Without free enterprise in economic life, we cannot maintain democracy: Minoo Masani |
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Without free enterprise in economic life, we cannot maintain democracy: Minoo Masani
The professional man, the businessman in a free economy, the landed peasant, the artisan and the self-employed man stand on their own legs and can disagree with the government.
I shall give two major reasons why it is important that free enterprise remains a major element in our economic life. My first argument is purely on economic grounds that free enterprise is the more productive way of life. It delivers the goods more than any other system. So far as industry is concerned, we know the facts. There are so many fields where we can test this. Mr. Graham Hutton, the British Liberal writer, gave a good analogy. He says that the government, when it enters the field of production, is like a dog in the barnyard—it can’t lay eggs itself and it stops the hens from laying eggs.
This experience of inefficiency of State enterprise in industry is making countries, even Communist countries like Yugoslavia and, for a little while, Poland, try to edge away from the State capitalist system. The Yugoslavs have invented a theory of workers’ control in order to end what they call State Capitalism of the Soviet kind. They do not admit that Russia is communist or socialist in any way. They say that it is a distortion of Marxism and Socialism. Russia is state capitalist in a vicious kind of way, and so the Yugoslav communists are trying to get away from the Statist pattern by ostensibly giving the factory back to the workers. That is partly theoretical, but one thing happens—the enterprise becomes more autonomous and the laws of competition come into existence.
I have heard leading Yugoslav Communists tell me in 1955, “We must get back to the laws of the market”, and they are quite logical and ruthless about it. If you ask them what happens if a shoe factory cannot sell its shoes. Because either the price is high or the products are not acceptable, they say that the factory must shut down. It must go out of competition because the consumer does not want their products. Consumer preference comes back and not the dictat of the Planning Commission. If you ask what happens to the workers, they say they are unemployed, and they will have to find other jobs. The managers are punished by not being allowed to be managers........