Knowledge And Decisions

Sometimes the business “concentration” that is attacked is based on the percentage of the market served (“controlled”) by some small number of companies or the proportion of wealth or land owned by some given number or percent of businesses, families, or individuals. As noted in earlier discussions of so-called “income distribution,” much of the individual and family data reflect different stages of a life cycle rather than people in one class rather than another — some of today’s upper bracket people being yesterday’s lower bracket people and some of today’s lower bracket people being the children of today’s upper bracket people. Business concentration figures are even trickier. Statements that, for example, 568 companies control 11 percent of the land area²³⁷ convey insinuations but no economic conclusion or even allegation, since 568 companies are not a decision-making unit, nor even a basis for a viable conspiracy — even if 11 percent of the land were enough to conspire with. To claim, as Ralph Nader does, that twenty-five landowners own more than 61 percent of California’s private land²³⁸ is completely misleading. Not only do state and national government own a substantial part of California — reducing the true percentage well below the 61 percent figure — it is also important to realize that the so-called twenty-five “landowners” include thousands or millions of people, because of organizational ownership by corporations with vast numbers of stockholders. The full facts reveal not so much a concentration of land ownership among few people as a preference of many people to have their assets managed for them by professional managers.

Given the advantages of specialization, it is hard to imagine how various activities could fail to be “concentrated.” Business concentration is simply arbitrarily singled out for detailed scrutiny and exposé-style treatment, fraught with insinuations but devoid of empirically testable conclusions. The implicit premise is that there is something strange, unique, or sinister in such numerical relationships representing “concentration,” when in fact such numerical relationships are commonplace throughout human endeavors. Anyone who watches professional basketball knows that less than 12 percent of the population supplies over half the basketball stars. Only 3 percent of the population grows all of the food, less than 1 percent of the population runs all of the post offices or drives all of the taxicabs. Indeed, far less than 1 percent of the population writes all the stories about small percentages of people controlling large percentages of activities. All the authors, editors and reporters in the country add up to much less than one percent of the population — and in fact less than one-twentieth as many people as proprietors, managers, and officials in business, who are supposed to represent “concentration” dangers.²³⁹ The simple underlying fact of advantages of specialization can be looked at in many ways, including the sinister insinuations chosen by intellectuals when discussing competing elites.

The discussion here of the political role of intellectuals has been almost exclusively a discussion of the role of politically liberal intellectuals because (1) the predominant political orientation of American intellectuals has been liberal and left, and (2) the small, politically far less influential, nonliberal intellectuals are a heterogeneous group, consisting of followers of specific economic or social principles — the “Chicago School” of economists (Milton Friedman, George Stigler, etc.), the sociologically oriented “Neo-conservatives” (Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, etc.) and conservatives in the more usual sense of people who follow traditional values (William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, etc ). Unlike political liberalism, which can be reduced to a body of values, postulates or inferences,²⁴⁰ “conservatism,” as the term is usually applied (to include all the varieties itemized above, for example), has little or no determinate content. If a conservative is someone who wants to conserve, then what specifically he wants to conserve depends upon what happens to exist, and this might be anything from the social-political system of eighteenth-century England to the contemporary Soviet Union. In short, the broad label “conservative” is itself virtually devoid of content, however much specific content there may be in each of the groupings and individuals to whom that label is loosely applied.