Private enterprise

“ 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 my considered opinion and I recommend that where the activi­ties of these government corporations can be taken over by private enterprise, and whenever their pioneering objectives have been basically accomplished, such corporations should be sold and transferred as soon as possible to private enterprise under reasonable terms and conditions, except those performing mainly social or governmental functions many of which can be converted into regular government offices or agencies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They show that size alone gives to giant corporations a social significance not attached ordinarily to smaller units of private enterprise. Through size, corporations, once merely an efficient tool employed by individuals in the conduct of private business have become an institution-an institution which has brought such concentration of economic power that so-called private corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Private enterprise has brought agriculture, manufactures, {235} and commerce to their present height, and is now developing them with increasing rapidity. Therefore, do not trust private enterprise. On the other hand, the State so fulfils its judicial function as to ruin many, delude others, and frighten away those who most need succour ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 role of government corporations in the realm of economic development lies essentially in undertaking ventures in new and untried fields where the risks involved may inhibit private enterprise.
In this sense, therefore, government corporations play a pivotal role in the attainment of our development objectives, particularly in the areas of production and industrial development and social amelioration. ”

“ Unlike private enterprise which quickly modifies its actions to meet emergencies—unlike the shopkeeper who promptly finds the wherewith to satisfy a sudden demand—unlike the railway company which doubles its trains to carry a special influx of passengers; the law-made instrumentality lumbers on under all varieties of circumstances through its ordained routine at its habitual rate. By its very nature it is fitted only for average requirements, and inevitably fails under unusual requirements. ”

“ I am still convinced that the American people, since 1932, continue to insist on two requisites of private enterprise, and the relationship of government to it. The first is a complete honesty at the top in looking after the use of other people's money, and in apportioning and paying individual and corporate taxes according to ability to pay. The second is sincere respect for the need of all people who are at the bottom, all people at the bottom who need to get work—and through work to get a really fair share of the good things of life, and a chance to save and rise. ”

“ It might distribute it among those objects of private enterprise which called for national patronage, in the form of subscriptions to the capital stock of incorporated companies, such as that of the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal, and other similar institutions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This then was the American tradition, that private enterprise manages better all that to which it IS equal. Anarchism declares that private enterprise, whether individual or cooperative, is equal to all the undertakings of society. ”

“ Conversely, when a flourishing partnership or similar private firm has gained an assured footing of good-will, in the way of any or all of the items enumerated under that term above, its lot, as prescribed by modern business exigencies, is to go up into a corporation, either by simple conversion into the corporate form or through coalition with other firms into a larger corporate whole. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has been noted in an earlier chapter that there unavoidably results a discrepancy, not uncommonly a divergence, between the industrial needs of the community and the business needs of the corporations. Under the regime of the old-fashioned "money economy," with partnership methods and private ownership of industrial enterprises, the discretionary control of the industrial processes is in the hands of men whose interest in the industry is removed by one degree from the interests of the community at large. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus the growing legal usage bases distinctions between private and semi-public corporations on their relation to public interest. This view practically assumes that the difference between private business and public business is only one of degree. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Corporations no less than individuals of course have rights which should be scrupulously respected by both our Federal and State legislators. But one defect in corporation legislation by Congress, as well as the States, has often been that it failed to make a sufficient distinction between what may be called private and public corporations. ”

“ It should not be forgotten that the agent of a private company is also a representative of that larger and more powerful corporation which we call the state. The private company can do no more than outline his duty and discharge him for dereliction; the public corporation not only prescribes his duty but imprisons or hangs him for neglect; the private company is itself but a creation of the state which exercises over it autocratic power while shirking responsibility. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If the national, state, or municipal government can in either of the above methods compel him to aid in building up and supporting private corporations, then private corporations are clothed with attributes of sovereignty, and all private citizens own and possess their property subject to the will of these corporations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Under the name of private corporations organizations have grown up, not for the perpetuation of a great charity, like a college or hospital, not to enable a company of citizens more conveniently to carry on a private industry, but a class of corporations unknown to the early law writers has arisen, and to them have been committed the vast powers of the railroad and the telegraph, the great instruments by which modern communities live, move, and have their being. ”

“ Sufficient has, however, been developed to demonstrate that neither potentially competing banking institutions nor competing railroad or industrial corporations should be subject to a common source of private control. ”

“ It provided political authority with capital enough to venture into the market place as manufacturer, distributor, financier, publisher, farmer, physician, employer, to the disadvantage of private entrepreneurs. It set the State up as the largest eleemosynary institution in the history of the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every public service capable of returning direct profit was in the hands of private companies, and the shares of the private companies were in the hands of the members of the Corporation, and the members of the Corporation were in the hands of the four most able and intellectual of their number, Councillors Sweater, Rushton, Didlum and Grinder, each of whom was a director of one or more of the numerous companies which battened on the town. ”

“ In America there are very few corporations which have private visitors, and, in the absence of such, the state is the visitor of all corporations.'
In no case or authority that we have been able to find has there been a definition of this right which would include the private right of the shareholder to have an examination of the business in which he is interested, and the right of discovery of the methods and means by which the agents of the corporation are conducting its affairs. ”

“ Again, the difference between private and public companies must be considered; a private company which employs a great mass of capital and large numbers of work-people—a concern which may cover a whole town or district—should in the public interest be subject to the same rules as a public company. Thirdly, in view of the amalgamation of industry, the linking up of company with company, there must be reconsideration as regards publicity in the case of subsidiary companies. ”

“ The Growing Field of Action by Corporations.—Until recently there has been comparatively little production in the hands of corporations great enough to be exempt from the same economic laws which apply to a blacksmith, a carpenter, or a tailor. Individual enterprise and generally free competition have prevailed. The state has not checked them and the great aggregations of capital to which we give the name "trusts" have not, in this earlier period, been present in force enough to check them. ”

“ You will find continually that private corporations, such as joint-stock banking companies, come to grief from not acting on this principle; and what holds of these small and, simple private administrations holds still more of the great and complex public administrations. ”

“ 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. ”