The Business of America

...It is almost as if society's "leading citizens" and "authorities" were conspiring against benevolence, for not only do signs of an essential sweetness beep beep from young Elmer, but likewise they emanate from the homosexual electrician who tutored him, as the intrepid reporters of the Times of I~s Angeles were quick to perceive...

...Best of all, from the businessman's standpoint, he risks only what he puts into the corporation...

...What's his outside the corporation remains his, no matter what happens to the business...

...So there they are, America's 12 million businesses...

...he may be the chap who owns the shoeshine stand in the office building lobby or the fellow who sells hot dogs from a pushcart at the corner...

...Politics is where wrongs are righted, and with that the whole mob of sophists gambols back to Washington...

...Dean Corll's life as a ~medern American tragedy...

...What bosh...

...The view is that public confidence is enhanced by an impressive array of partners, since the public knows that each partner can be responsible for all of the partnership's debts--to the extent of losing his house, his car, and even his motorcycle...

...The average partnership is nonetheless much busier than the average proprietorship: it takes in more than $90,000 a year and has a net profit of close to $12,000...

...When the government tries to tell all the butchers and other businessmen what they can charge for their products and services--and what they can pay their workers--it takes on a staggering task...

...From their researches they found he was always ~'polite, quiet and pleasantly harmless...

...Pretty soon, the controls will collapse or they will have to be supplemented by extensive rationing to spread the scarce goods around...

...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...Another problem is lack of continuity...

...Yet the federal economists are wise enough to recognize that they should encourage an increase in the supply of goods reaching the market...

...Government capitalizes on the misunderstanding...

...A large drawback of both proprietorships and partnerships, from the businessman's standpoint, is the high degree of risk...

...By their nature controls work to preserve the status quo...

...Of course, a corporation's stockholders pay ordinary income taxes on all the dividends they take out of the company, but the immediate tax impact on the business need not be so severe...

...Every year proprietors, partners, and corporate executives test their products and services in the market...

...A corporation," in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, "is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law...

...Of course one could pick nits here and there...

...Millions of college students suspect that this is a fate vastly more unpleasant than the electric chair...

...To some extent the pressures are working...

...Of course the free market and competition would work among the large corporations, too, if not always in ways that the controllers would prefer...

...If a corporation's profit margins are being squeezed, it will find it harder to borrow money, sell stock, or generate earnings to finance the new factories and equipment it needs to produce more...

...What pathos...

...He said %Vill I be able to kiss mama?' " What irony...

...See how the professional hatemongers manipulate men, create or exacerbate social ills, and build up their international "cartels of hate" in the pursuit of their dreams...

...In the mid-1920s Calvin Coolidge stirred the wrath of political liberals when he declared, ~'The business of America is business...

...As the Los Angeles Times suggestively chronicles: "after Elmer was jailed in the mass murder, he [Elmer's lawyer] talked to him one day on the telephone about meeting his mother in the courtroom the next day...

...At the moment the government is operating a vast network of regulations and regulators, all of it devised to keep wicked businessmen from raising prices...

...Yet what it means to the businessman is a reduced yield on the dollars he has invested in his business...

...Because we now live in the "Age of Megamedia...

...Partnerships also are common in finance...

...It goes without saying that the dastardly authorities refused this tender request...

...The primary aim of the government is to hold prices down, no matter what...

...On the average they were much bigger than proprietorships and partnerships...

...There is a strenuous effort in the academy to whitewash Marx (Erich Fromm is the worst offender here, I think: Marx loved his wife and all that) and I, being but a product of my academic environment, do not yet know which interpretation is closer to the truth...

...Partnerships are relatively rare...

...When prices are held artificially low, producers are discouraged from adding to supply and consumers are encouraged to buy...

...They are easy to set up...

...Smaller businesses with sixty or fewer employees are exempt from controls...

...Proprietors and partners pay taxes (continued on page 29) 4 The Alternative November 1973 The Rise of Radicalism by Eugene Methvin Arlington House $9-95 What do Rousseau, Robespierre, Babeuf, Marx, Nechayev, Lenin, and Mao all have in common...

...Oh it is a perverse world we live in...

...often nothing more is required than to start doing business...

...In business the status quo can be deadly...

...But these are, again, only nits, and although the academic-minded might complain, they do not detract from the soundness of the author's thesis...

...From the leaflets, pamphlets, and posters of the French revolutionaries, through the use of radio, loudspeakers, and the airplane by Hitler, to the fawning television journalists of today: read all about it in this book...

...For all the above-mentioned persons, and for others, Methvin describes the nature and probable origin of their psychopathologies, how they fed themselves on hatred for finite and imperfect man, and how, if given the opportunity, they transformed their inner tension into outer terror...

...The clod reporters who fashion literary pastiches around the grim deeds of vile miscreants only make Dreiserian rhetoric all the more plausible (one reporter actually described Mr...

...Enter the corporation...

...American business thrives on failure...

...All of its idealists are victims...

...Ironically enough, the government relies on free market forces to keep the little businesses more or less in line...

...He may not try to for very long...

...Not every businessman is so enamored of his abilities and ideas that he is willing to gamble everything on them...

...They disappear when the owner retires, dies, or finds he can't make a go of his enterprise...

...He gets all the profits, absorbs all the losses, and takes all the responsibilities...

...If you were to answer that all are influences on, or heroes of, the Left, you would be right...

...About three-fourths of them are proprietorships, owned lock, stock, and barrel by the entrepreneur...

...Government economic controls, no matter how wisely constructed and administered, simply cannot cope with anything as dynamic as American business...

...Society has devised unemployment compensation and other institutions to cushion the shock of change, but to prevent change serves no one's true interest...

...A price increase thus can carry the seeds of its own destruction...

...The Alternative November 1973 29...

...Or a proprietor may decide to take on a partner...

...All of its heroes are behind bars...

...This is the main thesis of Eugene Methvin's latest treatise, The R/se of Radicalism...

...Corporations often long outlive the men who set them up...

...A friend or a neighbor may have money to invest, or maybe he knows how to boil a better hot dog...

...The reader will find here innumerable points of special interest: Marx's psychosematicism, Lenin's being influenced far less by Marx than by the Russian Jacobins (especially Nechayev, who invented the professional revolutionary, and whose chilling description is included), Lenin as the first applied sociologist, and the ease with which Mussolini and Hitler fit the psychological type usually reserved for fanatics of the socialist genus...

...It hopes that the larger enterprises, subject to controls, will put competitive pressures on the small firms to keep their prices down...

...A young accountant can get a start in his field by joining an established partner...

...The obvious result: shortages...

...The failure of an enterprise releases resources of materials and manpower to seek more useful employment elsewhere...

...One of the largest partnerships is Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., a private bank with assets not far from $500 million...

...Methvin does point out that Marx--fortunately, I should think-never acquired political power, so we shall never know how he would have used it...

...Washington gets away with this approach because the average citizen doesn't blame the government for boosting meat prices by flooding the economy with too much money: he blames the butcher...

...Corporations pay a 22 percent tax on the first $25,000 of income, 48 percent on everything over that...

...One might also doubt that Marx was quite the ogre Methvin makes him out to be...

...In a controlled economy, however, supply and demand do not operate directly on price...

...The average is boosted by the fact that partnerships are popular among accountants, lawyers, and other professional men, and among businesses where skill and personality count for more than capital...

...the older man gains because he can give the new partner the less interesting work...

...Yet what he said was true in 1925 and it remains true today, even though the role of business in this relationship is often badly misunderstood...

...The average corporation takes in more than $1 million a year and has a net profit of nearly $50,000...

...At any rate, he takes in about $25,000 a year and has a net profit of around $3,5OO...

...Jack Simmons THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA (continued from page 4) at individual rates, ranging up to 70 percent, on all the profits of their businesses...

...In many areas and industries, however, the pressures are weak or nonexistent, as many citizens can testify as they watch the prices they pay edge ever higher...

...And every intelligent American knows that it is a less healthful experience...

...As Mr...

...What follows is the first of four columns by the associate editor of the Wall Street Journal on the practice of business in America...

...if even a single partner dies the partnership is dissolved...

...One might also have wanted a chapter or at least a few pages on Herzen who, though not a vicious man, was the first Russian socialist and a typical alienated intellectual...

...The two aims, unfortunately, can conflict...

...Young Elmer and his kind have been wronged...

...Why is it only in the last two hundred years that these madmen have had so much influence...

...In the market a price rise may persuade businessmen to produce more or it may induce consumers to buy less, or it may do a little of both...

...about half of the member firms of the New York Stock Exchange are partnerships...

...All the flummery about human rights, no matter how contrived and removed from human existence, merely makes it all the easier for these self-styled progressives to snatch young Elmer from tl~e hangman and tuck him away under the supervision of social scientists, psychiatrists, and social workers, until such time as he can be graduated into civil society...

...This is a most felicitous term, for it combines two facts that especially characterize the modern world: the astonishing advance in communications technology, and urbanization, which has brought pliable, mass audiences into existence...

...So once again the subtle intellects of American journalism are telling us that that which is obvious is illusory and that which is illusory is reality...

...And it would be nice if more Americans knew more about how their business really works...

...To the man on the street that probably sounds eminently fair...

...And here is another reason why I shed a tear for young Elmer...

...The fact that the Americans of today do not enter upon vast national discussions about the deeds of young Elmer only makes life at the controls all the more blissful...

...How does he live on such a tiny take...

...The enterprises vary widely in type and size...

...Coolidge said, the business of America is business...

...All in all, this book is an excellent introduction to violent radicalism...

...The government, for example, is permitting businessmen to pass along to their customers only the exact dollar amount of any increases in costs...

...The type is the idealistic, violent, and usually intellectual radical, the malcontent who cannot bear the unpleasantness and intractability of a fallen world, who conjures a utopia in his mind, and who does not hesitate to commit the basest atrocities in the attempt to shoehorn reality into his ideal...

...How can the government ever hope to keep an eye on all of them...

...Actually, of course, it doesn't...

...There are about 900,000 of them, compared with more than 9 million proprietorships...

...Taxes help to explain the attraction of incorporation even to small businessmen...

...At last count there were something like 12 million business enterprises scattered around these United States...

...He is about to receive the same heartless treatment that Americans visit upon their college students...

...But you would be right again, and you would have stated a more important truth, if you were to answer that all were psychological misfits, neurotics at the very least...

...A controlled economy is at best a rather messy place...

...Most intriguing of all, he was "nice to children...

...Although this book is many things---social history, intellectual history, and an encyclopedia of radicali s m - i t is basically a study in psychohistory, a study of a distinctive personality type with which humanity has been afflicted at least since Plato but which has become especially pernicious in the last two centuries...

...The average proprietor is a very small businessman...

...Obviously, the Dreisers are at the controls...

...Methvin hands on two myths about Rousseau: that he advocated a return to nature (in fact, he believed that it was too late for that), and that he thought that men were naturally good (in fact, he believed that we are amoral...

...Corporations naturally include the giants of industry, but they also include many small enterprises: in one recent year 276,000 corporations had annual sales of less than $10,000...

...At latest count there were nearly 1.8 million corporations in existence...

...He is the business...

...Proprietorships come and go, even as men's dreams...

...If they meet the public's needs and wants efficiently they succeed, but every year many thousands of them fail...