BUSINESS NEEDS ALL BEST MEN AVAILABLE

"Most of the energy and brains of the business system today is engaged in the game of capturing markets rather than in the production of goods", said Mr. A. G. Skelding, former Dean of the Babson Statistical Institute, in a recent interview for the CRIMSON. "The larger rewards go to those who are adept in selling and advertising, and as a consequence we have industrial stagnation, deadlock, and increased cost in living.

"We can be relieved of the menace of unemployment and social pessimism only by transferring the credit center from the ownership of property to the production of goods. This would assure a steady production of the necessaries of life and regular employment for all who wished to work.

"The modern banking system is the most useful organ of social control that has ever been known in the history of civilization because it can dispose not only of actual values, but it can also estimate potential and future values, and through it we can plan the future course of social developments. Capital is no longer the stored up energy of labor nor the accumulated savings of past labor, but it is in the main social credits, the faith of all the members of the community that their fellow-citizens will deliver the goods. Banks are no longer simply places to keep money, but are power houses for directing the economic and social resources of the state.

"Class hatred which is so rampant today is caused by the monopoly of social control of the machinery of credit, the Press, and industry. We are all of us cowards concerning public opinion; we fear the mob; not that the mob does not recognize a good thing, but someone free from the conservatism of the mob must see it first and call their attention to it. Mob superstitions are more vehemently held among the white-collared middle class (bankers are very middle class) than among the proletariat and real aristocrats.

"Power should be delegated to all men in proportion to their ability to deliver the goods, either in social service or material things. The democratic notion that any person of average ability can administer public affairs is the disease of our political system. It is the worship of mediocrity. The organizing of the modern industrial state should be the business of the best men available, an aristocracy of brains and technique. The business system today is functioning in a moral vacuum, and unless we succeed in moralizing it, it will eventually destroy our civilization."