A Stand of One's Own; D. Warmbier

He sat next to me on my flight back to Detroit from Kennedy In ternational, .a trimly-built gentle man about 45 years of age, with gray hair and gold-rimmed glasses. We began conversing on the AFTRA strike, then in its second day. I found my traveling companMr. Warmbier is a student at Michigan State University. 470 OF ONE'S OWN DONALD WARMBIER ion to be the owner of an advertis ing agency, a self-made man who through long years and hard work secured for his firm numerous ac counts for the producing of TV and radio commercials. This pro duction had been halted by the strike, however, and his firm was experiencing losses. He told me of those losses, incurred because of an unforeseeable strike to which he was not a party, without re sentment, as if the bearing of such risks were a part of the standard operational procedure of his pro fession. And so it is. For the en trepreneur works without senior ity, tenure, or unemployment com pensation, deriving income when his firm earns profits, suffering if it doesn't. And while that day's news paper accounts of the AFTRA strike told of the wages foregone 1967 A STAND OF ONE'S OWN 471 by the striking employees, the losses of an entrepreneur went un mentioned.

Our discussion turned to Eng land, from where my companion h!ld j Ugt l'~tul'ned a.£ter the produc tion of several TV commercials. England seemed to him a stifling and suffocating place, in spite of the recent creative outbursts of popular music there. He saw the current flow of British talent into the music and entertainment fields as a direct consequence of the dry ing up of other forms of entre preneurial opportunity. Heavy pro gressive taxes have left entertain ment one of the few fields in which budding entrepreneurs can acquire the seed capital needed to launch new ventures. My companion recalled his own climb from a tar-paper shack in Kentucky, and how much more dif ficult punitive taxes made it. "The government takes 60 per cent of my income," he said. Here was the type of··man politicians put out of their minds when they endorse soak-the-rich taxation, the entre preneur of self-made means who must overcome such onerous bur dens if he is to. succeed.

We were approaching for land ing as I asked my companion a final question: Why, with all the unfore seeable risks, the personal losses, and the burdens of government taxation, did he decide to go into business for himself, to become an entrepreneur?· The answer came quickly, without pause for thought, as if he were stating a self-evident axiom: "I'd rather run a popsicle stand of my own than work for some government bureau." ~ The Business Climate "BUSINESS" is a product of civilization and it cannot exist for long in the absence of a specific constellation of conditions, chiefly moral, which support our civilization. The economic ingredient in the constellation is, as we shall see, free competition. But free competition cannot function unless there is general acceptance of such norms of conduct as willingness to abide by the rules of the game and to respect the rights of others, to maintain professional integrity and professional pride, and to avoid deceit, corruption, and the manipulation of the power of the state for personal and selfish ends.

W I L H ELM ROE P K E , Economics of the Free Society POST MORTEM ON The Lister Centennial EDWARD P. COLESON FORGETTING anniversaries can be embarrassing. This time, almost everybody's face should be red, except mine. We just overlooked the centennial of one of the truly outstanding events in human his tory. Now we'll have to wait an other hundred years to celebrate right. It's the principle of the thing that bothers me, not just a teacher's sadistic urge to flunk everyone for forgetting some .date that I happened to remember. One hundred and two years ago this month an unknown Scottish surgeon made one of those funda mental discoveries of the ages, one to be ranked along with the discovery of fire, the wheel, the smelting of metals, electricity, Dr. Coleson is Professor of Economics at Spring Arbor College in Michigan. 472 and atomic energy. But for the work of Joseph Lister and other well-nigh forgotten benefactors of mankind, many of us would have died in infancy as millions of others have died over the millen nia of human history and as mul titudes continue to die in the backward areas of the world even today. Truly, it may be said that "never were so many indebted to so.few for so much."