private enterprise

noun

1. free enterprise.

private enterprise

noun

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

2. another name for capitalism

private enterprise

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.)

Word History and Origins

Origin of private enterprise¹

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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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