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Croly, Herbert David, 1869-1930

"The Promise of American Life"


The foregoing plan, however, is not suggested as a final and entirely
satisfactory method of incorporating semi-monopolistic business
organizations into the economic system of a nationalizing democracy. I
do not believe that any formula can be framed which will by the magic of
some chemical process convert a purely selfish economic motive into an
unqualified public economic benefit. But some such plan as that proposed
above may enable an industrial democracy to get over the period of
transition between the partial and the complete adaptation of these
companies to their place in a system of national economy. They can never
be completely incorporated so long as the interest of their owners is
different from that of the community as a whole, but in the meantime
they can be encouraged to grow and perhaps to become more efficient,
while at the same time they can be prevented from becoming a source of
undesirable or dangerous individual economic inequalities; and I do not
believe that such a transitional system of automatically regulated
recognition would be open to the same objections as would a system of
incessant official interference.


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