George W. Stocking Quotes

Both the law and business have long recognized the propriety of quantity discounts. But since 1914 the Clayton Act has banned price discrimination "when the effect may be to substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly." And since 1936 the Robinson-Patman Act has recognized such quantity discounts as legal only if they represent a saving in cost, and the law places the burden of proof on the seller.

The [Dow-Alcoa and Alcoa-IG] negotiations [of 1929] reveal strikingly the technique of cartel diplomacy - the steady application of "pressure" and the resort alternatively to challenges and blandishments. The similarity to power politics in which trial by battle is a last resort is marked. The procedure discloses the vast gulf between big business in practice and the patterns of behavior assumed in a regime of free competition. It shows how the conference table superseded the market as the arena for decision making.

The record is plain: the cartel system retarded the development of a domestic synthetic rubber industry, and, in so doing, jeopardized national security.

it is easier to induce national governments to discriminate against foreign producers than to defend the interests of domestic consumers

Under ordinary competitive conditions, any long and serious maladjustment between supply and demand cannot last.

Chemical products are used in virtually every branch of industry and agriculture and come to the consumer in almost every product he consumes; yet, because they are primarily industrial raw materials which have lost their identity, the average consumer is unaware of them. To him even their names are meaningless.

In a dynamic democratic society it is indeed difficult to keep in harness the forces of competition.

International trade in chemical products is not free. . . . Joint control of the market became the general rule; free competition, the exception.

The steel cartel is dead; but the cartel idea survives.

the German and Japanese governments heavily subsidized their chemical industries for war purposes. Government subsidies, direct or indirect, spurred German developments in synthetic rubber and plastics, synthetic fuels, light metals, and various other substitutes for natural materials.
However, the world's chemical industries would have grown rapidly without artificial encouragement.

Although all the major industrial countries and a multitude of business units participate in the world trade in chemicals, the forces of free competition do not rule the world markets. The techniques of business diplomacy frequently supplement and in some instances have supplanted independent decision making by separate producers in response to free market forces. The geographic and industrial areas within which particular companies will operate, the scale of their output, the prices of their products, the use or nonuse of their technology, have increasingly become objects of negotiation, subjects of national and international agreement. More and more the conference table has been taking the place of the market as a regulator if the chemical industries.

Today chemists can artificially make hundreds of thousands of organic compounds, most of which are not duplicated in nature.

The term cartel was virtually unknown to the American language a generation ago. Like most borrowed words, when first taken over it meant different things to different persons. Time was required to crystallize its meaning. In this country it now commonly refers to international marketing arrangements. In a companion study we have defined such a cartel as an arrangement among, or on behalf of, producers engaged in the same line of business designed to limit or eliminate competition among them.

What constitutes wise policy . . . will depend on whether the immediate objective of policy is the promotion of political ends, the protection of vested interests, or the satisfaction of consumer needs.

It is clear that both at home and abroad producers have been unwilling to trust their fortunes entirely to the unrestricted play of competition. Both in world and domestic markets businessmen have sought security by substituting collective controls for the free play of market forces.

either on a competitive or a cartel basis.

Germany made an early start in adapting its educational system to the practical needs of modern industry, grounded on exact science. In particular, it developed technical high schools which served as a training ground for industrial technicians of high calibre. These schools were not mere adjuncts to the educational system at the secondary level, providing a sort of apprenticeship training in arts and crafts. They were thoroughly integrated in an educational process which culminated in the great German universities.

two well-recognized economic principles. First, the firmer the monopolistic controls in a given market, the higher the prices. Second, monopoly prices are discriminatory prices. "Charging all the traffic will bear" does not mean that all the traffic will bear the same charge! In fact, it will not.