Public ownership

“ No social discovery has made individual honesty and civic virtue useless to good government.
The decision in any specific case is one dependent on local conditions, and the exact limits of public ownership are not fixed. Industry is changing so rapidly that new adjustments are made every year. The main outlines of public ownership, however, are now in large part determined. ”

“ It is the common property of all until it passes into [45] individual ownership, to be used for agricultural or other purposes, under fixed rules, a specific proportion of the product, or its equivalent, being turned into the common treasury, to prosecute public improvements and for other public purposes. ”

“ In the same country and under similar conditions otherwise than in respect to ownership and control, public ownership tends as a rule to make lower rates than private ownership. This tendency results from the fundamental difference of aim between the two systems. Private monopoly aims at dividends for stockholders; public ownership aims at service for all. A normal public institution aims at the public good, while a normal private monopoly aims at private profit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The most casual student of social questions has likewise seen the enormous fortunes that have been built up by the private ownership of public utilities. The larger part of all the stocks and bonds issued by public-service corporations are based upon franchises and not on private property. ”

“ Whether, under favourable circumstances and the rare public spirit of private owners, much can be done, or to any wide extent, so long as absolute individual ownership in land and ground values is allowed, seems to me very doubtful. ”

“ Another significant institution of civilization is the idea of ownership, the division of property into public property and private property and the right of the private property owner to do what he will with his property, subject always to the over-riding principle of eminent domain: the right of the community to expropriate private property for public uses, with or without compensation.
Another institution of civilization is the provision of public services in addition to means of communication and transportation. ”

“ Private ownership is constantly opposed to public interest, and the narrow point of view of immediate individual profit as the determining factor in all transactions obscures larger issues and stultifies collective action for the public good. ”

“ The public and unimpeached use of anything for a year in the city, or for five years in the country, or the private possession and domestic use for three years in the city, or for ten years in the country, is to give a right of ownership. ”

“ What is characteristic of Socialism is the joint ownership by all the members of the community of the instruments and means of production; which carries with it the consequence that the division of the produce among the body of owners must be a public act, performed according to rules laid down by the community. ”

“ We can now acquire landed property from the government, and this creates the most absolute ownership that can exist; but here again comes the question whether governments can do what is impossible to individuals? ”

“ In respect to public corporations, which exist only for public purposes, such as towns, cities, &c., the legislature may, under proper limitations, change, modify, enlarge or restrain them, securing, however, the property for the use of those for whom, and at whose expense, it was purchased. ”

“ The property may be appropriated by an act of the legislature, or the power of appropriating it may be delegated to private corporations, to be exercised by them in the execution of works in which the public is interested. ”

“ I cannot bring myself to believe that when the owner of property has by his industry, skill, and money made a certain piece of his property of large value to many, he has thereby deprived himself of the full dominion over it which he had when it was of comparatively little value, nor can I believe that the control of the public over one's property or business is at all dependent upon the extent to which the public is benefited by it. ”

“ Its powers are wholly derived from legislation. It possesses them for the convenience of business at the sufferance of the public. Its stock is widely owned, passes from hand to hand, brings multitudes of men into its shifting partnerships and connects it with the interests and the investments of whole communities. It is a segment of the public; bears no analogy to a partnership or to the processes by which private property is safeguarded and managed, and should not be suffered to afford any covert whatever to those who are managing it. ”

“ Corporations may, therefore, be very well said to be for public use, of which the property and privileges are yet private. Indeed, there may be supposed to be an ultimate reference to the public good, in granting all charters of incorporation ”

“ So I assert that private ownership, so called, is not a proprietary quality. It extends to and includes only the use; the absolute ownership of all land being, in fact, in the community composed of all individuals. ”

“ Is it not possible that the recent depression in the business world has been due, in considerable measure, to the shrinkage in the values ascribed to franchise and other intangible value in public service corporation property? ”

“ If two persons carry on a partnership, or own and manage property in common, complications arise, with which nevertheless the law can deal without calling in the aid of fresh conceptions. But what if there are fifty or a hundred joint owners? With such a state of facts legal principles and conceptions based on the type of individual ownership are scarcely competent to deal. How shall this multitude manage its common interests and affairs? ”

“ 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. ”

“ All property and all enterprises that now have, or subsequently shall have the character of a national public service or of a monopoly in fact, must become the property of the community.
The Nation shall ensure to the individual and to the family the conditions necessary to their development. ”

“ The kinds of business specifically enumerated bear no common analogy to each other except that they are all for pecuniary profit, and of strictly private character as distinguished from those to be carried on by quasi-public corporations authorized to exercise the right of eminent domain. ”

“ They are owned by private companies—are built and controlled by them; they are of public benefit, but not owned or controlled by the public or by the state, or local authority, as in the case of public highways. Their private owners can sell them, with all their franchises, rights, and privileges. The rules for their operation, rates of charges, and all other matters affecting their government, are exclusively under the control of the parties owning them. ”

“ The common element of all of them will be the common ownership of the means of production and management by social institutions, with the object of satisfying the common need whether that be the need of the State, the Municipality, or Co-operative Societies, instead of private ownership of the: means of production and private production for the market to secure private profit. ”

“ When private property "is affected with public interest" and is used in a manner to make it of public consequence, the public is in fact granted an interest in that use, and the owner of the property in question "must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has thus created." ”

“ It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form, which frees them from individual responsibility, and enables them to call into [543] their enterprises the capital of the public, they shall do so upon absolutely truthful representations as to the value of the property in which the capital is to be invested. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The power of corporations to take private property upon the theory of public need by the exercise of the right of eminent domain ought to be permitted, after the ascertainment by the state itself of the existence of such need. ”

“ Nature, or has conferred any franchise upon a corporation, under whatever conditions, the right of supreme control still remains with the natural owner, the public; and when the need arises, this control may be exercised. The rights of the owners and the contract obligations into which the public has entered should be regarded so far as possible; but when the public necessity demands, control on its behalf can always be exercised. ”

“ It held that counties, towns, cities, and villages are political or municipal corporations which, from their nature, are subject to the unlimited control of the legislature; that corporations such as banking, insurance, manufacturing, and trading companies were private corporations, the private advantage of the corporators being the ultimate as well as the immediate object of their creation, and the resulting benefits to the public being merely incidental ”

“ The leaders of the multitude, for the most part men belonging to the propertied classes who had either wasted their wealth or never possessed any, demanded the abolition of private ownership, first of land, then of movable wealth ”

“ A corporation maintaining a public highway, although it owns the property it employs for accomplishing public objects, must be held to have accepted its rights, privileges, and franchises subject to the condition that the government creating it, or the government within whose limits it conducts its business, may by legislation protect the people against unreasonable charges for the services rendered by it. ”

“ Our municipal monopolies are now taxing us that they may pay swollen dividends on millions of dollars of fictitious capital. It is quite time that the public recovered possession of the valuable franchises which are its rightful property, and managed them for its own benefit. ”

“ In order to show, therefore, the invalidity of the presumptions by which the institutions of bequest and inheritance are buttressed, I call up the perception that ownership of the managerial functions which are essential to the administration of capitalistic enterprise is a concession by society, for which there is plain historical ground, but that ground is not sufficient to justify recognition of such ownership as a natural right. ”

“ In the preamble they say, 'that the members of the society have, in a spirit of Christian love, agreed to unite in a communion of property, according to the rules and regulations specified.' The members renounce all individual ownership of property, present or future, real or personal, and transfer the same to three directors, elected by themselves annually; that they shall conduct the business of the society, take possession of all its property, and account to the society for all their transactions. ”

“ When certain strong men found themselves able to garner a larger share of property than their fellows, they rebelled against the communistic ownership of property, and the state, with the system of private ownership, was evolved, came into being to protect the private owners in their private ownership against the community, or the mass, which possessed no private property. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”