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The attraction of so many business leaders to systems of government-enforced trade practice standards reflected a continuing institutionalization of … - Butler D. Shaffer
" "The attraction of so many business leaders to systems of government-enforced trade practice standards reflected a continuing institutionalization of economic life. The systemwide benefits of maintaining openness in competition—with no legal restrictions on freedom of entry into the marketplace or on the terms and conditions for which parties could contract with one another—were being rejected by business organizations more concerned with the survival of individual firms and industries. As a consequence, business leaders expressed an increasing desire for the maintenance of conditions of equilibrium that would help preserve the positions of existing firms. Free and unrestrained competition demanded a continuing resiliency in responding to market changes. The innovation in products, services, and business methods that made economic life creative and vibrant came to be seen as a threat to the survival of firms unable or unwilling to respond. Concerns for security and stability began to take priority over autonomy and spontaneity in the thinking of most business leaders.
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About Butler D. Shaffer
Butler D. Shaffer (January 12, 1935 – December 29, 2019) was an American author, law professor and speaker, known for his numerous libertarian books and blog articles for LewRockwell.com.
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Additional quotes by Butler D. Shaffer
We have allowed our lives to be taken over and monopolized by variety of political, religious, educational, economics, and social agencies over which we have little, if any, influence. These entities have helped us to construct the barriers that not only restrain us, but keep us separated from one another and serve as the boundary lines for the intergroup struggles of which we are a part. Through these groupings, we have helped to institutionalize conflict, to make it a seemingly permanent and necessary feature of human society.
The 1920s are part of that critical period discussed by the historian James Gilbert in his study of the development of collectivist thinking, a phenomenon he relates to the emergence of ‘a new industrial civilization in which the giant business organization was the dominant force.’ As Gilbert has demonstrated, the architects of twentieth century American collectivism had patterned their ideas on the industrial corporation as the central organizational tool. Any form of collectivism is, after all, ‘conservative’ in nature, being premised on the establishment of static, rigidly structured social relationships designed to restrain any influences that would pose the threat of substantial change. A symbiotic relationship thus developed between the forces of "social reform" and those advocating the conservation of existing economic institutions and relationships. In twentieth-century ‘ liberalism, declared the historian James Weinstein, many business leaders saw ‘a means of securing the existing social order.’
As the creators of sophisticated technologies, we have made ourselves increasingly machine-like; robotic servants of institutional systems we have been conditioned to revere, whose purposes we neither understand nor control, and of which we are afraid to ask questions. Our corporate-state world plunders, enslaves, controls and destroys us, all in the name of advancing our liberty and material well-being. Most of us are dominated by an unfocused fear of uncertainty, a longing for the security of emptiness.
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