ABSTRACT
If one sought to establish an antithesis to Nef, one could argue, quite plausibly, that the industries on which he expends such attention were established only by the expenditure of unjustifiably large sums of money, under lie protection of the State which provided monopolistic conditions within which, though without showing a magnificent profit, the entrepreneurs succeeded in selling their product at twice the price it would have cost to import them. The entrepreneurs whom Dr Gough has examined are on the whole as unconvincing a lot as one could hope to find. Scarcely one could be considered the equivalent of the nineteenth-century hard-headed business man: speculator, visionary, amateur enthusiast, patriot, peculator - these terms, or some combination of them, could be applied to most of the men who put forward schemes which were to solve the country’s (and their own) economic problems overnight. To a man they underestimated the costs and overestimated the advantages.
