Back to Adam Smith

We are not so sure. Apart from bureaucrats, themselves now a sizable and influential stratum, the proposal might eventually find strong support by another group: business. The capital-starved utilities, the hounded oil companies, the profit-squeezed nuclear industry, the hamstrung coal companies, they will all continue to pay lip service to free enterprise, of course; but will they really prefer it to this giant new nipple on the federal sow?

* Mobil Chairman R. Warner has warned against sudden lifting of oil controls.

* In recent senate hearings on small business, a long row of panhandlers supplicated for more government aid, but only one businessman in the long procession (Mr D.J. Morroni of Denvers whom we are proud to have as a subscriber) told the senators what the businessman, small or large, really needs: "the government yoke removed from his neck."

*The banks that investigate everything but your sex life when you want to borrow a little money, pumped billions into New York City as it was building its astronomical deficit, and even now they are studying how others can save the city when it has roundly refused to save itself.

*Why should the airlines let you fly at half the present fares when they are cozily protected by the Civil Aeronautics Board? When some airlines recently cut their fees, the Justice Department clubbed them back into the Club with $35,000 fines. That was not good enough for Business Week. "The penalties," wrote this anti-business weekly for the feeble-minded, "should include jail terms as well."

In short, business tends to favor free competition for all the other businesses, but the government tit for itself.

Which is not really surprising. Adam Smith understood capitalism as a system which channels human greed into the maximum benefit for everybody, not as a system in which government makes fat cats fatter. The beauty of the free enterprise system is not that it makes entrepreneurs more moral - it doesn't - but that it creates wealth while protecting the consumer.