I have a question concerning the major industrialists/financiers during the Progressive Era. I thought I have seen somewhere, perhaps more than once, that many of these figures, after singing the virtues of the free market and laissez-faire, later rejected such ideas in favor of efficiency and planned production in partnership with political power. They decried competition as wasteful and believed that captains of industry and finance should take the lead in organizing the economy of the United States.
It makes sense, as we all know government regulation serves protectionist purposes in affected industries and leads to inflated profits. And yet, I cannot seem to find any literature on this, specifically. I am not looking for an economic analysis of antitrust, but a discussion of entrepreneurs speaking openly that market competition is wasteful.
Any help?
A good book that addresses what you are looking for is Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916.
For example, on page 13, Kolko writes: “Although there was a formal commitment to varieties of laissez faire economic theory in most of the academic world, big businessmen developed their own functional doctrine very much opposed to competition as either a mechanism or as a goal.”
“Competition is industrial war,” wrote James Logan, manager of the U.S. Envelope Company in the same year. “Ignorant, unrestricted competition, carried to its logical conclusion, means death to some of the combatants and injury for all. Even the victor does not soon recover from the wounds received in the conflict.” (ibid)
Kolko’s thesis, from page 5: “Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.”
“In proposing the federal regulation of business, advocates of the new Hamiltonianism were quite aware of the advantages such regulation would have in shielding them from a hostile public, as well as in introducting stability and control in economic affairs. ‘The leading companies should be, and I believe they are, prepared to accept the appointment of trade commissions both in the States and in the Federal Union,’ Francis Lynde Stetson announced in May, 1912. ‘No better buffer could be devised for absorption or avoidance of the shocks between the corporations and an impatient or critical public.’” (Kolko, 178)
I came across Kolko’s work because of another book, Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution–and What It Means for Amerca Today, by Thomas DiLorenzo. See especially pages 141-145.