5
The Steel Industry

The essential purpose of a cartel is to keep competitors from cutting each others’ prices…. The goal is to restrain disturbing influences, to stabilize prices, and to assure those in the business the comfortable feeling that their position is secure.

—Harold Fleming

6
The Natural-Resource Industries

Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.

—The Red Queen, in Through the Looking Glass

7
Retailing and Textiles

Merchants and master manufacturers… draw to themselves the greatest share of the public consideration. … As their thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candor … is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects, than with regard to the latter.

—Adam Smith

8
In Retrospect

The aversion to change is in large part an aversion to the bother of making the readjustment which any given change will necessitate; … any innovation calls for a greater expenditure of nervous energy in making the necessary readjustment than would otherwise be the case. It is not only that a change in established habits of thought is distasteful. The process of readjustment of the accepted theory of life involves a degree of mental effort—a more or less protracted and laborious effort to find and to keep one’s bearings under the altered circumstances.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Clair Wilcox, Public Policies Toward Business, 4th ed. (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1971), 8.

2. Paul Douglas, Controlling Depressions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1935), 247.

Bibliography

Abbott, Charles F. “Selling Code Is Prime Need.” The Iron Age 122 (29 November 1928): 1350–52.

Adams, Henry. “The Relation of the State to Industrial Action.” Publications of the American Economic Association 1 (1886): 471–549.

Adams, Walter. “The Military-Industrial Complex and the New Industrial State.”

American Economic Review 58 (May 1968): 652–65.

——. The Structure of American Industry. 1st ed. New York: Macmillan, 1950. Rev. 2d ed., 1954. 3d ed., 1961. 4th ed., 1971. 5th ed., 1977.

Index

Abbott, Charles F., 131–32, 136–37, 241n. 1

Adams, Walter, 18, 212

Agricultural Adjustment Act, 14

Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, 119

Airline industry, 120

Air Transport Assn., 120

Alan Wood Steel Co., 139

Alexander, Magnus W., 58, 95 Allen, Frederick Lewis, 22–23, 49

Allied Steel Castings Co., 140

Aluminum Company of America (U.S. v.), 250n. 4

Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, 102

American Bankers Assn., 159, 237n. 65

The Ludwig von Mises Institute

The Ludwig von Mises Institute, (bunded in 1982, is the research and educational center of classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics. Working in the intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995), with a vast array of publications, programs, and fellowships, the Mises Institute, with offices in Auburn, Alabama, seeks a radical shift in the intellectual climate as the foundation for a renewal of the free and prosperous commonwealth.