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Business means one thing to Mr. Willkie and another to me. In professional life I was a lawyer chiefly for what we would call small business. My stake in that is far more permanent and important to me than any stake in pohtics. And in government my particular job is to try to use the archaic antitrust laws to preserve this same kind of small and independent business. Mr. Willkie, on the other hand, has become not only one of the outstanding lawyers for big business but his mastery of finance and administration has carried him to the presidency of one of the largest public utihty holding corporations in the nation.
Small business, of comse, has its problems with government, one of the chief of which is the correction of inequities in the tax struct-ure. But it is chiefly big business that is at war on many fronts with government. The most constructive thing we can do tonight is to analyze the reasons why they do not get along.
First of all, there is one thing which the people expect business as a whole somehow to do. That is to ftmiish steady jobs for all who want to work and to furnish enough goods to make up that standard of living which we have come to regard as American. The public is convinced that a proper economic arrangement, in a nation of such unlimited resources, can give that, and so am I. First we look to business for it. But if industry will not provide it, the people are determined to provide it for themselves through their government. This nation has repudiated for all time what Senator Wagner has so well called “the outmoded dogma that the helpless must help themselves.” A man off the pay roll is a man on the tax roU. And whether or not business Ukes this as a philosophy, it must face it as a fact.
There are those who answer that private enterprise can take care of itself . . . that all government needs do is “let business alone.” Let’s see about that. It is important, if true . . . and it isn’t true.
This circle of American private enterprise has never been continuously self-sustaining. It has always operated tmder concealed subsidies. Until the end of the last century we operated a WPA by which the unemployed could get a quarter section of public land just for occupjdng it. Then came the second WPA . . . government borrowing and spending for the World War. After the war came the third WPA. We went into a foreign boondoggling program.
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