

Keeping Free Enterprise in Business
We at Harding University certainly did not invent
free, private enterprise. Our challenge has been to
develop positive, non-partisan, objective, responsible
ways to increase an awareness of the system in which
each person is
''free"to
be anything he wants if he has
the
"enterprise"
to do it.
Our goal, therefore, is to help each citizen to put a
polish on his amateur status as an economist because
in a very real sense he is his own personal economist.
Improve the understanding, and better attitudes will
be a healthy byproduct. Through the Belden Center,
we can tell our constituency that because of capitalism
they are something special, that they have a chance to
succeed or fail, that man is an individual, that he has
dignity and freedom of choice.
Across the land, and thanks to the pioneering efforts
of the Belden Center, citizenship training and private
enterprise education are experiencing a renaissance.
Our educational philosophy has been to recognize the
merits of free, private enterprise and to evaluate the
business community in the perspective of its
achievements as well as shortcomings.
If the American incentive system continues to
survive and flourish, it would certainly be due to a
greater sense of objectivity among our opinion leaders,
the reasoned arguments of business leaders, the
unbiased research of economists, and the more
responsible actions of educators and students.
Responsible advocacy economics can sell, through
principled examples, the belief that, historically, free,
private enterprise has all the good arguments on its
side. There is no alternative to capitalism that credibly
promises wealth and liberty. Every good product or
service needs a sales force in the field.
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