Books in Brief: Government and the Corporation

Government and the Corporation, by Ralph K. Winter (American Enterprise Institute, 73 pp., $2.75).

This slim soft-cover shapes up as the latest entry in the emergent intellectual revisionism which is busy dismantling the superstructure of the Berle-Means-Nader buncombe, an arteriosclerotic ideology which has not had a new idea in forty years and is therefore especially vulnerable to light and lively thrusts of this kind. The author, Townsend Professor at the Yale Law School, combines protean fedçralism and marketplace economics to contradict the root heresy of the corporation as licensee, and to eviscerate the notion that benefits will flow from federalization and social controls. In the process Winter attacks many matters of conventional wisdom and en passant makes some delicious polemical points. The book is a splendid riposte to the current round of fashionable anticorporate cant. Winter makes his case stylishly, blending wit and malice, as in his comment on Ralph Nader’s alleged concern for corporate shareholders: “Such ‘reformers’ can be expected to protect shareholders as foxes protect chickens.”

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Gerald T. Dunne

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Government and the Corporation, by Ralph K. Winter (American Enterprise Institute, 73 pp., $2.75).

This slim soft-cover shapes up as the latest entry in the emergent intellectual revisionism which is busy dismantling the superstructure of the Berle-Means-Nader buncombe, an arteriosclerotic ideology which has not had a new idea in forty years and is therefore especially vulnerable to light and lively thrusts of this kind. The author, Townsend Professor at the Yale Law School, combines protean fedçralism and marketplace economics to contradict the root heresy of the corporation as licensee, and to eviscerate the notion that benefits will flow from federalization and social controls. In the process Winter attacks many matters of conventional wisdom and en passant makes some delicious polemical points. The book is a splendid riposte to the current round of fashionable anticorporate cant. Winter makes his case stylishly, blending wit and malice, as in his comment on Ralph Nader’s alleged concern for corporate shareholders: “Such ‘reformers’ can be expected to protect shareholders as foxes protect chickens.”