“First let us ask whether our wealth-creating agencies, particular that of industry, are to be based upon private enterprise of policy management. I can not see how any intelligent observer can have any possible faith in the capacity of political management to provide either stability or progress if it should set out to operate the agencies of wealth creation, particularly industry. It is my firm conviction that any form of 'Government Regulation of Business' is bound to result in an ever-increasing interference with the broad exercise of initiative - the very foundation of the American system. That is the natural evolution of bureaucracy. If that be so, might not the ultimate logical result be the necessity for the socialization of industry through the break down of the profit system induced by the accumulative effect of the ever-increasing political management. We do not need to go far afield to see definite evidences of that possibility”

as cited in: Thurman Arnold (2000, 72-73).
New York Times interview, 1935

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "First let us ask whether our wealth-creating agencies, particular that of industry, are to be based upon private enterp…" by Alfred P. Sloan?

Alfred P. Sloan47

American businessman 1875–1966

Related quotes

“I underlined my conviction that running a business and managing an enterprise were not merely a private concern but a public endeavor.”

Matsushita Konosuke (1894–1989) Japanese businessman

Source: Quest for prosperity: the life of a Japanese industrialist. 1988, p. 232

“Belief in the stable state serves primarily to protect us from apprehension of the threats inherent in change. Belief in stability is a means of maintaining stability, or at any rate the illusion of stability. But the most threatening situations are those that confront us with uncertainty, and by ‘uncertainty’, I don’t mean risk, which is a probability ratio which we all know how to handle, particularly those who are managers of industry. We can deal with risk.”

Donald A. Schön (1930–1997) American academic

Donald Schon " REITH LECTURES 1970: Change and Industrial Society: Lecture 1: The Loss of the Stable State http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1970_reith1.pdf" at the BBC, 15 November 1970 – Radio 4; cited in: Richard Duane Carter (1981) Future challenges of management education. p. 102

“Much individual enterprise in industry does not make for industrial progress. A larger and larger proportion of the energy given out in trade competition is consumed in violent warfare between trade rivals and is not represented either in advancement of industrial arts or in increase of material wealth.”

J.A. Hobson (1858–1940) English economist, social scientist and critic of imperialism

Section 11, p. 418-419
The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1906), Ch. XVII Civilisation and Industrial Development

“[It remains to be seen whether the newer management theories, based as they are on research in industrial concerns, will be] equally applicable to other kinds of organized human activity, such as schools, voluntary organizations, unions, hospitals, governmental agencies, scientific and professional organizations, and the like.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Source: New patterns of management, (1961), p. 4; as cited in: James G. March. Handbook of Organizations (RLE: Organizations). 2013. p. 817

“Another reason is because industry is the most important field of human activity, and management is the fundamental element in industry. It is now generally recognized that not bankers, not stockholders, but management is the pivot of business success. It is good management that draws credit, that draws workers, that draws customers. Moreover, whatever changes should come, whether industry is owned by individual capitalists, or by the State, or by the workers, it will always have to be managed. Management is a permanent function of business.”

Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) American academic

Source: Dynamic administration, 1942, p. xx

“I claim that, unlike the totalitarian States, we have managed to secure both progress and orderly development in industry while still preserving to a large measure individual freedom and our individual enterprise, qualities upon which ultimately all our trade and industry depend.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Federation of British Industries (13 April 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), p. 115.
1937

“Enterprises, such as banks, railways and airlines, whether Chinese-owned or foreign-owned, which are either monopolistic in character or too big for private management, shall be operated and administered by the state, so that private capital cannot dominate the livelihood of the people: this is the main principle of the regulation of capital.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

The Economy of New Democracy
On New Democracy (1940)

“Foreign relations. At no period in the past 12 years have our foreign relations been in such a satisfactory condition as they are at the present time. Our actions in the recent months have greatly strengthened the American policy of permanent peace with independence. The attitude which our Government took and maintained toward an adjustment of European reparations, by pointing out that it wits not a political but a business problem, has demonstrated its wisdom by its actual results. We desire to see Europe restored that it may resume its productivity in the increase of industry and its support in the advance of civilization. We look with great gratification at the hopeful prospect of recuperation in Europe through the Dawes plan. Such assistance as can be given through the action of the public authorities and of our private citizens, through friendly counsel and cooperation, and through economic and financial support, not for any warlike effort but for reproductive enterprise, not to provide means for unsound government financing but to establish sound business administration ' should be unhesitatingly provided.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

“If any of you have ever looked at your FBI file, you discover that intelligence agencies in general are extremely incompetent.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Q&A with community activists, February 10, 1989.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s
Context: If any of you have ever looked at your FBI file, you discover that intelligence agencies in general are extremely incompetent. That's one of the reasons why there are so many intelligence failures. They just never get anything straight, for all kinds of reasons. Part of it is because of the information they get. The information they get comes from ideological fanatics, typically, who always misunderstand things in their own crazy way. If you look at an FBI file, say, about yourself, where you know what the facts are, you'll see that the information has some kind of relation to the facts, you can figure out what they're talking about, but by the time it works its way through the ideological fanaticism of the intelligence agencies, there's always weird distortion.

“In helping the arms industry to work with the Pentagon to work with the security agencies to work with the oil industry to work with the environmental agencies and so on, he encourages nationwide stability. If successful he will have indirectly eliminated interference from that rival system — citizen-based democracy — which technically maintains legal control over the constitutional structures of the Republic.”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Applied Corporatism"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Alfred P. Sloan47

Related quotes

Related topics