The Press WEDNESDAY, JULY 26, 1933. The Future of Private Enterprise.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20917, 26 July 1933, Page 8

The Press WEDNESDAY, JULY 26, 1933. The Future of Private Enterprise.

The discussion on economic planning at the meeting called in Christchurch by the National Reconstruction Association and an article by Mr Hartley Withers printed in "The Press" this morning raise the question of what place private enterprise will have in the new economic order now shaping itself in the chaos of the depression. There is, unfortunately, still a tendency to regard socialisation and private enterprise as opposed to one another and incompatible with one another, a tendency well illustrated in one passage from our report of the meeting on Monday: A voice: If private enterprise fails, what is wrong with socialisation? Mr McMillan: Nothing. The Mayor: I think, gentlemen, in his answer Mr McMillan has given you a challenge. The antithesis between private enterprise and socialisation is both false and harmful. It is false because socialisation has ceased to mean what socialists once imagined it meant —the expropriation of private capitalists. The public regulation of coal production, of electricity supply, and of the London traffic system in Great Britain, the regulation of imports in almost all the countries in Europe, and Mr Roosevelt's attempts to reorganise the great American industries, arc developments which have taken the wind out of the sails of both the Marxists and the Manchester school. Indeed, it would be a blessing if the economists agreed to banish for ever the expressions " socialism" and " laisser faire," since both arc now as empty of meaning as they are provocative. The antithesis between socialisation and private enterprise is harmful because it may lead entrepreneurs into an unreasoning and unnecessary opposition to a movement which they cannot check. For the truth is, as Sir Arthur Salter has pointed out, that " the world's economic mechanism " has lost its self adjusting quality." Only conscious control can restore it to working order. But conscious control, as Mr Hartley Withers shows, does not involve the suppression of private enterprise. On the contrary, it will be successful only if it gives private enterprise encouragement and elbow-room. The same point is made by the director of the International Labour Office in a report which has just been published. For better or for worse we are passing into an age when financial, commercial, and industrial processes will be subjected to planned direction in an increasing measure. Management will no doubt take many different forms and work through many different methods. Though it wili involve a larger degree of public control, it is not necessarily inconsistent with the maintenance of private enterprise and initiative within very wide limits. Whether planned direction is achieved smoothly through a gradual transition or as a result of clumsy and arbitrary State interference depends entirely, in each country, on those now in control of industry. If they are clear-sighted enough to perceive the tendencies how operating, and wise enough to adapt themselves to those tendencies,' they will ensure a future for private enterprise and save the State from the need for meddling unduly where it has not been conspicuously successful. Socialisation, which means no more than the planning and control of industry in the best interests of society, does not challenge private enterprise: it asks for the assistance of private enterprise.