The Business of America
Clark, Lindley H. Jr.
What follows is the last of four columns by the economic news editor of the Wall Street Journal on the practice of business in America. In recent years many college students have taken a dim...
...Free enterprise simply has shown itself to be a highly efficient way to organize the nation's resources of manpower and materials to produce the products and services that the public wants...
...they combined among themselves to divide the market at a noncompetitive price and, in the process, to defraud millions of customers and stockholders of utilities all around the land...
...Americans, at any rate, have used it to gain the world's highest material living standard...
...The original Henry Ford was hailed as a philanthropist in some quarters (and reviled as one by some competitors) when he offered workers higher wages than they could get elsewhere...
...If the state controls all the means of production and organizes them as a democratic majority dictates, that's as "moral" as free enterprise...
...Collegiate criticism of corporations has caused self-criticism within the companies--and stirred broad criticism from the general public...
...Let's start off by saying that some companies deserved all or at least most of the criticism they got...
...But if business enterprise does a good job of generating the wealth, the body politic can do as it pleases about the distribution of the wealth...
...4 The Alternative February 1974...
...The country keeps moving because, fortunately, some people want such jobs...
...Colleges and universities, notably, now often have more teachers than they need...
...It has moved a long way in that direction already, not always wisely...
...To some a job is only the means to support nonwork activities that we enjoy...
...government becomes self-perpetuating and dictatorial...
...The corporation is an artificial person with rm attitudes of its own...
...If anyone needs evidence that the business system can change under public pressure, he only has to examine U.S...
...Suddenly politicians such as Teddy Roosevelt found they could build a following by campaigning against the "trusts...
...To others the job can be central and other activities peripheral...
...Of course, in many of the so-called socialist democracies that's not the way it works at all...
...In a way the electrical equipment case showed that the rules do work...
...Such institutions do indeed need the services of many dedicated individuals, and a lot of brighter young Americans are accepting and will accept the challenge...
...In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the so-called robber barons operated pretty much as they pleased in the nation's major industries...
...That much being said, what can the right-thinking college student do about it...
...business--sometimes of specific corporations, but often of corporations generally...
...The Ford Corporation, however, had no patent on dominance...
...One of its recent mistakes was to decide that wage-price controls could produce economic stability...
...If America is to continue to grow in health, its business, as President Coolidge said, will continue to be business...
...All of them, in business or not, are going to have to try to be informed members of the body politic, which after all sets the rules that govern much of the way business operates...
...The electrical equipment companies started the 1960s by giving themselves and other corporations a bad name...
...The Sherman Antitrust Act went on the books in 1890...
...So if college graduates want to get this country moving in directions that they would like to see it go, some of them are going to have to enlist in business enterprise...
...Obviously, no business corporation can guarantee a new employee a career of matching wits with a Henry Ford...
...Its ideas are constantly being shaped and reshaped by the people who run the enterprise...
...The corporation of itself is neither evil or good...
...With high wages (relatively) and low prices he drove the Tin l,izzie to dominance in the fledgling auto market...
...We organize our lives differently...
...If a corporation breaks the rules or otherwise performs badly, it can be punished in the market place, too...
...Most of those charitable outsiders have derived their money from business enterprise either directly or by inheritance...
...Ethics and rules changed because the public insisted that they change...
...Free enterprise is not inherently any more moral than tnfly democratic socialism...
...if it is to survive, it continues to try to correct its mistakes...
...Should all of the worried students go to work for nonprofit foundations, welfare organizatious, universities, and other--to use that wretched word---eleemosynary institutions...
...Citizens still are capable of righteous indignation, and such indignation can and has moved politicians to shore up the rules where they need it...
...It was only as effective as the people who ran it, and soon some of Henry's competitors began to operate more effectively than he did...
...Then, finally, a majority began to evolve...
...All of the publicity didn't hurt the sales of Ford cars either...
...The inescapable fact is simply that business is what makes everything--good, bad, or indifferent--go...
...A corporation needs public support, or at least acceptance, if it is to continue to sell its stock, its products, and its services...
...The president of one company recently lost his job soon after revealing that he had approved an illegal campaign contribution...
...What Henry saw, much more clearly than his competitors did, was that high wages drew the best and most efficient employees...
...But a democracy is not always wise...
...Not all of the impulse for change came from outside the corporations, either...
...In recent years many college students have taken a dim view of U.S...
...Not everyone thought that this was a great idea, but there was no political majority to call a halt...
...What the corporation is ten or twenty years in the future will depend in large part on the caliber of people it is able to enlist now...
...Under pressure from the public, governments now provide near-universal schooling, a system still unequaled in the world...
...Business enterprise offers a multiplicity of jobs, and many of them--at least at the start--are highly routine...
...And even in the area of material things, it surely is true that some of us have much more than others...
...when it proved ineffective, other laws were written to supplement it...
...Students who do go to work for business will find that not all corporate executives laugh at the rules or even simple ethics...
...business history...
...It needs giant infusions of money from charitable outsiders...
...Whenever a business' ideas and actions harden into dogma they are likely to begin to lose out to the competition...
...The chief trouble with that solution, though, is that what will often answer for the individual cannot work for everybody...
...More recently there has been International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation, with its well-publicized efforts to influence politics both abroad and at home...
...Some businessmen actually went to jail for conspiring to fix prices...
...The eleemosynary industry, moreover, is not self-supporting...
...If such mistakes are to be corrected, business will need college graduates, both as present critics and as future policy makers...
...Material things," to be sure, are not all that matter...
...its morality stems from the people involved...
...unlike the corporation, man still is mortal...
...The record would seem to indicate that relatively free enterprise works better than any form of socialism...
...Business enterprise is not a church with a dogma that dictates the ideas and actions of all who work for it...
...In the nineteenth century it was considered entirely proper to send tenyear-olds to toil in factories...
...Whoever those people are now, new people will replace them before long...
...The corporations that have lamely admitted to making illegal contributions to President Nixon's reelection campaign haven't helped their own reputations any more than they have helped the Republicans...
...Henry, moreover, could have sold a lot of those Ford cars for higher prices than he chose to charge...
...But he saw also that if he held his prices down he could sell a lot more...
Vol. 7 • February 1974 • No. 5
