The Crimson Dictionary - Enterprise

'Enterprise' is a polite form of the word "thievery".  A person uses it when hiding the fact that they or someone they admire is stealing.  If someone steals 100 pounds from a pensioner they are called a thief and end up in court.  If someone steals 100 million pounds from pension funds they are called an entrepreneur and end up in the house of lords.

 

To understand how enterprise works imagine the following:

 

10 strangers are on a life boat lost in the ocean.  There are rations on board to last everyone a week.  It's lying there in boxes that everyone can get to.

 

On the first night one man wakes up and quietly hoards all the food.  He has a gun and when the others wake up he promises to shoot anyone who takes food without his permission.  Some would call this stealing but for those who admire and benefit from such behaviour, it is called enterprise.  Such people would say that the man has used his initiative: he is an entrepreneur.  The other people could have taken the food themselves but didn't, and that's why they'll go hungry, because they're not clever enough – not enterprising enough.

 

All the food now belongs to the entrepreneur and he is able to sell rations to the others at the price he chooses.  Some readers may think this is unfair.  But the entrepreneur must make up for his initial investment in the gun.  An investment which is quite risky due to the damp conditions.  Also his owning the gun is to the benefit of all those on the lifeboat, for without him their precious rations would be vulnerable to thieves.

 

So the inhabitants of the lifeboat can pay up or starve.  It is their free choice.  And so they choose to eat and pay him with personal jewellery and cash from their soggy wallets.

 

Our entrepreneur now creates a system whereby those men and women who will row the oars will receive payment for every hour they work.  The people who use words like enterprise would now call the entrepreneur's behaviour "wealth creation".  The man is generously giving them some of his wealth and all they have to do is row.  How lucky the survivors are to have this entrepreneur aboard their boat.  For without him they would have no money and therefore could buy no food.  The wage system he has introduced has also given everyone a motivation to row, and so their chances of long term survival are improved.  Some capitalist philosophers believe that if the wage system was not introduced by the entrepreneur, the inhabitants of the lifeboat would do nothing but have sex and listen to their i-pods until they starved.  This is because human beings are naturally lazy.

 

Now imagine this took place, not aboard a lifeboat, but on a large interstellar spaceship heading to a new star.  This spaceship holds hundreds of passengers and a small gang of enterprising individuals use force to take control of the armoury and the food replicators.

 

Imagine what would happen if this spaceship travelled for hundreds of years.  Everyone would grow old and some would have children.  The entrepreneurs would hand their weapons and their control down to their children.

 

Many generations pass and to those doing the work on the ship in return for money, it all seems fair.  It's all they've ever known.  They have no idea that they're ancestors were robbed by enterprising individuals.  Sometimes a person wonders how The Corporation (for that is what the ruling caste of the ship have come to be known by) came to have control of the ship in the first place.  But they don't wonder for long because they are quickly reminded of how dependent the inhabitants are on The Corporation.  Without The Corporation who would pay them wages and how would they afford to buy food from the replomarts.  And besides, as every fool knows, without the wage system to motivate people, everyone would just have sex and play hologames until the ship fell apart around them.

 

Now, change that spaceship in your imagination into a big rock, covered two-thirds in water (and rising), and look! We've got Earth.  That's how we live.  You or a friend you know is probably working for enterprising people.  Ask your friends and find out. They'll tell you it's totally fair to work hard for crap pay.  It's how human beings have always lived, they'll say.  And what would be the alternative? Socialism?  But that's totally an unfair system because it does not adequately reward enterprise and entrepreneurs, without whom we would all be having sex, listening to music and playing computer games until the day we die.

 

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