American Free Enterprise System

Poland's rise as a bastion of free enterprise | Don Brunell

In 1975, as America was preparing to celebrate its bicentennial, Poland was a suppressed Soviet satellite state.

The Polish people were impoverished, had no right to free speech and if you wanted a job, you had to play ball with Communist Party bosses. Poland was a bleak land that had never recovered from World War II.

That same year, more than 5,000 miles away, the Business Week program began at Central Washington University as a way for high school students to experience our nation's free enterprise system. It was an idea germinated at the Association of Washington Business by former Yelm grocer and legislator Hal Wolfe and CWU President Dr. Jim Brooks .

When Business Week started, Lech Walesa , founder of the Solidarity movement, was in prison, jailed by the Communist Party for union organizing at the Gdansk shipyards. Karol Józef Wojtyla was archbishop of Kraków and Ronald Reagan was governor of California.

Since then, everything has changed.

Walesa, who is credited with starting the Polish freedom movement, formed the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as president of Poland from 1990-95.

In 1978, Archbishop Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II and in 1979, he startled the Communist government and ignited the Polish freedom movement when he returned to his native Poland.

Then-President Ronald Reagan sealed the deal in 1987 when he stood at the Berlin Wall and challenged Soviet leadership, saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Why the history lesson?

Too often, Americans forget how fortunate we are and take for granted that our freedoms and our market-based system will always be here. On the other hand, the long-suffering Polish people vigorously protect their free enterprise system, the right to start a business and the opportunities to innovate and create new products.

As part of that dedication, the Polish people have embraced the Business Week program.

Three years ago, they started a Business Week program in their high school in Gdynia, Seattle's Sister City along the Baltic Sea. Then last year, Sister Cities International awarded the Seattle-Gdynia Business Week program its 2010 Innovation Youth and Education Award. In August, Washington's Business Week program will be in Gdynia, Gdansk and Tczew and next year will expand to other cities.

The expansion of Business Week is only one example of Poland's embrace of our free-enterprise system. The Polish people and government are intensely focused on attracting investors from around the world to start businesses, expand existing operation and create jobs.

Obamanomics, leaving on a jet plane

Buckle your seat belts low and tight, America, there’s going to be turbulence all the way to Election Day, 2012. It’s only the summer of 2011 and already we have kids vs. corporate jets, courtesy of the White House political machine.

The most newsworthy bit of President Obama’s press conference certainly had nothing to do with economics or America’s precarious fiscal position. Recall: The president’s most recent budget plan would add $9.5 trillion in cumulative new debt over the next decade. Eliminating a tax break for the purchase of corporate jets – it’s called “accelerated depreciation” and Obama has endorsed the deduction twice before to boost growth and create jobs – would save $3 billion, or 0.03 percent of that total.

Yet this is the place where the president has chosen to stand his ground, to say “Here and no further!” Obama astride the bridge Khazad Dûm. He challenged the GOP to “go talk to your constituents , the Republican constituents, and ask them, are they willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate-jet owner continues to get a tax break.”

What, the food safety system – or National Weather Service or National Institutes of Health – would suffer if government extracts a few hundred million less a year from taxpayers? Is Uncle Sam really running that sort of lean-and-mean operation? Of course not. McKinsey consultants have found that if the U.S. public sector could just halve the productivity gap with the private sector, its productivity would be as much as 15 percent higher and would generate annual savings of up to $300 billion a year. If the president wants to get rid of corporate tax breaks, he should offset them by lowering the sky-high U.S. corporate tax rate while also cutting spending.

But the clumsy attempt at class warfare probably wasn’t even Obama’s most disheartening moment during the presser. Several others were at least equally as bad:

1) The president unnecessarily raised the specter of default if the debt ceiling is not raised by early August:

By August 2nd, we run out of tools to make sure that all our bills are paid.  So that is a hard deadline.  And I want everybody to understand that this is a jobs issue.  This is not an abstraction.  If the United States government, for the first time, cannot pay its bills, if it defaults, then the consequences for the U.S. economy will be significant and unpredictable.  And that is not a good thing.

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