The Economic Power Syndrome; S. Petro

SYLVESTER PETRO SYNDROME NATURE goes its own way, follow ing laws of its own, shaped by forces in which human action passion, will, thought - is irrele vant. Man's laws and man's socie ties are something else. The works of Ludwig von Mises,summed up in the monumental Human Action, demonstrate more powerfully' than those of any other writer the role played by human will and human thought in the universe which af fects and is affected by human ac tion. Not everything is possible to human action. Nature goes its own way. In the generous realm of the possible, however, man's laws, his rationally directed values, make a difference; perhaps the difference. As a part of nature we Dr. Petro is Professor of Law, New York Uni versity. This article is reprinted by permission from the two-volume Toward Liberty series of essays in honor of Dr. Ludwig von Mise&' on his 90th birthday, September 29, 1971, published by the Institute for Humane Studies.

212 share the universal conatus, the striving to be. But our conatus is generic and undefined; we are more than the birds and the bees, or perhaps less, but different, any way. And our intelligence is cor respondingly different. We can kill ourselves, and we can err. More strangely still, we are ca pable through intellectual error of killing ourselves by policies which we believe necessary to our sur vival. I believe that what I call here the "economic-power syn drome" constitutes one of the most destructive combinations of moral and intellectual error that man kind has ever suffered, and I pro pose to disperse this dark syn drome with the aid of one of Pro fessor Mises' most brilliant con tributions to the formulation of sound social policy: his insistence upon a central role for the concept of consumer sovereignty.

1972 THE ECONOMIC-POWER SYNDROME 213 Anti-Business Bias in the u.s. For a hundred years, more or less, the policies of the United States have had a characteristi cally anti-business thrust, some times compelled, sometimes ·con doned, by dominant voices of popu lar opinion. For public opinion in this country has always been in fected to a degree by dread, dis trust, even hatred· of "big busi ness." Thus Mr. Nader and his raiders, J. K. Galbraith, Vance Packard, even Marcuse, are far from representing a new attitude. They express the same fear, the same suspicion, that brought about the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Act in the nineteenth century and the mountain of re strictive legislation and court deci sions of this century. In a word, what they fear and suspect is eco nomic power. The populist . antipathy toeco nomic power in general and to big business in particular has not swept all before it. Ambivalence among the. populists themselves, the achievements of American big business, and a persistent minority in favor of liberty and its political corollary, laissez-faire, have also influenced· our public policies. Poli ticians and bureaucrats have known, too, that they could have $300 .billion to spend each year only if the economy produced $700 billion to $1 trillion a year - an unattainable result without large scale economic activity. Hence they have been astute over the years to balance the Sherman Act and other anti-business laws with appropriations small enough to guard against absolute frustra tion of the need of businessmen for flexibility and freedom. Like wise they have been careful .to mitigate populist insistence upon confiscatory income taxation with many loopholes, and with taxes upon capital gains modest enough to guarantee the continued growth of capital. and the survival of the capital markets· upon which the progress .and well-being of the American economy rest.

However, the dominant trend in the public policies of this country has nevertheless been toward ever increasing regulation of business. Congress and the state legisla tures year by year add to the bur den of restrictive legislation. The courts, especially .the Supreme Court of the United States, zest fully enforce far beyond its letter and spirit all legislation limiting the freedom of businessmen; at the same time, they read virtually out of existence laws, doctrines, and principles which would tend to preserve to businessmen the rights and the freedom recognized in the classic common law. In so deciding, the courts leave little room for doubt of the phil214 THE FREEMAN April osophy underlying their decisions. Whether we speak of antitrust or labor-law decisions, or even of private-law decisions in which the common-law courts take sides against business, the same theme prevails: Economic Power - it is as much to be dreaded, and there fore to be confined, apparently, as the threat of conquest by enemies from abroad or of chaos by crimi nals from within.

Such views and policies, the works of Ludwig von Mises dem onstrate, are full of disastrous fal lacies. The person who follows Mises' argument emerges, on the contrary, with the conclusions that, far from being an object properly of fear and doom, econ omic power is in all ways good and wholesome; that there are few, if any, capabilities at once so in nocent of social harm and so pro ductive of social benefit; and that the fear of economic power which now threatens to tie up the econ omy in knots is the product of ig norance, confusion, and supersti-' tion. The Nature of Power Much of the confusion traces to conceptual complexity in the term "power" itself. The word "power," integrally associated with the prob lem of causation, refers basically to the capability of affecting re ality, of bringing about effects, changes, results. Some results are brought about by strictly indi vidual action, as when primitive man fells a tree with his bare hands or with a tool fashioned by himself. His will, his act, his power is the only human one in volved there. In society, things are different. In society, all power, whether of the economic or politi cal variety, rests upon cooperation.

This is true of the capacity of a criminal to compel a change in the location of money, from his vic tim's pocket to his own. Without the cooperation of all those sectors of society which feed, clothe, and arm him, the criminal is helpless to bring about the result he seeks - unless of course he does it with no aids other than those available to the bushman, in which case his power analyzes out as the same, equally modest and precarious. In society, and especially in re spect of operations of a certain scale, power of all kinds, to repeat, rests upon cooperative activity; and, more than that, cooperative activity resulting from a coinci dence of opinion. Although he was referring to only governmental or political power, David Hume was correct generally in relating power to opinion. One way or another, di rectly or indirectly, both economic and political power are founded in opinion.

Ortega y Gasset thought it nec19'72 THE ECONOMIC-POWER SYNDROME 215 essary, in The Revolt of the Masses, to distinguish in his dis cussion of governmental power be tween political aggression and po litical rule. Observing the plain fact that Napoleon's conquest of Spain obviously did not accord with the opinion of the Spanish people, he said: "It is necessary to distinguish between a process of aggression and a state of rule." The distinction, however, is both unnecessary and misleading; Napoleon could subjugate Spain only because its whole people, rela tive to the people of France from whom Napoleon derived his power, amounted to a minority. The same situation prevails between the peo ple of Russia and the people of Czechoslovakia today. The power of Russia to quell the Czech revolt was founded in the opinion of the Russian people, or at any rate of the .ruling maj ori ty of Russians, that it was better to support their government in its domination of the Czechs than to withhold such support. I dare say that the same phenomena of maj ority rule de termined the events in this coun try in the period 1861-65. The opinion of Northerners prevailed over the opinion of Southerners because there were more of them and they had more hardware. · It is important to observe the comprehensiveness and uniformity of the relationship between opinion and power. Within Spain dur ing the Napoleonic wars, or Czech oslovakia today, or the Southern States during the War between the States, the situation was not different in kind from the situa tion between those countries and the aggressors who subjugated them. Within each, the govern ment, resting upon the opinion of the majority, similarly subjugated nonconsenting internal minorities.

The government of Napoleon had to deal with recalcitrants not only in Spain but also in France; and the same was true within the Northern States in 1861-65 and is true today within Russia. The internal government of any state, in brief, while resting as long as it lasts upon the opinion of the consenting majority, im poses its will by force upon a non consenting minority. That is the specific nature of government power. I have had to emphasize, the point because it is common in our time to overlook this feature of political power, and because, in overlooking this obvious feature, much of the confusion relating to economic power rests. The sharp difference between economic power and political power does not reside in their respective foundations; both kinds of power rest in opinion. The significant dif ference between economic and po216 THE FREEMAN April litical power rests in the purely consensual .character of economic power as contrasted to the only partly consensual character of po litical power. For no businessman, qua businessman, can ever compel a nonconsenting minority to deal with him. It is the very essence of government, however, to impose the will of the majority upon the nonconsenting minority. The dif ference, then, lies not in the foun dations of economic power and po litical power but in their respec tive effects and modes of operation.

The productive power of any business has its beginning in the man or men who found it and who are able to convince others to in vest their capital and their talents in it. However, the business suc ceeds only if the consumers ap prove its production. In a market economy there is no way for a firm to compel anyone to deal with it or to purchase its goods and services. As Ludwig von Mises has said so often, the consumers daily vote for and against the products of American business. Those firms which gain the patronage of the consumers prosper; those which do not, lose ground. In rewarding those who best serve the consum ers, the profit system constantly insures that current allocation of resources which best suits the cur rent wishes of the community. It expands the assets of those firms endorsed by public opinion; it en hances their capacity to bid in the market for other factors of pro duction and thus to increase their economic power - by which I mean their power to produce.

The secret of the so-called am bivalence of American public pol icy toward big business resides in the phenomena just described. On the one side, mainly from "intel lectuals," we hear much about the abuses, the evils, the dark powers of big business to destroy small business, to exploit workers, .and to impose its will upon consumers. But these charges, however often made, and however well publicized, have only a limited effect, fre quently no more than the crackling of thorns under a. pot. They re sound hollowly against the pro digious fact that business grows big only because and to the extent that public opinion favors it with its voluntary purchases. More than that, if the polls are correct, Amer icans favor and admire big busi ness in "greater numbers than they do any other institution, including the government. However, since the anti-business opinion has an effect also, we emerge with fra.g mentary, inconsistent, and am15iva lent policies.

It is impossible to understand properly either the meaning of economic power or the real stand':' ing of business in the community 1972 THE ECONOMIC-POWER SYNDROME 217 without a full and accurate grasp of this fact of consumer sover eignty in the market economy. The late Mr. Adolph A. Berle, in many ways a learned man and a. keen observer of contemporary society, illustrated in his well-known writ ings a characteristic error, trac ing to inadequate grasp of con sumer sovereignty. Although year by year he grew more moderate in his criticisms of big business, yet, even in his latest book, Power (1969) he continued to hold to a confused view of economic power. He attributed to that power a species of capability, a capacity for decision and action which it simply does not possess. He spoke as though big business had un limited power in the disposition of resources, the direction of in vestment, choice of product, amount of production, and level of price. From others, such as J. K.

Galbraith, such a blunder might be expected. But Mr. Berle was a different case: he frequently dis played a genuine understanding of consumer sovereignty. For ex ample, in his latest book, he had this to say: In economic life, every decision made affects, in some way, every life in the modern world. This is the peculiar quality of economics. The im pact of economic-power decisions may be imperceptible or great, but it is al ways there. The· woman who chose nylon stockings instead of silk (a choice she still has, though nylon has clearly Yvon the campaign) affected the lives of silk growers in Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. Consumer Power Once one grasps the significance of the female preference for nylon hosiery, it is no longer possible to mistake the locus of ultimate power. The Dupont Company has power, of course, but it is only the same kind of power to propose, to offer, that everyone else has, in business and out. Business pro poses, the· consumer disposes. If she disposes favorably the busi ness prospers and may expand. If not, the business must mend its ways or retire from the field.

The business must do more than propose an attractive product. It must have the capability to de liver that product at an attractive price which still exceeds produc tion costs. When it demonstrates that capability, it demonstrates at the same time its social qualifica tion~ Profitability and social utility are two names for the same thing. The business that makes losses has abused the society in which it operates; the business that makes profits has served it; and, remark. able as it may seem, it follows tha t the higher the profit, the greater the service. Much current literature views the word "profit" and· its referent 218 THE FREEMAN April in reality _as downright obscene. Nevertheless, the facts are what they are. The firm that must sell below cost and which, therefore, experiences losses rather than profits, has done society in, and deserves to be penalized rather than praised. It has directed fac tors of production improperly, from the point of view of con sumers and society as a whole. It has engaged in a course of pro duction the full costs of which the consumers are unwilling to pay.

In refusing to pay those full costs and thus imposing losses upon the incompetent producer, the sover eign consumers redirect produc tion in a manner more to their liking. Literature of the "New Left" Current "new-left" -literature faithful to its mentors, Messrs. Galbraith, Packard, Marx, and Marcuse - rejects the foregoing analysis. It insists that economic power involves a form of compul sion even more obj ectionable than the physical compulsion exerted by gangsters or by the armed forces of the state. Professor Mises' prin ciple of consumer sovereignty, they say, is a pure myth; the fact is that the concentrations of eco nomic power in big business com pel the consumers by way of ad vertising to want _certain things and to fulfill those wants in ways which serve the interests of big business, not of the people. No conscious human being-with normal sensory equipment can fairly dismiss these charges out of hand. All media of communication bombard us constantly with com mercial exhortations, appealing to every aspect of human nature, from the most elemental to the most sophisticated, from the sub~ liminal to the most obvious and coarse. There -can be no doubt about it. Advertising has us all in siege. And its objectives are among others to expand, shape, and direct our desires.

The question, however, is whether, in what circumstances, and to what extent advertising succeeds. It will not do, in seeking an answer, to confine our attention to the claims of advertising agen cies and Messrs. Galbraith, et al. They beg the question; they do not resolve it. Condensed to its meaningful point, the charge is that, by adver tising, big business substitutes its will for that of the consumers, thus making the principle of con sumer sovereignty a mere myth. The fundamental weakness in the Galbraithian thesis is its dis regard of certain evident aspects of human nature. For better or for worse, mankind is so consti tuted as to preclude thesubstitu tion of one man's will for an1972 THE ECONOMIC-POWER SYNDROME 219 other's, except fragmentarily and temporarily, and then only by brute force, not by any other means. No matter how often per sons may be bombarded by an ap peal to buy Pepsodent, or. Colgate, or Crest, the actual decisions when they stand at the counter as to whether to buy toothpaste at all and, if so, which brand, must be made inside each person's mind. In all but the autonomous functions of the body, human beings must act, must choose, as Mises says, and their choices, their actions, proceed necessarily from within.

Our limbs and organs are all in ner-directed. Some weight might justly be ac corded the Galbraithian thesis in a socialist society, where control of all production and all media of communication were concentrated in the same men who controlled also· the physical power of society. In such a society the faculty of choice would still remain, but it would, so to speak, lack traction. It would have nowhere to go, like an automobile with bald tires on slick ice. The government control of all media, from the schools to television, would come close to brainwashing the public, and the lack of variety in··consumer goods would carry forward the demoli tion of practical choice. Consum ers would still retain their in destructible humanity; notwithstanding the brainwashing at tempts, they would still have wants and still have to make their own choices; but they would have little scope to exercise their power or fa«ulty of choice.

Even sO,however, traces of the sovereignty which is fully theirs in market economies would remain also in socialist societies,· for so long as man is man, he must choose if he is to live. So, in Rus sia today, there are shortages in some lines of consumer goods and surpluses in others. To that ex tent, the consumer remains king, even in Russia, though only in rags. In a market economy, the Gal braithian thesis makes no sense at all. The characteristic features of a market economy all tend toward providing traction for the faculty of subjective choice. Au thority to use physical force is confined to the state. The media of communication are free. The con sumer is encouraged on all sides to choose from a vast array of competing goods and services. American Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors must not only compete with each other; they have also to contend with Volks wagen, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Fiat. And all the motor com panies must compete with the air lines, the bus lines, the railroads, the subway systems, as well as the 220 THE FREEMAN April firms which encourage consumers to stay at home or enjoy them selves in their gardens. Even American Telephone and Tele graph competes. It urges us to call, not write. The much maligned soap manufacturers have only one thing to say: "Buy our product."

Ultimately, when one thinks things through, that is the basic message of all commercial adver tising. Advertising agencies claim, quite rightly, I believe (on the whole at any rate), a special ability to bring products and serv ices to the attention of consumers. Their job is to acquaint the public with the fact that such and such a product exists and to urge that it be given a try. From there on, the consumer and the product must fend for themselves. The product must make good on the claim made for it. Thus under stood, the specific function of ad vertising is to promote competi tion. Any other claim for it, whethey made by advertising men or Messrs. Galbraith et al., is mere puffing. If big business and its adver tising had the power attributed to it by Messrs. Galbraith et al., the avidity of men and women for ma terial goods would be a new phe nomenon, observable in human history for the first time only in the last fifty years or so. After all, big business is a new ,phe nomenon in the world, and adver tising agencies are still newer.

But is it true that men and women have grown remarkably desirous only in the last fifty or hundred years? The question answers it self. ,On the first page of'the first his tory book ever written, The His tory of Herodotus, recounting the wars between the Greeks and the Persians, the author reports that "according to Persians best in formed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel." How was that? Herodotus continues: They ianded at many places on the coast, and among the rest at Argos .... Here they exposed their merchan dise, and traded with the natives for five or six days; at the end of which time ... there came down to the beach a number of women, and among them the daughter of the king .... The women were standing by the stern of the ship intent upon their purchases, when the Phoenicians, with a general shout, rushed upon them. The greater part made their escape, but some were seized and carried off....

Anyone who has ever had the mis fortune to be in Macy's on a sales day will know that, whatever Galbraith says about it, big busi ness and advertising have not changed women very much in the intervening two thousand four hundred years.

1972 THE ECONOMIC-POWER SYNDROME 221 Nor men, either. Aristotle wrote only for men, it seems, in the Nichomache,an Ethics. In discuss ing and urging the virtue· of tem perance, he admonished against the development of voluptuary habits. More to the point, he fo cused upon the inner sources of luxurious desires. "It is absurd," he said, "to make external circum stances responsible, and not one self, as being easily caught by such attractions." There was hard ly any business around at all in Ancient Greece, let alone big business, and B.B.D. & O. were still in the far off future. Such too was the case in 17th century England, when John Locke took . note of the insatiable desires of mankind for material goods and services. He said: We are seldom at ease, and free enough from the solicitation of our natural or adopted desires, but a con stant succession of uneasiness out of that stock which natural wants or ac quired habits have heaped up, take the will in their turns; and no sooner is one action dispatched, which by such a determination of the will we are set upon, but another uneasiness is ready to set us on work.

The Galbraithian-SDS thesis is out of touch, not only with the most profound and persistent re alities of human nature, but also with the available statistical evi dence concerning the use of commercial advertising. Far from es tablishing the contention that big, concentrated business to some marked extent uses advertising to warp consumer desires, recent re searchers reveal: (1 ) that there is no significant correlation between industrial concentration and ad vertising; and (2) that there is in deed a contrary tendency, with ad vertising expenditures tending to rise as industrial concentration decreases. Sources of Misunderstanding I must deal more briefly with the two remaining major sources of. misunderstanding which make up the "economic-power" syndrome - (1) the belief that economic power can buy political power or that, at any rate, (2) economic power can shape the political opin ions of the community more or less at will.

The first of these can be dis patched fairly readily. Certainly it is true that public servants at every level of government are "for sale," as every person is, for that matter. The question is, however, in what medium of exchange do they do business? In contemporary repres.entative government, the medi urn of exchange is votes. While the wealthy and the big businessmen could and do bid vig orously in the medium of exchange which they are well supplied with, 222 THE FREEMAN April namely, money, the sad fact from their point of view is that they are not very extensively supplied with votes - and votes are what count. If Tocqueville was correct, this situation has prevailed throughout American history. Writing in 1840 or so about Amer ica, he said: "At the present day the more affluent classes of so ciety have no influence in political affairs; and wealth far from con ferring a right, is rather a cause of unpopularity than a means of attaining power."

One may argue that while dol lars are not convertible into gold, they are convertible into votes, and this is to some extent correct. But only to about the same extent as it would be correct to point out that dollars can buy officials di rectly. In both cases dollar con vertibility is only marginal: a drunken Bowery derelict will sell his vote for a bottle of whiskey; a faithless official will take a bribe here and there. But the wealthy and the big businessmen are unable to! buy public policies with their dollars. If they seek tariffs, exclusive franchises, import quotas, and other such measures, they do not succeed· unless the measures they seek coincide with public opinion. Only public opinion to the effect that such policies are good· for the country on the whole will secure their adoption. And when the pub lic is convinced of the merits· of a particular policy, dollars are in capable of affecting the result one way or another.

Subsidies for the poor, for com muters, for farmers, for the mari time industry, and pretty soon for everybody else in the country all these are traded by politicians in return for votes, not in return for dollars. When industry repre sentatives go to Washington for tariffs and import quotas, they are told to return only when they can show some political currency. If they return with trade-union rep resentatives, men who are thought to command votes, and if the union men join in seeking protectionist policies, the tariffs and quotas are forthcoming; otherwise not. The current situation with re spect to tax exemption for interest on municipal bonds makes the point rather well. By and large such bonds are purchased by more or less wealthy people. But if their interest were to be consulted ex clusively, there is no doubt that the tax exemption would be re moved. The exemption continues because the citizens in lo~al com munities, desiring local govern mental services, such as public schools, insist upon it. And they insist upon it because, in their (ultimately incorrect) opinion, tax1972 THE ECONOMIC-POWER SYNDROME 223 exempt municipal bonds reduce for the taxpayers the costs of the services in question.

For the disinterested observer, his reason unimpaired by passion and prej udice, there is no need to go on at length with this point. It is sufficient to notice that over the past hundred years in this country, the steady trend of legis lation has been against the wealthy and the successful businesses. David Hume was correct in stating as the first principle of govern ment that all public policies are founded in opinion. On the other hand, in declaring that govern ment in capitalist countries serves exclusively the interests of the wealthy, Karl Marx was as wrong as he was when he said that prof its come exclusively from the ex ploitation of labor and that in creasing poverty for the masses is the inevitable consequence under capitalism. An Argument Omitted Strangely· enough, the victims of the economic-power syndrome have left almost completely unde veloped an argument which, if they could sustain it, would carry the day for them. They could be arguing that, while it is true that all government rests upon opinion - on political votes rather than dollars - the wealthy and· the big businessmen control .government by controlling the political and so cial ideas of the citizenry. Why is this argument so rarely made?

I offer as a possible answer the fact that the argument is so pat ently at odds with reality. If we confine ourselves to reality we cannot help observing a tremen dous disproportion in all the areas of intellectual communication and opinion-forming. A vast majority of instructional personnel from grade-school through graduate school roams somewhere left of center. Most newspaper colum nists, moreover, consider them selves leftist-liberals and spend little time vaunting the virtues of capitalism. For every best-selling author on the right, there are at least ten on the left. Foundations established by the wealthy spend infinitely greater sums promoting the welfare state than they do in defending capitalism. Professor Paul Samuelson has become a wealthy man as author of an eco nomic text sympathetic with the welfare' state, if not with social ism. Galbraith's books become au tomatic best sellers. The works of Ludwig von Mises, the most pow erful protagonist of capitalism in print, do not sell in sufficient quantities to feed him.

Let us now approach the prob lem more systematically. The con tention that economic power trans lates into political power by way 224 THE FREEMAN April of political indoctrination of the masses would have to establish, in the first place, that the wealthy and the big businessmen are them selves uniform exponents of a par ticular policy or set of policies, for the first requirement in any indoctrination is a doctrine. But the argument then stumbles at the threshold. The one outstand ing and apparent fact about the wealthy and the big businessmen and the institutions they found and support is ideological diver sity. If we place H. L. Hunt on the right, as is customary these days, where shall we place the Rocke fellers, the Kennedys, the Fords? And should we place all the· Rocke fellers in the same category? Where exactly would you place the Kennedys, father and sons? There is no common ideology among the wealthy and the big businessmen, just as there is no common ideology among the mas ses. There are only vague, half formed, often contradictory opin ions, which veer one way now and 'another way again. They spend their money accordingly. The foundations and institutions at tacking capitalism and free enter prise and the profit system seem to have plenty of money. As far as I havebeen able to tell, the few foundations and colleges which promote free enterprise rarely, if ever, are wealthy.

Recapitulation I have tried to make three points: 1. Economic power, like political power, rests upon favorable opin ion, the sovereign opinion of con sumers; unlike political power, however, it produces wealth in the form of goods and services and has no compulsory capabilities. The consumers reward with profits those firms which serve the com munity and penalize with losses those firms which do not. 2. There is no way at all in a mar ket economy for business. to sub stitute its will for that of the con sumers in respect of demand for goods and services; it. proposes, the consumer disposes; the con tention that advertising can sup plant the will or implant desires in consumers conflicts with every thing we know about human na ture as well as with the external facts of life in the market econ omy. 3. Economic power is not convert ibleinto political power. The medium of exchange owned by the possessors of economic power is money; the medium of. exchange in politics is the vote. Dollars are produced by economic capability; votes flow in accordance with po litical opinion. Unless the holders of dollars represent interests which coincide with the independ ently derived opinions of the voters, the interests of the wealthy are doomed.

1972 THE ECONOMIC-POWER SYNDROME 225 I have in this brief paper failed to deal with a number of features of the economic-power syndrome: the relations between big business and small business, the relations between business and employees, the Jeffersonian ideal of a society composed of farmers and small tradesmen, the notion that the managerial revolution heralded by Berle and Means and by Burnham has somehow incapacitated big business for the service of the community. With respect to these I can say only that there was not space. My silence on these points is not to be taken as an admission of their strength. On the contrary, I believe it a simple matter, on the basis of the points which I have dealt with, to demonstrate equal weaknesses in those which I have not had the opportunity to discuss here. I wish to say but one thing more, and to quote a statement which sums up what I have had to say here. First, I would not have my remarks interpreted' as an apologia for the wealthy or for big .business as such. My main in terest has been to clarify thought on the subject of economic power.

Secondarily, my interest is in con sumer sovereignty and its princi pal servant: the system of free competition emerging from those two common-law institutions, private property and freedornof con tract. Ludwig von Mises has sum med up a large part of what I have been trying to say. As he puts it: The rich, the owners of the already operating plants have no particular class interest in the maintenance of free competition. They are opposed to confiscation and expropriation of their fortunes, but their vested in terests are rather in favor of meas ures preventing newcomers from challenging their position. Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the inter ests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow and whose ingenuity will make the life of coming generations more agreeable. They want the way left open to further economic improve ments. They are the spokesmen of progress ....

It is manifestly contrary to the in terest of the consumers to prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from ex panding the sphere of their activities up to the limit to which the public ap proves of their conduct of business by buying their products. Here again, the issue is who should be supreme, the consumers or the government? In the unhampered market the be havior of consumers, their buying or abstention from buying, ultimately determines each individual's income and wealth. Should one vest in the government the power to overrule the consumer's choices? t) MOST of the self-styled liberals of the present day would be aston ished to learn that the father of the welfare state that they so much admire was none other than the fervent antiliberal and advo cate of "blood and iron", Otto von Bismarck. "He was the first statesman in Europe to devise a comprehensive scheme of social security, offering the worker insurance against ac cident, sickness, and old age. This Bismarckian 'socialism' later be came a model for every other coun try in Europe. It represented in part the paternalistic function of the state which Bismarck, as a con servative, had always held."1 Bismarck's scheme of compul sory insurance went into effect in Henry Hazlitt is well 19town to Freeman readers as author, columnist, editor, lecturer, and practitioner of freedom. This article will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming book, The Conquest of Poverty, to be published by Arlington House.