Give it A Chance

FREE ENTERPRISE ZONES are the closest President Reagan and his conservative congressional buddies have come to suggesting any new program at all to help the under-privileged. If this were the only thing the proposal had going for it, it would still be unwise to discard it too quickly.

But the idea of free enterprise zones has a lot more going for it than just that. It is based on the sound notion that the ideal "welfare program" is a private sector job--not a government job for people who cannot find private employment; not a CETA-type training job, which in most cases trains people for jobs that do not exist. The idea of the program is to create real jobs.

Whether it will achieve this exalted end is admittedly open to question. There is evidence to suggest that corporations will not come running to the South Bronx with open arms just because of a tax incentive. But the program is based on that fine principle of capitalism that every man has his price. If people are staying out of an area because of crime, discrimination, or poor services, it should be possible to raise incentives to a level where they will not want to stay out.

Of course, the question of loopholes must be addressed forcefully. The law should raise the number of actual community residents the businesses must have on the payroll, so that companies do not just move into an area and fail to employ any local people, or employ them only in custodial work. Also, Reagan should not remove housing monies, transportation aid, and other funding to these areas until this experimental program shows real signs of working. These are the issues that liberals should address--not shooting the program down, but making it work fairly.

It is too easy to dismiss the free enterprise zone plan out of hand because it does not conform to traditional Democratic ideas of how unemployment should be confronted. Reagan, however, is not about to endorse Humphrey-Hawkins, and realistically, Congress is not about to pass it. The people who are suggesting enterprise zones were elected with a mandate to change the New Deal approach to social services. The conservative plan may fail totally, and then we'll be rid of it, but as long as it has noble intentions--as this one seems to--it should be allowed to fail honestly.