Two years ago a Ruml plan led to a revolution in the way the U.S. collects its taxes. Last week, in his first book, Tomorrow's Business (Farrar & Rinehart; $2.50), rotund Beardsley Ruml unveiled a new plan. This time Mr. Ruml was far more ambitious. He aimed at something like a revolution in the way 1) many U.S. businessmen think; 2) the U.S. thinks about business.
Like most well-heeled businessmen who decide to write a book, the first thing Beardsley Ruml did was to hire a ghost writer to do it for him. This did not work out. So Ruml squeezed enough time from his other jobs (treasurer of R. H. Macy & Co., chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, etc.) to set down his liberal business gospel in his own adding-machine style.
Business, says Ruml, affects everyone. Such ideals as freedom from want and fear, freedom of the individual to live as he chooses can be realized by business, through its instruments: high employment and productivity. But business itself must first learn a new concept of freedom. It must learn and conform to the controls for freedom—e.g., reasonable Government regulation—within which it must act. In the same manner, those who wield the power over business for Government must also learn the controls which, by giving business its greatest freedom, can enable it to do its job.
Order In Business. Business, Ruml holds, is itself a private government (like the trade union, the family, the church). It is a rulemaker with the job of bringing "order and certainty to the production of things for use." But Ruml concedes that business has frequently brought this order only at the cost of the freedom of others. The reason lies in excesses of the very qualities most desirable in businessmen. Thus without regulation "initiative becomes arrogance; resourcefulness, cunning; efficiency, greed; tenacity, obstinacy; and willingness to take authority and responsibility, pride and lust for power."
Because human nature is inevitably low, says Ruml, the Federal Government must protect the public from business excesses, by exercising certain minimum controls. In turn, business can do much to head off further regulation by increasing the freedom of those it governs—stockholders, employes, customers and consumers. He suggests one way: give each of them a director-trustee to represent their interests on the boards of directors which run business, thus a voice in management.
Order In Labor. What labor must learn is that it, too, as a private government, must eventually be regulated. But first Ruml foresees a "period of serious conflict" to which the present turmoil over the union shop is only the prelude. Philosopher Ruml, admitting that the labor union has a proper and necessary function, approves the principle of the union shop: "It seems inescapable that those who benefit [by union bargaining] may fairly be required to share the burden."