general population were in favor of a strong role for government in determining the economic future of a nation. However, beginning in the late 1970s there was a major shift in the developed economies towards lessening government controls (now deemed “interference”) over the activities of private enterprise. In the capitalist world of the West the greatest changes were seen in Great Britain. Here, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, with the aid of her “minister of thought,” Keith Joseph, dismantled the state-owned industries and labor union hegemony that were driving the nation to penury. The homeland of Keynesian economics was throwing off decades of government control and privatizing everything in sight. SECOND WORLD DECLINE
Even more dramatic was the 1991 dissolution of the purest of state-controlled economies, the Soviet Union. Once heralded as the savior of the working classes, communism lay in ruins along with virtually any other form of centrally planned
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