Free Enterprise Research Paper

Free enterprise is the current system used to deal with businesses in the United States government. It is defined as, “an economy that allows private businesses the freedom to organize and operate competitively for a profit without government interference, regulation, or subsidy” (“Free”) by the Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History. It is an ideology which many government officials agree with, especially Republicans. However, this system makes it too easy for one company to have a monopoly over a whole industry since their antitrust laws are not strict enough, and there are not many regulations restricting overbearing competition, which negatively impacts many small businesses while greatly profiting a few large corporations. For example,
Many businessmen in high positions and company executives are in favor of competition, stating that it makes people work harder. This is because these businessmen are part of larger companies, so they do not have as fierce of a competition surrounding their workplaces. Even though competition might make people work harder in order to survive in the world of business, it also causes “competition [to be] inefficient and wasteful because it leads to the duplication of effort” (Fang 1229). Since competition is becoming increasingly more fierce, people are becoming more secretive as they “fear being scooped by their rivals” (Fang 1229), decreasing the essential practice of teamwork. By not sharing their work, people are slowing down businesses by doing the same work since no one wants to share their findings or cooperate for fear of losing out on profit. The academic journal by the American Society for Microbiology states that in the field of science, “competition discourages sharing and may even lead some scientists to sabotage competitors, perform biased peer review, and engage in questionable research practices” (Fang 1229). Instead of encouraging teamwork, the Houston Chronicle states that competition “can create unhealthy rivalries that result in workers resenting one another, which is especially true if one person or team always wins the competitions”
Since many online companies are trying to get consumers to switch to the online market, the are facing huge losses now to profit later, offering low prices in the beginning, in attempt to gain many consumers of a certain industry so that they will get loyal customers and later start to increase prices similar to those of physical stores. The International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering claims that other advantages of ecommerce are that there are “Faster buying/selling procedure, as well as easy to find products… More reach to customers… [and] no theoretical geographic limitations” (Niranjana 2362). Even though these online stores have many benefits, they also have high potential to become monopolies in the near future. In addition, many online stores do not pay taxes since there many online stores in need of regulation. This is unfair to physical stores which have to pay taxes. To solve this injustice, the Department of Justice should increase its budget so that it can hire more workers to regulate online companies. This way, online stores will not be able to have exaggeratedly low prices free of taxes, making competition more fair between online and offline businesses. This is not the best solution to making competition fair in the U.S., because this only improves the problem of overbearing online companies instead of brick and mortar companies. Making stricter