most people. You believe it or you don’t.” It’s interesting.
It’s interesting, in part, because of the Japanese man’s failure to
understand what actually happens in the US, which apparently was
shared by the students in his business class. If it was Eastern
Airlines they were talking about, Frank Lorenzo, the director, was
trying to put it out of business. He made a personal profit out of
that.
He wanted to break the unions in order to support his other
enterprises (he ripped off profits from Eastern Airlines to support
them). He wanted to leave the airline industry less unionized and
more under corporate control, and to leave himself wealthier. All of
that happened. So naturally he didn’t call on government
intervention to save him—things were working the way he wanted.
On the other hand, the idea that corporations don’t ask for
government help is a joke. They demand an extraordinary amount of
government intervention. That’s largely what the whole Pentagon
system is about.
Take the airline industry, which was created by government
intervention. A large part of the reason for the huge growth in the
Pentagon in the late 1940s was to salvage the collapsing aeronautical
industry, which obviously couldn’t survive in a civilian market.
That’s worked—it’s now the United States’ leading export industry,
and Boeing is the leading exporter.
An interesting and important book on this by Frank Kofsky just
came out. It describes the war scares that were manipulated in 1947
and 1948 to try to ram spending bills through Congress to save the
aeronautical industry. (That wasn’t the only purpose of these war
scares, but it was a big factor.)
Huge industries were spawned, and are maintained, by massive
government intervention. Many corporations couldn’t survive
without it. (For some, it’s not a huge part of their profits at the
moment, but it’s a cushion.) The public also provides the basic
technology—metallurgy, avionics or whatever—via the public
subsidy system.
The same is true just across the board. You can hardly find a
functioning sector of the US manufacturing or service economy
which hasn’t gotten that way and isn’t sustained by government
intervention.
The Clinton administration has been pouring new funds into the