American Notes of the Week
THE ECONOMIC COUNCIL.
How far American business has travelled from the old- fashioned doctrines of laissez faire is illustrated almost daily, as one industry after another seeks by mergers, trade agree- ments, or legislative enactments to protect itself against competition, and what used to be regarded as the adamantine law of supply and demand. A striking instance is provided by the setting up of the new Economic Council, representative of every important industrial activity in the country, to co-operate with Governmental agencies in an attempt to avert depressions, stabilize the business cycle, and mould industry to serve not individual but national ends. Now Mr. Owen D. Young comes forward, in connexion with the present Senate Radio Inquiry, with as frank and courageous a statement of the new business faith as we have had. Just as Mr. Henry Ford advocates one giant monopoly to control all the hydro-electric resources of the country, so Mr. Young urges consolidation of American telegraph, cable, and radio communications under a single control. So urgent is the need, as he sees it, to end " archaic and uneconomical " competition, and so vital the threat of foreign competition, that Mr. Young is prepared, if necessary, to see control take the form of outright Government ownership. At any rate, he is convinced that the old methods of competition have signally failed, and constitute a menace to the national interest.
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