One Nation Under Business

...Congress invented the Interstate Commerce Commission back in 1887, and three years later enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act...

...Tyler answers his question by recalling the sophisticated response of Richard Olney, Grover Cleveland's attorney general, to a railroad president eager to exterminate the fledgling ICC: "The Commission, as its functions have now been limited by the courts, is, or can be made of great use to the railroads...

...Fine, right on, and all that, but I should have been grateful for a few particulars...

...I could not agree more that "Both for pragmatic and principled reasons . America's hope for abundance in the future rests on a society that plans collectively for the common good, while preserving significant elements of the capitalist economy...

...Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things...

...As Tyler demonstrates in entertaining detail, corporate America pursues inflationary pricing policies and generates artificial scarcity...

...In this grand tradition, Felix Rohatyn, celebrated by Jack New-field in the Village Voice as finance capitalism's finest human representative, quietly arranged during the Nixon era for Harold Geneen's ITT to retain its possibly illegal ownership of the Hartford Casualty Company despite the fact that Richard Maclaren, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division, wanted to prosecute...

...an equitable distribution of income...

...So it was in the beginning, so it has been ever since...

...And Tyler is on sound ground when he urges "the Federal government to lay out the master design for: full employment...

...Olney, in short, foresaw the co-opting of the regulators by the regulated...

...These two famous victories against monopoly and entrenched corporate power were followed, of course, by the Clayton Act and the Robinson-Pat-man Act...

...It thus becomes a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people and a sort of protection against hasty and crude legislation hostile to railroad interests...

...Rohatyn narrowly diverted both a financial danger to ITT, and the graver prospect of a Supreme Court ruling that might have cramped the style of conglomerates in general...

...Tyler's case against giant business is forcefully argued and intellectually persuasive...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman In 1987, those of us who are still around will be celebrating a century of governmental supervision of big business...

...He does not dispute the certainty that the world's inhabitants will have to learn to do without energy from fossil fuels, but points out that right now a two-century supply of coal, petroleum, and natural gas is probably still available...

...He wound up by advising his angry friend that "The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it...

...I hope Gus Tyler is already at work on a programmatic sequel...

...the reality is that the Seven Sisters have actually reduced domestic exploration, increased American dependence on OPEC, locked in huge reserves of natural gas, and brought about the very shortages they use as arguments for deregulation, higher prices, and still more extortionate profits...

...Exxon and Mobil advertisements celebrate the public spirit of the oil industry...

...Less satisfactory, because less specific, is his program of change and reform...

...How has it happened then, Gus Tyler asks in his incisive, stylishly written survey of the American economy, that huge domestic conglomerates and global corporations have come to mightily dominate manufacturing, retailing, finance, energy, and, most recently, even agriculture, always presumed the domain of the family farmer...

...This kind of situation leads Tyler to his central conclusion: Although resource exhaustion is a genuine long-run probability, it is a danger that in the short run is being freely, cynically and advantageously manipulated by major corporations...

...The big loser in all of this is us...

...It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads at the same time that such regulation is almost entirely nominal...

...It also offers an analysis some of the Presidential candidates floating about the countryside would do well to ponder...

...an allocation of manpower and resources to cut down waste, recycle, reclaim, research, and develop new sources of plenty...

...Unlike most works of economics, Scarcity is a treat to read...

...Neither statutes nor commissions, even when occasional naive efforts are undertaken to make them effective, are allowed to interfere with profitable opportunity...

...In addition, a flock of regulatory bodies have been created, clothed with authority over banking (the Federal Reserve), food and drugs (the Food and Drug Administration), deceptive advertising (the Federal Trade Commission), commercial aviation (the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Federal Aviation Administration), stocks and bonds (the Securities and Exchange Commission), power (the Federal Power Commission), pollution (the Environmental Protection Agency), industrial safety (the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission), and radio and television (the Federal Communications Commission...