|
|
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shows that business leaders fought laissez faire, March 14, 2000
Butler Shaffer's scholarly interpretation of the political attitudes and actions most prevalent among America's business leaders in the two critical decades following World War I is uniquely satisfying. The author, a professor of law, reveals himself to be well grounded also in economics, history, and philosophy, as well as possessed of an insider's feel for the political agnosticism of large corporations and industry associations. Given his talents and his apt approach to the subject, Shaffer has made an important contribution to the literature. [Shaffer] clearly demonstrates that the postwar period was not, as commonly depicted, the final hurrah of laissez-faire. On the contrary, "with the war concluded, leaders from a number of industries undertook a campaign on behalf of a system of 'cooperation' and 'self-regulation' for American industry" (p. 28). In a virtual summation of his book, he writes, "World War I may not have made the world safe for democracy, but it did give encouragement to some business leaders that a system of 'business cooperation,' subject to legal enforcement by the government, could become a functional reality in order to make competition safe for business" (p. 28). The 1920s were marked by a political tug-of-war over business policy. On one side were corporate leadersand career politicians, such as Herbert Hooverwho saw in the War Industries Board the precise mechanism they craved to control competition and to force "order" on the economy. On the other side were advocates not of laissez-faire, but of so-called self-regulation. Trade association "codes of ethics," developed by most industries during or after the war, were intended to achieve identical goals through voluntary restraints on competition. The Harding and Coolidge administrations tended to be very receptive to the latter approach. The now-predictable result, of course, was that without enforcement authority, industry leaders spent their energy excoriating the "ten-percenters," who refused to cooperate, or trying to outlaw one example after another of "unfair competition." Almost every imaginable method of competition was attacked during the 1920s. The election of Herbert Hoover (derisively called "Wonder Boy" by Calvin Coolidge) and the subsequent crash of the stock market provided both a rationale and the support for business to regain the wartime mechanisms for controlling competition. One Hoover administration initiative after another garnered strong support from the business community, but as economic conditions worsened, the demands for intervention grew more radical. Then, with the worsening of the Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the support and the rationale both soared to new heights. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933, far from a program passed over the objections of business, was actually the culmination of fifteen years of special pleading by business leaders. Shaffer's book dispels any remaining doubts about its genesis as a plan endorsed and lobbied for by business. The facts and the quotations are numerous; their impact is overwhelming.
|
by Murray N. Rothbard
by Daniel Estulin
by Ron Paul
by Andrew P. Napolitano
