ABSTRACT
For the businessman and the political philosopher the appeal of the competitive model was its solution of the problem of power. This is still the basis of its hold on the American conservative. Indeed, for most Americans free competition, so called, has for long been a political rather than an economic concept. The income of a businessman is no longer a measure of his achievement; it has become a datum of secondary interest. Power obviously presents awkward problems for a community which abhors its existence, disavows its possession, but values its exercise. In the competitive model, intervention by the state in the economy was excluded with equal rigor whether the motives of the state were assumed to be malevolent or benign. In the United States, until the present century, the federal government was ordinarily the patron, in economic matters, of those best situated for extracting favors and of its own employees.
