The Freeman 1972 - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

636 THE FREEMAN Octobererators would have developed inan orderly way t:tIat would nothave hurt the little man. But thetemptation was too great: theState, throughout the nineteenthcentury, had too much to give,and it was in the cards that forcefuland adaptive men would combineto conjure special advantagesout of the Great Benefactor inWashington.Men Are KnownBy the Company They KeepDr. Roche is ambivalent aboutthe men whom Matthew Josephsoncalled the Robber Barons. Theyare to be blamed, so Dr. Rochesays, for courting government togain such special privileges as tariffsand grants of land. But in actingas a pressure grol;lp the nineteenthcentury tycoonery was behavinglike everybody else. Thegovernment owned title to most ofthe empty continent. Settlers insearch of a good quarter sectionof land rallied to the slogan, "Voteyourself a farm." Everybody wasin on the take, as was perhaps inevitableunder the circumstances.When "society" as a whole is toblame for a state of mind, thereis little point in .making specialvillains out of those who provedmost efficient in providing whatpeople wanted. The "robber baron"enriched himself, but in many instanceshe also enriched eventhose who were forced to sell outto him.What Dr. Roche seems to betelling us is that the Americanpeople in the latter half of thenineteenth century should havefound some nongovernmental wayof protecting themselves againstthe "enmassment" called into beingby the corporate form. Afterall, nobody compelled farmers tomake themselves dependent oncash crops and monoculture agriculture.Producer and consumercooperatives might have beenformed to bring the benefits of"economies of scale" to the littlefellow. When Edison developed thepower plant, farmers might haveavailed themselves of small-scaleelectrical power components, as"Boss" Kettering of GeneralMotors originally suggested. If individualshad formed associationsto buy tracts of land and then subdividedthe acreage to suit themselves,we could have avoided someof the uglier results of urbansprawl. When Henry Ford startedmaking his Model T, he hoped thatpeople would divide their time betweenworking for employers andraising their own vegetables ontheir own acres. The car mighthave enabled a man to take industrialemployment in prosperoustimes without quitting a base onthe land that could tide a familyover periods of depression.