It is also true, the businesslike managers of industrial enterprise have also other things to do, besides holding the marketable supply of goods and services down to such an amount as is expected to bring the most profitable prices, or diverting credulous customers from one seller to another by competitive advertising. But it should also be noted that there is next to no business enterprise, if any, whose chief end is not profitable sales, or profitable bargains which mean the same thing as profitable sales. They are therefore engaged unremittingly in one or another of the approved lines of competitive management with a view to profitable traffic for themselves, and to creating an advantage for themselves in the market. It is a poor-spirited concern that does not constantly aim to create for itself such a position of advantage as will give it something of a vested interest in the traffic. Such a concern is scarcely fit to survive; nor is it likely to.
It is not that business enterprise is wholly taken up with such like manoeuvres of restraint, obstruction and competitive selling. This is only part of the business men's everyday work, although it is not a minor part. In any competitive business community this line of duties will take up a large share of the business men's attention and will engage their best and most businesslike abilities. More particularly in the management of the greater industrial enterprises of the present day, the larger as well as the more lucrative part of the duties of those who direct affairs appears commonly to be of this nature. That such should be the case lies in the nature of things under the circumstances which now prevail. It would not be far out of the way to say that any occupations in which this rule does not apply are occupations which have not, or have not yet, come into line as members in good standing in that new order of business enterprise which is based on the machine industry governed by the liberal principles of the eighteenth century.
"Our people, moreover, do not wait to be coached and led.
They know their own business, are quick and resourceful at every readjustment, definite in purpose, and self-reliant in action...
The American business man is of quick initiative. The ordinary and normal processes of private initiative will not, however, provide immediate employment for all of the men of our returning armies," Such is the esteem in which American business men are held by American popular opinion and such is also the view which American business men are inclined to take of their own place and value in the community. There need be no quarrel with it. But it will be in place to call attention to the statement that "The ordinary and normal processes of private initiative will not, however, provide immediate employment for all the men." It should be added, as is plain to all men, that these ordinary and normal processes of private initiative never do provide employment for all the men available. In fact, unemployment is an ordinary and normal phenomenon. So that even in the present emergency, when the peoples of Christendom are suffering privation together for want of goods needed for immediate use, the ordinary and normal processes of private initiative are not to be depended on to employ all the available man power for productive industry. The reason is well known to all men; so well known as to be uniformly taken for granted as a circumstance which is beyond human remedy.
It is the simple and obvious fact that the ordinary and normal processes of private initiative are the same thing as "business as usual," which controls industry with a view to private gain in terms of price; and the largest private, gain in terms of price can not be had by employing all the available man power and speeding up the industries to their highest productivity, even when all the peoples of Christendom are suffering privation together for want of the ordinary necessaries of life. Private initiative means business enterprise, not industry.
