Private business

“ A growing sense of personal responsibility both on the part of those who suffered from existing conditions and on the part of those who profited by them was paving the way for a speedy application and a willing acceptance of a system of conservative public regulation of private business in which careful consideration would be given to the rights of all persons. ”

“ His business being a useful one, it is the interest of the public that the ordinary motives should exist for carrying it on, and that neither law nor opinion should prevent an operation beneficial to the public from being attended with as much private advantage as is compatible with full and free competition. ”

“ In discussing these problems, however, we must remember that wealth production and distribution takes place in modern society under conditions imposed by the social order in which we live; these were defined as competition, private property and personal liberty. If any modifications of the processes of distribution were desired, it would undoubtedly be necessary to alter these fundamental institutions. ”

“ Those most generally known are business corporations; and though many of them are very large, legally they are private corporations. A railroad corporation, though performing a public service, nevertheless is a private corporation. ”

“ Every practical economic problem that confronts us calls in some degree for the exercise of state activity. It is necessary for us then, if we are to render sound judgment on these questions, to have a clear opinion as to the proper sphere of government action, as to how far the State should interfere in the economic activities of private individuals. We cannot do better than to state first the main functions of a modern state. The modern industrial system, as we saw in the first section, is based upon certain fundamental institutions—personal liberty, competition, and private property. ”

“ On the one hand, the approved methods of corporation finance may in some measure be resorted to by a private firm, Without formal conversion of the concern into the corporate form; and on the other hand, an incorporated company may continue to carry on its business after the manner usual with privately owned concerns. ”

“ On the other hand, under private ownership, the best professional talent is employed, at salaries unheard of in public office; and all the latest inventions and improvements are at once utilized, giving the public up-to-date service.
The active, modern business man, keenly alive to the requirements necessary to ensure profit and success, perceives at a glance the evils and mischievous results that would infect everything carried on under this Socialistic plan. ”

“ To effect this, corporations have been created in most of the states and granted such liberal corporate powers, without respect to the nature of the business to be conducted, and with terms and privileges so favorable, that private enterprise without large capital cannot compete with them. ”

“ It remains to be seen how long the community will suffer itself to be the victim of an abstract definition.
“It will be readily conceded that a corporation is strictly and really private when it is authorized to carry on such a business as a private citizen may carry on. ”

“ I have made it a point to give first place to private enterprise and to transfer those activities formerly under State rule to autonomous enterprises in which the State has an interest. They are run by business men along business lines as business institutions. The State's principal function in them is to protect the native employes. The gold mines at Kilo are an example. ”

“ In Looking Backward the entire social process is made an expression of service. Service is a matter of course, not of compulsion. No business is so fundamentally the public’s business as the industry and trade on which the livelihood of the public depends.X-29 Therefore, to intrust industry and commerce170 to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly “similar to that of surrendering the functions of political government to kings and nobles for their personal glorification.” ”

“ It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition. ”

“ There is no guarantee that, if other guardians of capital were appointed, the public would be better served.416 Modern industry has long ago proved the administrative superiority of private enterprise in commercial transactions; and all social functions that admit of it will gradually pass into private management, always excepting the great theoretic functions in which combined action will ever be necessary. ”

“ It is this theme, coöperation in industry, that I desire to develop.
We must ask ourselves at the outset certain fundamental questions:
First, what is the purpose of industry? Shall we cling to the conception of industry as an institution, primarily of private interest, which enables certain individuals to accumulate wealth, too often irrespective of the well-being, the health, and the happiness of those engaged in its production? Or shall we adopt the modern viewpoint and regard industry as being a form of social service, quite as much as a revenue-producing process? ”

“ This view of the development challenge underlines in each and every case our basic economy policies, particularly those governing the role of private enterprise in the economy. There have been questions raised as to the role of private enterprise. ”

“ The argument supposes the corporation to have been originated for the management of an individual concern, to be founded upon contract between individuals, having private trade and private profit for its great end and principal object. ”

“ Because private enterprise really meant more, therefore the Government said more, and the very defining of the work and circumscribing of its sphere made the results sounder, more lasting, and more substantial. ”

“ We hear much about quasi-public corporations, and public opinion has gone a long way in taking away from the owner of public-service corporations the right to manage his own property, to name his own rates or prices, to decide about his methods, and has imposed on him the responsibility of providing safe and adequate public service from his private means, but so far has exerted little influence upon the men who have to make the quasi-public corporation of use to the public. ”

“ It is clear that corporations created for quasi public purposes, clothed for that reason with the ultimate power of the state to take private property against the will of the owner, hold their corporate powers as carriers in trust for the fairly impartial service of all the public. ”

“ The undertaking by the State or the Municipality, or other units of social life, of various departments of industry, such as the railways, telegraphs, post-offices, is a definite assertion that, in the supply of the common services rendered by these industries, the competition of private interests cannot be relied upon to work for the public good. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whereas the organization of feudal economic life rested upon an elaborate system of binding customs, the organization under the system of private enterprise has rested upon the self-interest of the property owner-a self-interest held in check only by competition and the conditions of supply and demand. ”

“ The employers talk about "private enterprise," as if there were anything private about modern enterprise. Its combines are as big as many commonwealths; and things advertised in large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy. ”

“ The absorption of private industry will be gradual. The public ateliers will all be united from the start [120] into a grand federation, and will form a mutual insurance company, so that the losses of one may be made good by the profits of others. ”

“ Who is to say how private enterprise would come out if it tried its hand at State work? Those who have had most experience of joint-stock companies and their management, will probably be least inclined to believe in the innate superiority of private enterprise over State management. ”

“ Over against all the ownership rights which do and should accrue to such manager, social responsibilities on the part of the management arise and develop with every stage in the progress of the business. These responsibilities are obligations to coöperators in the business, and to the society more remotely affected by the business. These obligations fix the ethical limits of ownership, and define the duties incumbent on proprietorship. ”

“ PART IV—AMERICAN POLITICAL PROBLEMS A. SOME ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT CHAPTER XXVII PUBLIC INTEREST IN BUSINESS: REGULATION 322. NECESSITY OF PUBLIC INTEREST IN BUSINESS.—Although individuals carry on business primarily for their own ends, the economic activities of men affect not only themselves, but the community as well. If every individual voluntarily confined his attention to those forms of business which strengthened the community as well as adding to his own prosperity, there would be little need for laws regulating the conduct of business. ”

“ In our municipal life, for example, it is the aroused interest and zeal of the best business community for better government and better conditions that can alone produce important results. Happily, all over the country we find chambers of commerce, boards of trade, merchants' associations, and other bodies of men of practical business affairs, taking their stand for the transaction of public business upon high standards of character and efficiency. ”

“ PUBLIC UTILITIES AND PUBLIC OWNERSHIP The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the nature of public utilities, the various methods of regulating them, and the question whether they ought to be owned by the government.
Ordinary business is regulated by competition. The Problem.—In the case of most ordinary business enterprises the factor which secures reasonable prices and good service to the customer is competition. The customer who finds that prices are high or that service is poor at one grocery store stops trading there and goes somewhere else. ”

“ Now, if for this conception of a central Government, we substitute that of a body of persons occupied in industrial pursuits, of whom each adds in his private capacity to the common store, we at once obtain an approximation to the actual condition of a civilized mercantile community, from which approximation we might easily proceed into still completer analysis. ”

“ What is needed now is not the multiplication of government reports, but corporate industry, the formation of land companies, development companies, irrigation companies, any kind of corporation that will call out private capital from its hiding places, offer employment to millions and start the wheels moving again. ”

“ A corporation which derived its profits from public franchises, or from a business transacted in many different states, found the purchase of a local or state machine well within its means and well according to its interests. ”

“ The state expresses the cooperative or mutual-veto will of that part of society which is politically organized for this purpose. Private property expresses the individual will of the several private owners, or of the private chief, whether patriarch, pope, suzerain, boss, or industrial monopolist, who is at the head of the particular institution. The sociological view, being strictly inductive, does not impart to the theory of the state that which is potential and ideal, but only that which is actual and historical. ”

“ Public management will begin in those branches where the difficulties are smallest. Publicly managed enterprises will originally represent kind of oases linked with private enterprises by the laws of exchange of commodities. ”

“ The difference between private and public ownership, it seems to me, is mainly in the natural selection of those most competent to foresee the future and to direct labor into the most productive channels, and the greater poignancy of the illusion of self-seeking under which the private owner works. ”

“ As an interested party to any condition of business, labor also is claiming the right to be heard. The public in its direct dependence on certain classes of corporations for many of its necessities and most of its conveniences is also interested in the proper conduct of those businesses. ”

“ A clipped and regulated private ownership—a private company, for example, with completely published accounts, taxed dividends, with a public representative upon its board of directors and parliamentary powers—may be an infinitely more honest, efficient, and controllable public service than a badly elected or badly appointed board of governors of officials. ”

“ The world has progressed, or retrogressed, as the most powerful interests at any time adjusted the institutions and customs governing wealth production to their own advantage. As the controlling interests in our present scheme are the business interests, it is the business man, not the workman, who directs industry and determines its policy as well as the general policy of the nation in which it operates. ”

“ Their Report is of the first importance as offering a policy for attenuating private property in capital in the important group of industries in which private ownership, in one form or another, is likely for some considerable time to continue, and a valuable service would be rendered by any one who would work out in detail the application of its principle to other trades. ”

“ We therefore demand a strong National regulation of inter-State corporations. The corporation is an essential part of modern business. The concentration of modem business, in some degree, is both inevitable and necessary for national and international business efficiency. ”