Free enterprise

“ We speak to the entrepreneurs throughout our land who need, besides the maintenance of our free enterprise system, the practical assistance of government in the identification of markets, in the development of sources of labor and raw materials, in the availment of credit facilities, and in the concerted effort to free the full bounty of our resources as a nation. ”

“ Unfortunately, free enterprise is sometimes easier to praise than to practice. But all who believe in free enterprise can take heart from the fact that when it is reintroduced into areas of our economy where it has long been dormant, the results can be salutary. ”

“ An essential part of our heritage as Americans is our free enterprise system. America's millions of small business men and women exemplify the freedoms we all have-the freedoms to produce and create wealth as we choose, to earn and save and invest, to make opportunities for ourselves and others. ”

“ This it cannot be unless the resourceful business men who are to deal with the new circumstances are to have at hand and ready for use the instrumentalities and conveniences of free enterprise which independent men need when acting on their own initiative. ”

“ The field for business enterprise has been open to individuals, partnerships, and corporations; they have entered it fearlessly, and a free-for-all competition has resulted. This free action is in process of being repressed by chartered bodies of capitalists, the great corporations, whom the law still treats [Pg 377] somewhat as though in its collective entirety each one were an individual. They are building up a semi-public power—a quasi-state within the general state—and besides vitiating the action of economic laws, are perverting governments. ”

“ Free enterprise must reign, and those that are strongly ambitious and enterprising, and who use their own initiative to build a successful business honestly must not be penalized and held back by heavy tax systems, but must be encouraged to utilize their talents and initiative to expand their businesses, thereby creating many jobs for all.
"They must also be encouraged to utilize their wealth creatively for the ultimate good of all. Greed must be eliminated from your society. Evolvement of individuals depends greatly upon the determination and desires of each individual. ”

“ It asks the government to "let alone" the industrial affairs of the country, and leave private enterprise to take its own course. Its adherents are fond of asserting that each man knows his own wants and can direct his own business affairs much better than any government can direct them for him. It declares that free competition is [198] the best possible agent to regulate all industrial affairs, and it ascribes all economic evils to the fact that free competition has been thwarted or destroyed. ”

“ But if this relative morality has developed under present conditions, when enrichment is the only incentive and the only aim, can we doubt its rapid progress when appropriation of the fruits of others' labour will no longer be the basis of society?
Another striking fact, which especially characterizes our generation, speaks still more in favour of our ideas. It is the continual extension of the field of enterprise due to private initiative, and the prodigious development of free organizations of all kinds. We shall discuss this more at length in the chapter devoted to Free Agreement. ”

“ By the side of these productions, there will be maintained exactly the same system of private ownership that exists to-day with all the virtues that emulation produces free from the fatal consequences that make failure result in misery, pauperism, prostitution, vagrancy, and crime. For so long as the individual prospers in his private enterprise, he will be encouraged to maintain it ”

“ American industry is not free, as once it was free; American enterprise is not free; the man with only a little capital is finding it harder to get into the field, more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow. Why? Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak. That is the reason, and because the strong have crushed the weak the strong dominate the industry and the economic life of this country. No man can deny that the lines of endeavor have more and more narrowed and stiffened; ”

“ Since he is in control of the enterprise, it is he who pays the land-owner, the capitalist, and the laborers, for their respective contributions toward the finished shoes.
The amounts received by the individuals co÷perating with the entrepreneur are not, however, arbitrarily determined. The entrepreneur must bow to economic law, and give these individuals what free competition in industry sets as a proper reward for their respective services. ”

“ These twenty-four gentlemen administer that corporation as if it belonged to them. The amazing thing to me is that the people of the United States have not seen that the administration of a great business like that is not a private affair; it is a public affair.
I have been told by a great many men that the idea I have, that by restoring competition you can restore industrial freedom, is based upon a failure to observe the actual happenings of the last decades in this country; because, they say, it is just free competition that has made it possible for the big to crush the little. ”

“ Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. Protection from casual embarrassments, however, may sometimes be seasonably interposed. ”

“ In our efforts for recovery we have avoided, on the one hand, the theory that business should and must be taken over into an all-embracing Government. We have avoided, on the other hand, the equally untenable theory that it is an interference with liberty to offer reasonable help when private enterprise is in need of help. ”

“ The workman must at all times, be "free to sell his services in the open market," and the employer must be equally "free" to conduct his business as he saw fit. The days of the Mercantile System, when the state had regulated the industrial life of the entire community, were coming to an end. ”

“ No pretext of developing resources, diversifying industry, fostering weak interests, or protecting labor, could be made an excuse for commercial restrictions. It was ordained that business shall be left to voluntary enterprise, to the spontaneous impulses of private effort, and to stand upon the stable basis of its natural laws rather than upon the artificial support of regulative State legislation. ”

“ Only through full and free competition can free markets, free entry into business, and opportunities for the expression and growth of personal initiative and individual judgment be assured. The preservation and expansion of such competition is basic not only to the economic well-being but to the security of this Nation. ”

“ There must be these two liberties—liberty to create wealth, as the makers of it think best according to the light and experience which business has given them; and then liberty to distribute what they have created without unnecessary vexatious burdens. The comprehensive law of the ideal industrial condition of the world is free manufacture and free trade. ”

“ You may argue that great industrial companies are voluntary; the question is whether they are innocuous to the common weal, and we may add that this point is coming seriously to the front at the present time. The distinction, as Mr. Stephen remarks, drawn by the old individualism between State institutions and those created by private combination is losing its significance; and, what is more, public bodies are now continually encouraged to absorb private enterprise in all matters that directly concern the people. ”

“ We are properly devising ways whereby the corporation holds its property or privileges in trust, returning to government (or to society) a fair rental; that is, we are regulating the corporation and making it responsible to the people. What shall we do with the unattached man, to make him also responsible? Shall we hold the corporate plunderer to strict account, and let the single separate plunderer go scot free? ”

“ Liberal policy, therefore, aims at keeping the field of private enterprise in business as wide as possible. But in the general discussion of political or personal liberty in economic affairs, we have to consider how far and in what way the freedom of private enterprise needs to be limited or curtailed for the common good. We must solve that problem. For Liberals there is no inherent sanctity in the conceptions of private property, or of private enterprise. ”

“ Only after we have mastered the principles upon which American industry is based, shall we be in a position to solve the problems which arise directly from the nature of our economic organization.
46. INDUSTRIAL REFORM.—Our industrial life is so clearly based upon certain fundamental institutions, such as private property, free contract, and free competition, that an industrial "system" is said to exist. Certain great evils, notably poverty, have accompanied the development of this system. ”

“ In discussing this theme, we must not make an indiscriminate attack upon corporations. The corporation limited to its proper uses is one of the most valuable of the many useful creations of law. One class of corporations has played a most important and conspicuous part in securing the liberties of mankind. It was the municipal corporations—the free cities and chartered towns—that preserved and developed the spirit of freedom during the darkness of the Middle Ages, and powerfully aided in the overthrow of the feudal system. ”

“ As we have seen, laws are made regulating the freedom of contract, the conditions of labor, the conduct of business, methods of banking and transportation, etc. The terms under which competitive business may be conducted are laid down, and while freedom of industry prevails for every individual it is only on condition that he conforms to the rules of the game thus prescribed. But the conditions are not merely restrictive; sometimes they are designed to promote enterprise, as in the case of gifts, subsidies, protective duties, etc. ”

“ The objective of this Law is to promote and protect the exercise of free competition and the efficiency that benefits the producers and consumers; and to prohibit monopolistic and oligopolistic practices and other means that could impede, restrict, falsify, or limit the enjoyment of economic freedom. ”

“ For the purpose of self-protection, the laboring community throughout the country are banding together to resist this monopoly. The Patrons of Husbandry are moving in the same direction, all feeling assured that no time must be lost, and that the welfare of the country, the perpetuity of our free institutions, and the privilege of owning and enjoying the fruits of thrift and labor, without giving at least one-half of them to support these monopolies, demand prompt, united, and efficient action. ”

“ Every trade and business should be conducted by a society voluntarily formed of all those who choose to engage in it, electing and removing their own officials, determining their own policy, and co-operating by free arrangement with other similar bodies. ”

“ A new kind of prosperity demanded new laws and better organised courts of justice; and thus, it may be said, that the civil liberty, the political privileges, the national wealth, the ameliorated laws of modern Europe have all, in a great measure, proceeded out of commercial enterprise. Another confirmation of the truth, that industry is the mainspring of civilization, and has been in modern times, and during the period of the middle ages—for it was then that this new spirit announced itself—the grand regenerator of society. ”

“ It is not a company of merchants, having a monopoly, and doing whatever they please, whether right or wrong, that now hold the commerce of the world in their hands, but large communities of free merchants in all parts of the world, affiliated to manufacturers and producers equally free, each under strong temptation to do what may be wrong in the pursuit of his own interest, and the only security of doing right being to follow steady lights of information and economic science common to all. ”

“ Similarly, it might be argued that, where the ownership of the means of production and the administration of industry are unreservedly left to the capitalist class, this ' freedom of enterprise ' would result in a development of faculty among the captains of industry which could not otherwise be reached. We dissent from all these propositions, if only on the ground that the fullest development of personal character requires the pressure of discipline as well as the stimulus of opportunity. ”

“ Laws regulating private enterprises, substituting State control or initiative for individual action, encouraging or discouraging thrift, and above all interfering with free contracts, have much more than an immediate influence, for they become the prolific parents of many further extensions. ”

“ The practice of permitting the free holding of stock by corporations, and especially by holding corporations, has been undoubtedly harmful to the public, and to the public morals, and has been the main cause making possible the speedy acquisition of immense private fortunes. ”

“ The complete breakdown of all barriers which impede the free flow of commerce and the migration of capital and labor, the fullest and widest dissemination of industrial information, are necessary to the attainment of the individualistic ideal of free trade. ”

“ Suppose we, as settlers, finally succeed in making good, clear our land, and build up our farms, as expected by the company and hoped by ourselves. Will we then be free and independent of the company's control? We are afraid not. We will still have to transact our financial matters through the bank in which the company is interested, sell our products through the company's agency, etc., not because any law or stipulation would require this, but solely because the company, with all its business establishments, is here among us. ”