America has always been thought of as a “Free Enterprise”, a belief that our economy tends to operate best on decisions about what to produce and what prices to charge for goods and services, through the give-and-take of millions of buyers and sellers. This belief does not include our government or powerful interest groups decisions or ideas; it is solely based on the people. People tend to want to improve our country, but they feel it is necessary to satisfy their needs or wants first. The problem with satisfaction is that people rationalize important economic problems because of their needs/wants. Rationalization is a way for people not to feel bad about their wrongs or detrimental feelings, by using a defense mechanism where they weigh their positives over the negatives, which can be externalities for others. Rationalizing can be seen in instances where corporations and businesses do international trade and productions overseas to benefit their own needs or their group’s needs. The Externality to this rationalization is that it happens to take some of our economic flow (resources/income) and hands it over to a weaker country which will cause deficits in our economy, lay-off employees, and generally weakens our country, at the expense of satisfying the people in control’s self-interests (needs or wants).
Despite our own psychological needs, America right know is in a crisis. Our crisis is that our economy is getting weaker day-by-day, and our American dollar is depreciating in value. This weakness is due to some of this “Free Enterprise” belief, because America has gone global, and we now are less self-sufficient, depending on other foreign countries. You can see through our trade deficit statistics that we are foreign dependent. “America was at -$41 billion in January of 2003, and in May of 2008 we were at almost at -60 billion” (Trade Ticker, 2008, Online). These trade deficits seem to be increasing month by month as the years roll on. This increase in debt...