Voltaire once said: If sun worship were made mandatory, investigation of the laws of light would become suspect. It may be difficult to find the "mandatory" element about economic opinions which makes them so sharply sensitive to investigation or question; but that does not lessen many a man's unwillingness to see them undergo even a scientific scrutiny. Perhaps, of course, the underlying cause for this reluctance lies in our devotion to private enterprise. Instinctively we rally to the support of that system's generosity to men who dream dreams and see visions in which others so generally share. All over the world, where private enterprise has grown into the pattern of life, people are asking anxiously whether it can become again the portal to abundant living. There are variant forms to the question, depending on the fears, anxieties and preferences of the questioner. Oftentimes they ask instead about the fate of democracy, and of free institutions. But free institutions and private interprise have risen side by side in our time; and it is not unfair to assume that in most minds anxiety about one is likely to include the other also. These questions are not unlikely to include such as the following. Has private enterprise, over the past hundred and seventyfive years, come to full flower like some century plant – which is said to bloom once in glorious beauty, and then perish? Is it incapable in time of peace of operating dependably at comfortable levels of opulence and employment? Must we accept the counsel of defeat, which says that submission to overwhelming government controls, pressed on the people's heads like a crown of thorns, is the only way for crowded humans to survive on an over-populated planet? Queries like these are today perplexing and plaguing the thoughtful mind. The answers commonly accepted to questions like these may be expected within the few fateful years ahead to provide a lasting and almost unbreakable mould for hundreds of years of human living. They will be the unforeseen forces which nudge our policy makers along, step by hesitant step into the unknown; for even day by day decisions are impossible without the guidance of current convictions, or beliefs, or impulses. These answers will serve as yardsticks of logic and decision, whether valid or not. Thus they may vastly aggravate the grave predicament of our age; that wrong beliefs may lead to wrong decisions both disastrous and irrevocable.
Based on Joseph E. Goodbar, Lorenzo U. Bergeron,Creative capitalism intended to reveal where depressions start, where lasting cure must begin, and how cure can be had within the capitalistic system of private enterprise.
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