Businessmen and Their Rivals

Abstract

Ideology about business activity in the United States is linked to principles of free enterprise and individual action, coupled with the nineteenth-century model of indus trial atomism. Ideology and practice are widely disparate. A combination of technical, financial, and marketing factors has made it possible for the large corporations effectively to make public policies, that is, policies affecting not only their internal workings but also their customers, their suppliers, their communities, their rivals, and even the government. The fed eral government has responded with antitrust legislation sensi tive to the menace of inordinate private power to free consumer choice, individual initiative, and effective democracy. Busi ness managers of the oligopolized industries, in turn, have used price leadership, advertising, and styling and packaging as al ternatives to monopolistic combination for limiting the scope of effective competition and diminishing the uncertainty which has always accompanied genuine competition. Recent actions by federal courts and the President indicate that, in conflicts affecting the public interest between law, ideology, business practice, and the realities of power, business giants retain their right to power on the condition that their power is used for broader purposes than the interests of their own stockholders or managers. Efforts of the giant corporations to minimize competition suggest a stagnation and enervation of which the implications are slow economic growth and lagging redistribu tion of income.—Ed.