The Mixed Economy

There is an economic basis for every country, a governmental policy that serves as a foundation for the distribution of goods and the regulation of resources that is never either wrong or right in every respect. The world is filled with a great diversity of people, and perhaps the most defining characteristic of the human community is the gift of opinion. Capitalism, socialism, communism, and mixed economies; all of these are born of different minds and desires. There are benefits and consequences to each, and there are balanced mediums that can be found through compromise, sacrifice, and a willingness to consider the well-being of all. Ours is a mixed economy because there is a public sector and private sector. In our country the idea of the mixed economy has taken root and flourished with time, providing our citizens with affordable goods and services that are produced both quickly and efficiently, and an incentive to work that may not be of the highest caliber, but is surely not of the lowest. It is my firm belief, since both our standard of living and our quality of life are comfortably settled upon the highest rung of society's ladder, that our countries healthy mixture of Free-market and Command economies has sustained our way of life and triggered a chain reaction of success, an explosion of wealth and power that has made our nation great.

There is an article entitled, Mixed Economies: "A No Man's Land", which presents a significant correlation to the topic I've chosen to discuss. In the article, Glenn L. Pearson discusses both the explanation and misperceptions of our mixed economy and agrees with the textbook's definition of a mixed economy as being an economic system in which some allocation of resources is made by the market (private sector) and some is made by the government (public sector).

As I mentioned before, the most defining characteristic of humanity is the gift of opinion. People elect to choose sides on certain issues and, at times, cling to them feverishly enough to melt their own good judgment. As Glenn L. Pearson said, "People are mixed, not economies. That is, in what we call a mixed economy, what we have is a mixture of two classes of people - those who are in the socialist side and those who are in the non-socialist side." His words are very true, though the defining lines between the various economies go well beyond what I've discussed.

There are downsides