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Too Much Government; Too Much Taxation by Charles Norman FayThe North American Review, Vol. 217, No. 811 (Jun., 1923), p. 864Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25113053 .

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864 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

Too Much Goveknment; Too Much Taxation. By Charles Norman

Fay. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company.

A more comfortable doctrine than that of laisser faire was surely never in

vented, and it must be admitted that anything more disquieting to a good citi zen or more irritating to a good business man than the various evils Mr. Fay

complains of would be hard to imagine. That a general simplification is the

sole and sufficient remedy for all our troubles, one is not, however, quite pre

pared to concede. Mr. Fay wants a radical simplification; the elimination of

numerous national, state, and municipal activities. The Interstate Commerce

Commission, as well as many other boards and commissions, state and na

tional, he regards as futile. The efforts of the Government to regulate busi

ness have been, he believes, productive of nothing but evil, and he cites with

considerable effect our experiences in the attempted control of sugar and wheat

and our still more disastrous experiment with government control of the rail

roads. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act has benefited no one, he thinks, except the lawyers. The "trusts" are in his opinion beneficial; they do not raise

prices, and besides, to abolish national trusts would put us at the mercy of

international trusts. Here as elsewhere the best remedy is to let things alone.

Labor unions exist that "Gompers and Co. may deliberately work up con

spiracy among a few hundred or thousand men who hold strategic jobs? switchmen, or railway shopmen, or coal miners, for instance?to stop vital

work all at once, everywhere, in order to 'hold up' the community for cash; and yet break no moral statute, even though 'incidental' violence results."

All the corrective that is needed is simply for the Government to keep the

peace and to protect non-union men in their right to work. In general, the

Government should confine itself to the simple duty of keeping the peace and

upholding the status quo?the less government the better.

Mr. Fay's programme may be briefly summed up as laisser faire, plus the

commission form of government for smaller cities, plus the short ballot, plus the sales tax. It sounds attractive, but it suggests an odd mingling of pro

gressive tendencies and reaction. This programme is progressive just in

those ways in which modern business men are inclined to be progressive and

conservative in just those respects in which they are disposed to be conserva

tive. Mr. Fay has given us in this book a good deal of well-informed and

straightforward criticism. His proposals are persuasive, as simplicist solu

tions of vexed problems always are. In considerably more than half of his

contentions the author appears to have reason unquestionably on his side.

Certainly no one can maintain that he is "all wrong ". A somewhat desultory

reading of economics leads one, indeed, to the belief that if the evils of laisser

faire and the evils of too much government could be exactly compared they would be found to be about equal! However this may be, one finds it hard to

believe that a revolutionary return to first principles is at all feasible or even

desirable. Such a thing has seldom if ever occurred in the history of the world.

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.21 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 16:33:19 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions