Neil H. Jacoby Quotes

The largest corporations, like companies of lesser size, are a changing rather than a static group. Their annual turnover rate reflects the rise or decline of management and the vagaries of business fortune. Of the hundred largest industrial corporations in 1909, only thirty-six remained on this list in 1948. And, of the top hundred companies in 1948, only sixty-five continued to hold this ranking in 1968.

The American credo is one of faith in institutional pluralism and of mistrust of large size and concentrated power, political or economic. The growth of giant institutions has always been viewed with apprehension, even though it has been for the most part the natural product of rising populations and income, and of technological changes that created economies of larger scale.

Even the population of business enterprises does not provide a comprehensive measure of ‘entrepreneurship’ in the United States because it excludes farmers, professionals, and other persons devoting at least part-time to selling their services in markets and who have neither an established place of business nor employees. A conservative estimate of the ‘entrepreneurial’ population is given by the number of individual income tax returns filed reporting income from self-employment. An estimated 11.1 million persons did so for 1968, one for each 18 persons in the United States.

The growth of the British company population was not interrupted, as it was in the United States, by the economic depression of the 1930’s and World War II. By the middle 1960’s, the United Kingdom was more densely populated with companies in relation to its human population than was the United States, although the reverse had been true in 1935.

At the end of 1968, the United States contained about 1.6 million active, profit-seeking corporations and about 200 million people—one corporation for each 126 persons.

In assessing business performance, we must keep in mind that ours is a pluralistic society. Indeed, the maintenance of pluralism by the diffusion of power among diverse institutions is itself a national goal. In such a society, each institution tends to specialize in the performance of those tasks in which it has a comparative advantage. The society is a highly complex system of interacting subsystems and institutions, in which the performance of each is affected by that of others. Hence, the business corporation should be assessed primarily with reference to the performance of its unique function of production, taking into account the effects of other institutions, such as governments and labor unions, upon its performance; no institution in a pluralistic society should be evaluated in isolation.

The central them of Humanistic Marxism is the replacement, in the economy, of authoritarian penalties and material incentives with democratic processes and moral incentives…Great stress is laid upon an egalitarian distribution of income and wealth. Everyone is expected to perform some physical work… Corporations are maintained as state-owned facilities under joint government-worker control. Market competition and profit motivation are blunted or obliterated. Authoritarian political methods, officially shunned, are used in some degree to stifle dissent and to enforce industrial discipline provided by market competition in the United States.

The Hippies are nonviolent anarchists who withdraw from the mainstream of society into their own communes. They are apolitical, libertarian, anti-industrialist, and essentially parasitic upon society. They have a nostalgic yearning for the smaller, simpler social orders of the past… Feeling and intuition are claimed as the source of their attitudes rather than reason and intellect.

Utopian critics reject both capitalism and authoritarian socialism and seek to establish new social orders based upon different human values.They believe that human nature can be radically changed. Individualistic striving for material gain is to be replaced by cooperative efforts to elevate the moral and cultural character of society. Wealth and income are to be shared according to need rather than according to productivity—an ideal not yet realized in any of the socialist countries. American-style capitalism and Soviet-style socialism equally err, they contend, in having hierarchical structures and in stressing material rewards; the difference between them are not significant.

Although the Marxist antithesis to the capitalist thesis has been vigorously advanced for more than a century, it has never gained significant support in the United States. Marxist voices have, during recent years, been drowned out by the complaints of the Reformers, on the one hand, and of the Utopian critics, on the other.

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.

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.

An institution is likely to be more searchingly appraised if attention is focused at the outset upon its faults rather than its virtues.

Property tax bills are rising much faster than family incomes…. They threaten to erode away that foundation of American society: the American-owned home…. We must deliver an unmistakable message to our elected representatives that no longer will we permit misuse of the property tax to finance welfare, health, educational and other governmental services that serve all people in our state. Such government spending programs should be paid for by revenues collected from all the people.

[ Proposition 13 ] would precipitate a revolutionary reform—one long overdue—in California state and local finance… People’s incomes are not closely related to their ownership or use of housing. Hence, the present tax system unjustly burdens the young family with large housing needs and the older couple who want to live in their family home or their retirement pensions. Stability of home or apartment occupancy is an important social goal. The present tax system weakens our society by threatening to force people out of their homes.