Neil H. Jacoby Quotes

During the recent nineteen-year period from 1950 to 1969, corporate profits, both before and after taxes, formed a shrinking proportion of the national income.

Because exporting and importing nations have conflicting goals, and the interests of individual countries within each group are not identical, United Nations efforts to regulate the industry have not been successful.

Reformist critics comprise the majority of contemporary critics of American business. To a considerable extent, their demand is not for new or stricter governmental controls, but for attitudes and policies on the part of corporate leaders that are more responsive to public needs. Our society needs reformist critics and the author counts himself among them.

Political influence is exerted differently in the industrialized countries than in the agrarian, preindustrial societies. In the former, demands by individuals and special interest groups normally reach the political system before the enactment of legislation. Indeed, legislation is usually a consequence of such demands. Bribery of officials by businessmen is considerably lessened by the existence of open channels for the exercise of political influence.

Motivated partly by the decision to convert its navy from coal to oil, the British government ultimately acquired a major interest in what was then the only oil-producing company in the Middle East.

The Multinational corporationis, among other things, a private ‘government,’ often richer in assets and more populous in stockholders and employees than some of the nation-states in which it carries on business. It is simultaneously a ‘citizen’ of several nation-states, owning obedience to their laws and paying taxes to their treasuries, yet having its own objectives and being responsive to a top management that may be located in another nation. Small wonder that some critics see in the multinational corporation an instrument of irresponsible private economic power, or even an agent of economic ‘imperialism’ by its home country. Others view it as an international carrier of advanced management science and technology, an agent for the global transmission of cultural values, bringing closer the day when a common set of ideals will unite mankind.

The multinational corporation is, beyond doubt, the most powerful agency for global economic unity that our century has produced. It is fundamentally an instrument of peace. Its interest is to emphasize the common goals of peoples, to reconcile or remove differences between them. It cannot thrive in a regime of international tension and conflict. The instrumentality of multinational business is man’s best hope of achieving political unity on this shrinking planet.

Because conduct judged improper or illegal in one culture may be considered quite proper—even unavoidable—in other cultures, we have been chary of making moral judgments. Thus, we have sought to avoid the twin pitfalls of arrogant ethnocentrism and moral absolutism.

Whenever any thought or idea or moral imperative is transferred from one society to another an important question is whether that which is transferred is freely sought by the recipient or is, to one degree or another, forced down his throat. Does the transference occur freely through reading or the reports of visitors to other lands, i.e., does it occur as a voluntary importation by one society of what another has developed or found, or does it occur through the coercion of the bayonet or propaganda?

Because internal corruption is endemic to the communist system, it ineluctably conditions privileged elite to the habits of corruption in their external relations with other communist officials in the Eastern bloc countries and with the Western and Japanese businessmen who negotiate with the state enterprises.

Lubrication payments are not subject to a going rate. They are usually determined by what the traffic will bear. The usual way for a government official to extract a payment is by threatening obstruction or delay in carrying out his official duties… Large political payments are rarely transferred directly by a principal to an upper echelon official; rather, a middleman is used. He may be a professional ‘fixer’ who is himself a low-level government functionary; more often he will be a member of the same family as the high-level recipient.

How did it come about that only a few international oil companies held concessions to all of this region Middle East at the end of World War II? The answer lies in the bitter struggle of the United States government to gain an entrance for its nationals into the British-dominated Middle East, a struggle which very significantly shaped the structure of the industry as it emerged from World War II.

A foreign oil industry consisting mainly of private multinational companies competing in open markets has unique values to the Western World. Profit-motivated firms have proven to be better adapted to accept long-term risks and to allocate investment multinationally than have politically motivated government agencies.

But beginning in the 1960’s, an adverse tide of public opinion began to rise against business… Frustration over the [[w:Vietnam War |Vietnam War added fuel to the fires of discontent. Suddenly, consumerism, stock-holderism, racial equalitarianism, antimilitarism, environmentalism, and feminism became forces to be reckoned with by corporate managements. For the most part, they replaced the classical ‘isms’— socialism, Communism, syndicalism, fascism—as the main driving forces seeking the reform of the American business system.

Private business investment is inherently superior to governmental aid as an instrument of development because it combines transfers of managerial and technical assistance with that of capital.