The
result will be either the abandonment of the experiment or the
substitution of some degree of public ownership. But in either event the
constructive economic work of the past two generations will be in some
measure undone; and the American economic advance will be to that extent
retarded. Such obnoxious regulation has been not unjustly compared to
the attempt to discipline a somewhat too vivacious bull by the simple
process of castration. For it must be substituted an economic policy
which will secure to the nation, and the individual the opportunities
and the benefits of the existing organization, while at the same time
seeking the diffusion of those benefits over a larger social area.
III
THE FRUITS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION
The only sound point of departure for a national economic policy is, as
we have seen, the acceptance by the state of certain of the results of
corporate industrial organization. Such state recognition is equivalent
to discrimination in their favor, because it leaves them in possession
of those fundamental economic advantages, dependent on terminals, large
capital, and natural resources, which place them beyond effective
competition; and the state has good reason to suffer this
discrimination, because a wise government can always make more social
capital out of a cooeperative industrial organization than it can out of
an extremely competitive one.
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