0618119639
John Kenneth Galbraith
Notes
But the fact that consumer cooperatives are not of any great importance in the United States is to be explained, not by any inherent capacity of Americans for such organization, but because the chain stores preempted the gains of countervailing power first. The counterpart of Swedish Kooperative Forbundet or the British Co-operative Wholesale Societies has not appeared in the United States simply because it could not compete with the large food chains. The meaning of this, which incidentally has been lost on devotees of the theology of cooperation, is that chain stores are approximately as efficient in the exercise of countervailing power as a cooperative would be.
Because familiarity is such an important test of accessibility, the acceptable ideas have great stability. They are highly predictable…conventional wisdom makes vigorous advocacy of originality a substitute for originality itself.
Production fills a void that has itself created.
“Humans, in contrast to machines, evaluate their own positions in relation to the value of others and come to accept others’ goals as their own.”
Though economic growth consists increasingly in items of luxury consumption, we have successfully converted the enjoyment of luxury into an idea of national virtue.
Modern socialism is extensively the adoption by reluctant governments, socialist and otherwise, of the abandoned offspring of modern capitalism. Being thus so dependent, the corporation must seek power in the state.
The corporation had needs – franchises, rights-of-way, capital, qualified manpower, support for expensive technological development, highways for its motor cars, airways for its airplanes – which only the state could supply. A state that served its corporations as they required quickly ceased, except in the minds of more romantic conservatives, to be minimal.
All successful revolutions are the kicking-in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
Countervailing Power