The film you are about to see was made to provoke discussion of our private enterprise economic system.
During the film, high school students discuss the pros and cons of the system.
You will probably agree with some of the ideas expressed and disagree with others.
When the film is over, you will want to discuss what you have heard.
But there's also another thing.
Yeah, no, that's right.
Explain.
Besides the fact that you find that...
Okay, let me ask you this.
Well, I don't think...
No, no, no.
That's contradicting.
I don't believe that.
So what's the problem then? That's right.
No, that's perhaps true.
How about that? Let's start out by defining the economic system we have in this country.
What is it, first of all? Well, as we call it, free enterprise.
But it's like being able to start a business without having the government tell you whether you can or not.
It started that way way back in the beginning.
But it has changed quite a bit now.
In 200 years, the government has come into it quite a bit now.
There are controls for these things.
I think the free enterprise system is probably one that's just based on competition, where everyone receives his material benefits in accordance to the work he does and the productivity he puts into society.
And I think that's probably the greatest advantage of the system, that it does have that incentive to work for an individual to work and for an individual to produce.
I think probably that's one of the things that has contributed to the massive accumulation of material goods we have in the free world today.
The free enterprise system only works like that, though, if you have sincere and true competition.
Well, the way I look at a free enterprise system is that it leaves business unlimited.
It can go as big as it wants to.
And there isn't a limited market or a limited anything.
Then you eliminate the competition.
Free enterprise becomes control over the economy rather than competition.
Isn't big, isn't becoming a monopoly, isn't that part of the system? Isn't that, OK, you start off very little and you grow and you grow.
Isn't that part of the system? That's the only problem with big businesses.
When one gets bigger or when a group of big businesses merge and form like a conspiracy, then we're at their mercy.
And you can produce the product cheaper, then there's nothing wrong with it, because that's the whole purpose of society.
Certainly.
That's right.
Except, Mike, the point is that no one is going to do that if they don't have any competition.
And who are they going to compare prices against? I think they'll soak us for as much as they can get, as long as we let them.
I agree that they could raise their prices, but then there would be the one guy who'd say, oh, they're all going to raise their prices.
I'll lower them and I'll sell more and I'll make more because they all have...
That's not necessarily true.
Yes, it is.
Because once they become inefficient or someone can do it better than them, then they come in and compete with them.
Well, doesn't the corporation have to be sensitive to the consumer and what the consumer wants and to serve the consumer to be successful? Yes, but then you get back to once it gets big enough, it doesn't have to if it's a necessary product.
Well, then look at the food industry.
That's the marketing professions like in the oil industry where you have to be so big just to get started that...
There are about seven oil companies now.
That's right.
It's not just one.
Yeah, but they all work together and they all...
I have a question.
Why couldn't...
Mike's not stupid, but why couldn't one company that has all the oil, just one company control, everything that has to do with the mining of oil and putting it on the market, one company could do that really efficiently.
Why could...
What's wrong with that? There's a monopoly.
Well, oligopoly...
I know, but what is wrong with that? I mean, if...
They can charge anything they want to do that.
They can double the prices.
Well, that's why free enterprise is always going to be contradictory.
It depends on if you want to give everyone an incentive to be able to enter the system or if you want the most efficient system and you're not going to get both in the age where you can have mass production.
How is that free enterprise when you get stopped at a certain point? It's a possibility to have a completely free enterprise system.
As a company, as a big business gets more and more successful, it eliminates the competition and suddenly it controls the whole market.
Then the government, who isn't really supposed to enter into the free market and into free enterprise, has to come in to preserve competition.
And that's their only function, I believe, is to preserve it, the competition...
You're going to have to have some government controls for like price fixing and things like that.
Big business can't be the...
Yeah, it can't be the leader in the country.
The government has to be the leader.
And...
But still, you have to have big business...
Well, it's the function of profits is to, of course, ideally...
The way profits don't really exist anyway.
It's all on paper if you could figure out exactly what the profit is.
But really, all the money is going from one place into another, being reinvested or going into more technology, more research and development.
So that's how it should work.
The reality is that perhaps in the long term it will be successful, but you need in the short term the government to step in and close some of the gaps.
Jim, you said that it's better in the long run, but Harry Hopkins, who worked for President Roosevelt in the 1930s, said that people do not eat in the long run.
They eat every day.
And I think that's the important point.
The point is that people are basically in industry and in everything out for themselves, not out for the good of the millions of masses.
And I mean, when they do something, it's to benefit themselves, not saying, well, we might be able to make some money doing this and give 10 billion people jobs, but I'd rather do something else.
Yeah, that's true.
Exactly.
You can't have one monopoly and no other companies, but you can have a bigger business and other small businesses that will try to work up towards competing.
Yeah, but I don't know.
Okay, but everybody, we've all got to have a medium, right? I mean, we're not down the dumps or we're not way up high.
I mean, so isn't society doing, or government and business doing us okay? A good job, I mean.
No, really.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
We should never work out.
Well, we work to the heart all the time, and look what we get for our corn.
The price we get for our corn is going down.
Look at the price we get for our milk, going down a dollar a hundred just the other day.
What system would you suggest to help that? I mean, what? Well, I think you could go just give the farmers an even break.
But how? Well, I mean, it's still supplying the man.
Well, it's the same story in every business.
I mean.
Oh, God, his prices are so high all the time.
My father would like an even break, too.
His furniture prices keep constantly going up, but what can he do about it? He has to do what the furniture manufacturers tell him to put the price at.
He wishes the prices were lower.
First of all, all right, if they raise their prices, that's when you need government regulation.
To price cut when they start putting little businesses out.
You find that the large corporation owners and so forth are the ones who are controlling the government, so therefore it doesn't work.
What can you do then? Well, I don't believe they control the government, not by any means.
But you know they have a large influence over what goes on in the country.
That's true.
We can't really believe that companies will always do what is best for society.
When a company finds it more profitable to buy a machine that will put 20 or 30 people out of work, that certainly is not going to better society.
Right, but what happens is secondary, even though they're not trying to, they better society and they employ more people.
How do they better society, though? By increasing the profits for themselves.
By increasing the profits, they put the profits back into something else and therefore create more efficiency in some other type of the market and therefore lower the prices in everything.
Are they really doing it? Are they really lowering prices by making higher profits? Are they really? The question is, is the system working as far as people are concerned, as far as society is concerned? With a few minor faults, I think it's...
Yep, with a few minor faults.
No, really, I think that with a small exception of about 10 % of the people.
I think it's quite obvious that our system would have to be considered the best in the world in that we are the number one producer in the world.
That's why I think our system works so well is because it's so responsive to what the consumer wants.
Yeah, I think so, too.
He can decide what he wants and how much he wants to pay for it by just looking around.
Wait a minute, now...
See, talking about other corporations and the profit motive is that they are sensitive to consumer, but they're sensitive to the middle class consumer who can afford to buy whatever they want, who buys ridiculous things like cheese kisses and stuff that they don't need.
There is no cheese.
But they don't have...
Come on, I mean, why can't we just live on necessities? I mean, if that's the whole purpose of society, I should just have a house? But there are some people who don't even have the necessities, Michael.
So I should give away my income that I work for them.
Now what kind of answer is that? That was ridiculous extreme.
What about the people that really need it? The poor that, I don't know, they don't have that good of jobs or anything.
What are they going to do? Is that the goal of pre -enterprise, to provide for the welfare of society, the good of society? A long time ago, Michael said that the goal of society was to make things as efficiently as possible at the lowest possible prices, but you've got to figure out if you're sacrificing, if you're sacrificing more people who have a lower standard of living, industry is working to better the middle class and the upper class, but the poor and the unemployed are the ones that are going to suffer and we have to decide whether...
Say, some industry, like the automobile industry, can be more efficient at the sacrifice of unemployed a lot of people.
Okay, you might unemployed 50 people if you go to mechanized, let's say auto industry, but at the same time, you have to have people who will maintain those machines.
And how many? Do you need 50 people to do that? Why would you need 50 people? That's not true.
You know, if you carry it to an extreme, you could become completely mechanized in the auto industry and lay everybody off because of technology.
I think, you know, the problem with unemployment is not technology.
I will admit, there's certainly a serious problem there and it has to be solved, but it cannot be solved by simply cutting back in technology and going to a more labor intensive...
What about the system and the individual, the opportunity provided by the system for the individual to do what he wants to do, to start his own business, for you to get rich, to achieve? That's where our system...
That's where it comes through.
No, there are certain people that are going to get way ahead financially, socially, and every other way and then other people that...
Each man delivers his own wealth.
Whatever the man does, he gets.
If you're poor and you live in the ghetto, you can't get a good education in the lower grade schools.
Malta is not just providing those people better schools.
That's impossible.
Well, education would help, wouldn't it? But it needs a change in the whole...
There are some people that are in our society that we cannot ignore, you know, like the retirees, the divorces with 100 kids or something.
And we can't ignore these people, so we have to have a system set up to support those people.
Okay, those cases excluded, what about the people who don't work because they don't want to? Look, I mean, it's so easy for us to sit here and talk about this and talk about percentages of unemployed, but...
What percent of those people are really trying to get jobs? Those are the only things that you have to correct, not things that you have to change the whole system for.
So why don't we just provide them the jobs? What do we need to change the system for? Then you're talking government intervention, not talking free enterprise.
We're talking about free enterprise in this country.
We've got to realize that we're talking about free enterprise for the small businessmen and socialism for the big businessmen.
Who are we giving millions of dollars to? We're giving millions of dollars to Amtrak, to Penn Central.
Is that free enterprise? The thing is, though, that the government also gives lots of money, say, to small airlines, the feeder airlines like North Central and Piedmont.
They get all sorts of government subsidies so that they service the small towns rather than trying to make more profitable runs like...
But how do you justify the fact that we're giving millions of dollars to all the companies as soon as they fail, as soon as they show some sign of maybe we're going to go out of business, we're going to go bankrupt.
We say the company can say to the federal government, look, if we go out of business, we're going to be employing unemployed...
Competition is the high value.
That's sort of necessary in the auto industry because if Chrysler goes out of business, that leaves only two, which is more of a monopoly, a bigger oligopoly.
Isn't the government kind of in the business of preserving competition? The trouble is, in free enterprise, the democracy is not working anymore because big businesses have the money to organize and to sway votes and to advertise so that they...
Okay, well, I don't know.
I just don't think that there's any other system except this one where everything just keeps going up and up.
Yeah, okay.
It's better to avoid.
I mean, you know, it'd be nice to say it, but what other system is there? Okay, we haven't even touched on it, but I think communism, that's more or less a social system, but where everybody is his own incentive.
Everybody is greedy.
Everybody wants to be a millionaire.
Who wouldn't want to have everything? Is that evil? No, that's not evil, but it's just a fact.
Well, the only thing is that it is evil to the extent that other people are suffering because other people are getting richer and other people are staying poor.
Yet we can't limit the people who can develop themselves and promote business and go on to be so -called success.
Then the question is whether this system does or does not really serve the consumer and serve society as opposed to other systems.
I don't know how long it's going to take until we realize that there is really something drastically wrong in the country today.
In what other system are you allowed to...
All right, the consumer doesn't have a lot of say in what the companies do or what they do with their money, but you take a communist or a socialist system, the consumer has no say.
He's not allowed.
That is absolutely untrue because what...
You see, in the pre -enterprise system, the consumer can't control the government because big businesses control the government because they have the money.
If the government is...
Because the consumer...
You just got through saying that...
No, listen.
What's socialism? What incentive does the government have to produce the best toothpaste to produce the best car or whatever if there's no communist...
See, the point is that socialism, ideally, is what it means is that the means of production instead of being owned by an elite amount of people are owned by everybody and they have a say.
We think the consumer has a bigger say in what goes...
People like us or our parents or whoever, they're left out nine times out of ten out of what's going on.
They really have no say.
I think we're not left out.
I think we have some of the highest standards of living.
And if we were living in another society, we have a lower standard.
Look at the people that are out of jobs.
Look at the people that are living below the poverty level.
Wait a minute, though.
Wait a minute.
Are we living under the higher standard of living? America is only 200 years old and we're one of the better countries in the world.
Yeah, 100%.
Free enterprise.
Maybe a free enterprise has some flaws, but it's working.
You think socialism, where it exists now, is working? Socialism might be...
is working just as well as free enterprise.
No, it doesn't.
I mean, free enterprise is not working either.
Look at the way that other socialism or that kind of economy function.
It does not function as efficiently or does not provide as high a standard of living as free enterprise.
Just because we are better than Russia does not mean we are where it ought to be.
And the point is, the free enterprise system is not sacred.
The only reason that the free enterprise system is in use in this country today is because it supposedly benefits the general public.
And if it doesn't...
Communism...
Let's talk about economy.
Wait a minute.
I don't believe that.
I do not believe that.
No, wait.
You take, you know, the communism, I think, is the system, economic system, most beneficial to the consumer because it tries to make everything equal.
That's absolutely ridiculous.
Usually they don't think that works.
That's why you have small proprietorships in England and all those countries that are socialists.
They want some free enterprise in the system.
So they have to show you to some extent that free enterprise is good.
No, it would be nice to think that you don't have a limit or anything like that, that you can.
Therefore, instead of moving to something that's socialistic, you should stay in free enterprise, just correct some of the imperfections.
But is that the whole idea of the free enterprise system is to have the chance for someone to go from rags to riches? The only thing is, no, I think that the idea of going from rags to riches is impossible.
Where, then, is the reality of the free enterprise system? Does our private enterprise system meet the needs of the consumer? How much should the government be involved? Does our system serve the consumer better than any other economic system? What do you think? Now it's your turn.
Thank you.
