Capitalism Out – Free Enterprise In

The US Chamber of Commerce launched a $100 million media campaign to promote the virtues of capitalism. The problem – capitalism isn’t selling these days.

From BusinessWeek:
” ‘Capitalism’ was universally problematic,” says Chamber spokeswoman Tita Freeman. Adds Rich Thau, president of New York-based Presentation Testing, which ran the focus groups: “There were those who associated ‘capitalism’ with greed and with the powerful dominating the vulnerable.” But those negatives, he says, didn’t apply at all to “free enterprise.”

This doesn’t come as a surprise. The media and the left launched their own campaign – against capitalism – and it worked. Look where we are today. Last October I was appalled at the way Good Morning America was promoting a socialist agenda. Diane Sawyer interviewed a man who lost much of his life savings when the stock market dropped. Diane Sawyer, that heavy hitting interviewer, asked him if he had lost faith in capitalism. Naturally, he said he did. I wonder if she would have received a different response had she asked if he believed in free enterprise.

Free enterprise has a nice ring to it. If a little game of semantics is what it takes to convince people the Obama way is the wrong way, I’m all for it. The left does it all the time. Just in the past week or so Obama re-tooled his health care message. It’s no longer health “care” reform, it’s health “insurance” reform.

So let’s hear it for free enterprise!