The Business of America

...To prove my point, I ask you to think for a moment of the tremendous coercive power of any government which controls all of a society's capital, thereby controlling all employment and, of course, all the universities and all the news media...

...It may well be that there was far less justification for the costs imposed on many of the people involved than for the costs generally imposed on people who advocate unpopular causes...

...Lewis: "It may happen to any of us at any moment...

...The point, I think, is that, as a practical matter, those individual freedoms and privileges which are exercised responsibly have the best chance of enduring...

...I think his words apply equally well to the responsibilities of men who exercise economic power: "They must understand, in Acton's phrase, that freedom is 'not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought...

...My reading of history," Irving Kristol has written, "is that, in the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria...

...And its success depends upon the virtue of the people who undertake it...

...Therefore, unless one wishes to live in a society in which the governed have no freedom at all, it seems self-evident that one should wish to keep as much economic power as possible in private hands...

...But one cannot stop there...

...In my view, the following are also necessary checks on privately held economic power: anti trust laws, to preserve the competitive nature of as many economic markets as possible,thereby preventing the accretion of too much economic power to any one individual or collection of individuals...

...And since that contact cannot be avoided for long, and since it means either bliss or horror, the business of life is to learn to like it...

...While I am deeply committed to the preservation of private economic freedom as a desirable end in itself, I am equally committed to the kind of political freedom most of us in the Western world enjoy...

...If the army does not resist it, such a government can silence those who disagree with it and enforce absolute conformity to its wishes, whatever they may be, through the power it has over each person's ability to earn a living...

...Another more fundamental and compelling reason is set forth in the following terrifying yet beautiful paragraph written by C.S...

...In the twinkling of an eye, in a time too small to be measured, and in any place, all that seems to divide us from God can flee away, vanish leaving us naked before Him, like the first man, like the only man, as if nothing but He and I existed...

...On the other hand, if a significant proportion of economic power is kept in separate hands from political power, each can serve as a check upon the other...

...In my understanding, it is impossible to have that political freedom without having private economic freedom as well...

...IT IS LITTLE understood that economic freeamr—the freedom to control the use of capital—and political freedom are intimately connected, that a society which gives up its economic freedom to the government, in the end will have its political freedom taken from it by the same government...

...Father John Courtney Murray wrote the following about the responsibilities of men who enjoy political freedom...

...An] example of the role of [private economic power) in preserving political freedom," Milton Friedman has written, "was revealed in our experience with McCarthyism...

...In most of the Western world, the competitive nature of the free market often provides a check on such abuses...

...In this sense, [the exercise of freedom] is a spiritual and moral enterprise...

...On the other hand, those individual freedoms and privileges which are abused will, in all likelihood, be taken away...

...Having thus provided an essential check on abuses of political power, a free society must use its political power to provide checks on possible abuses of privately held economic power...

...In spite of these market and political restraints, those who hold private economic power, that is to say businessmen, will always be able to abuse it somewhat...

...Entirely aside from the substantive issues involved, and the merits of the charges made, what protection did individuals, and in particular government employees, have against irresponsible accusations and probings into matters that it went against their conscience to reveal...

...And unfortunately, some, perhaps many businessmen today, either through indifference or malice, continue to abuse the economic power they have over others while reaping for themselves the highest economic rewards...

...But the important point is that the costs were limited and not prohibitive, as they would have been if government employment had been the only possibility...

...For example, the existence of several competitors in any given economic market restricts any one firm from unreasonably raising the price or lowering the quality of its products...

...These businessmen should be made to understand that if, by their example, such abuses become widespread, they run the risk of having their economic freedom stripped from them and of bringing our private free market system crashing down around our ears—delivering us, in all likelihood, into the uncomfortable position I described earlier, the position of having both political and economic power concentrated in the government...

...Their fundamental protection was the existence of a private market economy in which they could earn a living . . .The protection was not absolute...

...Many potential private employers were, rightly or wrongly, averse to hiring those pilloried...

...and second, because I think it unlikely that the majority will long tolerate a system which distributes the greatest economic rewards to a minority containing a significant number of people who seem lacking in moral fiber...

...I say this is little understood because it seems today, that people increasingly feel it possible for a society to adopt the essential features of Russian or Communist Chinese economic arrangements while preserving the essential features of Western democratic political arrangements...

...Men who would be . . . free must discipline themselves...

...and fair employment and health and safety laws, to prevent private employers from abusing the economic power they have over their employees...

...Likewise, institutions which would pretend to be free with a human freedom must in their workings be governed from within and made to serve the ends of virtue...

...for to do so would be to invite its customers to buy its competitors' products...

...Their appeal to the Fifth Amendment would have been a hollow mockery without an alternative to government employment...

...I say this for two reasons, first, because it seems inconceivable that, in a democratic society, a minority, the employers, will for long be allowed to mistreat the majority, the employed...

...regulation of monopolies, to prevent the exploitation of markets in which, for one reason or another, it is inadvisable for there to be competition...

...That is the first and great commandment...

...But, as Father Murray indicated, there are more than just practical considerations involved, more than just practical reasons why businessmen should act virtuously...