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In the late 1930s, New Dealers, industrial unionists, and business groups led by the National Association of Manufacturers seized on the language of Americanism and launched public efforts to define the nation in ways that furthered their own political and social agendas. All addressed Americans’ desire to be free of want, and all attempted to connect economic and political concerns. Beyond that, however, they framed issues in profoundly different ways. President Roosevelt, CIO leaders, and others in the New Deal coalition stressed the majoritarian overtones of the word “democracy,” and called for an activist government to ensure Americans’ economic security. Industrialists and their allies, by contrast, emphasized individual rights and the libertarian dimensions of American “freedom.” The ensuing battle—pitting “democracy” against “freedom,” mutualism against individualism, and a progressive ethos against interclass unity—presaged contests that would continue into the postwar era.

The market socialist system is differentiated from the free enterprise system by the types of organizations that are allowed to operate in their respective economies. While the free enterprise system allows a variety of organizational forms, in a market socialist system, there are mostly worker-managed cooperatives and sometimes for specific reasons, firms wholly owned by the state and privately owned enterprises. Organizational types vary in their interrelationship with factors such as laborers, capital providers, input suppliers, monitors, central contracting agents, director of the firm's output, residual claimants, and ultimate decision-makers. This chapter also points out what differentiates a traditional capitalist firm from an open corporation and from a worker cooperative. In the discussions, this chapter goes back to the concept of exploitation in the context of the organization. An explanation for the phenomenon is sought from the ideas of bounded rationality and opportunism.

This chapter discusses the opportunities for exploitation in a large cooperative setting. Ideally, other than in terms of sheer size, the differences between large cooperatives and smaller cooperatives do not appear to be that great. Indeed, in principle, smaller cooperatives could also have a workers' council. Though the two types of cooperatives are similar in many respects, the comparable capitalist organization, the open corporation, is dramatically different from its smaller cousin, the classical capitalist firm. Following the comparison, this chapter identifies various areas where exploitation may occur in the large cooperative setting. Such areas include the firm-market boundary, state organizations, state control of new investment, and in the valuation of assets. Following the discussion on exploitation, this chapter surmises that due to the presence of exploitation, a form of injustice, in the market socialist economy, the system might not be the most conducive system towards a good society.

In the aftermath of World War II, an array of influential elites launched a wide-ranging effort to recapture the sense of teamwork that had pervaded public discourse during the war. Those engaged in this endeavor included social scientists who worried about threats to national cohesion; intergroup activists who hoped to extend their wartime anti-prejudice campaigns; business and advertising executives determined to derail the rising power of labor and to halt or roll back the New Deal; and officials of the Truman Administration who sought to unify Americans behind their emerging Cold War policies. The motives of these elites differed sharply, as did their definition of the values around which Americans should unite. What they shared was a fear of social unrest or upheaval. This chapter explores their efforts, focusing particularly on the activities of the Advertising Council. The council provided a vital link between numerous groups and conducted campaigns on behalf of both free enterprise and intergroup tolerance.

This chapter returns to the United States, where in the 1950s and 1960s supermarkets secured economic dominance in the nation’s food system. Even as American-style supermarkets were exported as “weapons” against international communism, no small number of American farmers and consumers developed cogent critiques of the notion that supermarkets were unassailable exemplars of “free” enterprise. American farmers, long upheld as the backbone of democracy, bristled at the realization that supermarkets’ demands for standardized, low-priced foodstuffs often pinned farmers in an uncomfortable position. Economic freedom—supposedly the hallmark of the American supermarket—seemed increasingly illusory to many in the rural United States who were expected to either conform to the demands of supermarket-driven industrialized agricultural production or get out of the agricultural marketplace altogether. Meanwhile, many American consumers who appreciated the low prices and wide range of goods on offer in their supermarkets nonetheless contested conservative economists’ declarations that “consumer sovereignty” was a central achievement of “free enterprise.” Even at the height of the Cold War Farms Race, when Americans’ certainty in the economic superiority of capitalism was at its apogee, the undeniable power of corporate entities in the American food system raised questions about capitalism’s moral and political legitimacy.

This chapter examines how medical care became the “fourth necessity” of modern life—after food, clothing, and housing—during the postwar period. There were disagreements on what shape America's medical order would take after World War II. Some advocated for an American equivalent to Britain's National Health Service, whereas others agreed that a more “free enterprise” system would better suit the nation. In the late 1940s, the business-backed model of free enterprise prevailed, giving rise to a medical economy that moved in the opposite direction from what consumerists had hoped for. In the short run, these free enterprise modifications to the medical economy paved the way for the remarkable expansion of the health care system. This chapter considers how American medicine came into even closer alignment with the dynamics of postwar consumer capitalism, which brought a dramatic increase in the number of medical products and services available to patients but also led to more consumer dissatisfaction.

This chapter charts McIntire’s efforts to popularize free enterprise after World War II. His pivotal books The Rise of the Tyrant (1945) and the Author of Liberty (1946) and their public impact are examined in detail, as are the American Council of Christian Churches’ systematic attempts to use the radio and other means to spread a free enterprise message. McIntire’s politics are shown to have been impelled by a particular neo-Calvinist reading of the Scriptures as a guidebook for individual, economic, and political freedom. It is also shown that immediately after World War II McIntire forged a close alliance with business apologists for free enterprise and started secretive collaboration with leading Catholic, Jewish, and secular anticollectivists.

This chapter explores the initial resistance to the PAC concept within the business community and among conservatives more generally in the 1940s and 1950s. Though major business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and United States Chamber of Commerce had not entirely ignored elections to this point, they concentrated their energies following World War II on lobbying and publicity campaigns promoting “free enterprise,” while criticizing labor and liberal PACs as coercive, collectivist, and antidemocratic. They also placed faith in the “conservative coalition” of Republicans and Southern Democrats to protect their interests, reflecting their strong belief that both parties should and could promote business aims. As fears grew that labor had successfully “infiltrated” the Democratic Party, however, conservative activists urged business groups to be “businesslike” and respond to labor electioneering in kind. Business leaders thus began to contemplate a partisan electoral counterstrategy centered on the Republican Party.

This chapter follows the Council through the last months of the war and into the reconversion period, when it worked diligently with leaders of the advertising industry, business, and government to determine its role in postwar America. It discusses the nature of these deliberations and analyzes the newly elevated role of advertising as a public relations tool for the business community at large. No longer satisfied with taking directives from the government, the postwar council—once again called the Advertising Council—assumed a more independent role in regard to campaign selections. Its campaigns over the next few years included programs that were more explicitly designed to educate the public about the superiority of the American system of free enterprise and the virtues of corporate capitalism.

This chapter examines Helms’s career during the 1950s. Helms was not a typical southern conservative. He opposed the New Deal and advocated North Carolina’s realignment with the Republican Party. Helms spent most of the decade as executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association and editor of the Tarheel Banker. His main responsibilities were promoting banking and defending bankers’ interests, but he also advanced conservatism. Helms’s Tarheel Banker commentaries advocated free enterprise—a mix of anti-tax, pro-business policies, with a healthy dose of anti-statism. In 1957, he won election to the Raleigh City Council, where he found his voice in opposition to annexation, taxes, and fluoridation. In his commentaries and position as a city councilman, Helms reconfigured southern racial politics in support of conservatism rather than the racial status quo. His commentaries castigated the mainstream media, advocated private schools in response to Brown v. Board of Education, and criticized liberal economic policies such as farm programs. Helms developed his politics of pious incitement in his attacks on the civil rights movement and the mainstream media. Late in the 1950s, Helms began delivering Sunday afternoon editorials on WRAL-TV. He joined the station in 1960 as vice president.

This chapter turns to the National Association of Manufacturers' (NAM) activities during the Cold War. The Cold War impeded full global economic integration, but it also provided an opportunity for free enterprise to show its superiority to state-directed economic systems. Hence, NAM and other international organizations had to conduct a high degree of coordination, standard-setting, and information exchange in order to globalize capitalism. But that work fostered tensions, especially with regard to tariffs. Tariff reduction was key to the postwar trade agenda. Here, NAM was, as usual, divided. But times were changing. The Cold War fight against communism required a commitment to international capitalism and freer trade. State-instigated tariffs were antithetical to postwar, free-market conservatives, a movement influenced by Austrian émigrés and enthusiastically embraced by NAM leaders.

The New Deal liberalism that FCN treaties sought to project onto the world was defined by basic rule-of-law principles found in the U.S. Constitution and by the free enterprise system. The United States was seeking in its treaties to obtain for U.S. investors abroad the same protection that foreign investors already received in the United States, and thus the treaties did not provide greater rights than those granted by U.S. law and policy. In general, the treaties sought non-discriminatory (national and MFN) treatment for investment, security for investment against expropriation, a guarantee that regulations of investment would be reasonable, and due process for investors—all reflected in an overall requirement of fair and equitable treatment. The treaties also pervasively recognized the legitimate power of host states to regulate investment, subject to these basic principles. This chapter explains the meaning of each of the investment-related provisions in the treaties.

This chapter traces the emergence of a Christian free enterprise vision for the South at the end of the war. For evangelical businessmen, the region seemed a new promised land for growth and investment with a hard-working, low-wage labor force. Christian free-enterprise ideology meshed easily with the goals of corporate executives hoping to take advantage of the lower wages and conservative politics of the South. Moreover, The South was a bulwark against the further spread of liberal, New Deal politics. Meanwhile, for white Protestant evangelicals, Christian free enterprise could protect the region against the threats that modernism and state-centered bureaucracies posed to the southern way of life.

This chapter underlines the role of anti-unionism in challenges to the New Deal consensus, further highlighting the influence of economic conservatism in the immediate postwar years. New Deal-era laws increased workers' ability to form unions and set a minimum wage for many workers, fueling an economic prosperity that by the 1950s had created the century's narrowest income gap between the wealthy and middle-income workers. Corporate and conservative interests had challenged these laws from the start, and many emerged from World War II motivated by a renewed determination to slow labor's growing momentum and return workplace economics to the private sector.

This chapter details Robert Knight's London background and start in Bombay. Robert was born in Lambeth, a modest South Bank neighbourhood of London, on 13 March 1825, the son of William and Anna Maria (Coombs) Knight. No records show any university attendance. His later prose was that of an educated man, but it did not drip Latin and Greek phrases. Robert landed at Bombay on 8 October 1847, carried there from Suez by the East India Company steamship Victoria. Young Mr Knight — he was then 22 — brought with him the ideas of a new age, ideas of reform, of free enterprise, of an empire run for the mutual benefit of rulers and subjects, as judged by the values of that new age.

This chapter describes the impact of free market economic policies on rural development in the 1980s and 1990s. Seeking to end excessive government interference in the economy, President Ronald Reagan cut taxes, weakened civil rights enforcement, and reduced funding for social programs that served low-income Americans. Reagan believed that private enterprise and market forces were the most efficient mechanisms for creating wealth and distributing resources. Such policies failed to address the problems facing unemployed and poor people in the rural South. At the turn of the twentieth century, the region was still plagued by unemployment, poverty, inadequate health care, substandard housing, and out-migration.