private enterprise

American  

noun

1. free enterprise.

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private enterprise British  

noun

1. economic activity undertaken by private individuals or organizations under private ownership Compare public enterprise

2. another name for capitalism

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private enterprise Cultural  

1. Business carried on for profit and not owned by the government; also, the system that discourages public ownership of business; the same as free enterprise. (See private sector.)

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Etymology

Origin of private enterprise

First recorded in 1835–45

Example Sentences

It needs the opposite: fiscally responsible leaders who value private enterprise and don’t try to buy elections by making wild promises with other people’s money.

From The Wall Street Journal

Private credit isn’t a bubble—it is a response to regulatory change, market concentration, and the real capital needs of private enterprise.

From Barron's

During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty.

From Salon

It was a "failure at all levels of government" that "private enterprise has simply been allowed to run roughshod" with contracts that simply benefited them, he added.

From BBC

But they were always intended to sustain an unstable compromise between true popular sovereignty and the oligarchic forms of power created and demanded by an economy built on private enterprise.

From Salon