Suggested Reading:
Reenchantment of the world
Small is Beautiful
Economics In One Lesson
The Beanstalk Principle, Kirpatrick Sales (not a luddite book)
The worldly philosophers
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Periodic Blog: The downfall of Communism, what did we learn?
In comparing Free Enterprise or Free Markets to Socialism, one thing strikes me today. Free Enterprise has no idea of a next phase of social organization or achievement. Socialism perceives history as a series of phases, the final historical phase was Capitalism under liberal democracy at the time early socialist writers lived. Today we have Global Capitalism, a futuristic phase the early socialists could not have entirely predicted. (As we have the concept of peak oil, the concepts of "peak debt" and "peak corruption" should also be considered.)
If we consider modeling what future phases of Free Enterprise might look like, since we do not have a model from the time of classical free market theory of succeeding phases we should look at what the socialists predicted, even if a free market vision is completely different - Socialists were the first of the futurists in a sense, by assuming they could see next phases of evolution of society after early industrialism.
In Socialist ideas, the next phase after free market capitalism would be a revolutionary period where the workers turned the table on their masters, followed by a society in which all would have sufficient material goods, and finally a phase where Government would become less and less necessary as people became more and more advanced.
Now as people living under a free enterprise system where do we want to go ?
Most people would agree we want individual liberty, a 'meritocracy' where those who strive are rewarded and those that do not contribute get the minimum