It should remain true to
the principle that, so far as economic authority and power is delegated
in the form of terminable leases to private corporations, such power
should be complete within certain defined limits. If agents of the
national economic interest cannot be trusted to fulfill their
responsibilities without some system of detailed censure and supervision
they should be entirely dispensed with. It may be added that if the
proposed or any kindred method of reorganization becomes politically and
economically possible, the circumstances which account for its
possibility will in all probability carry with them some practicable
method of realizing the proposed object.
Wherever the conditions, obtaining in the case of railroad and public
service corporations, are duplicated in that of an industrial
corporation, a genuinely national economic system would demand the
adoption of similar measures. How far or how often these measures would
be necessarily applied to industrial corporations could be learned only
after a long period of experimentation, and during this period the
policy of recognition, tempered by regulation under definite conditions
and graduated taxation of net profits would have to be applied.
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