pretense that corporations were individuals entitled to protection under the due process clause struck him as a triumph of "metaphysical" over "factual" thinking. Corporations were clearly organizations, not individuals, and they wielded powers that could better be understood as governmental than as entrepreneurial. Their ability to set prices amounted to a power of taxation, which should be recognized as such and subjected to public control. The mythology of private enterprise—which Arnold compared to the "medieval myths which impeded medical knowledge for hundreds of years"—had the effect of encouraging the "type of organization known as industry or business" and of discouraging the "type known as government." A more rational approach would have recognized their underlying similarity and judged them by the only appropriate standard, that of efficiency. Arnold did not bother to defend the "standard that it is a good thing to produce and distribute" as many goods as possible. He did not propose to debate "whether medieval civilization is really better than modern civilization." He simply took for granted the "standard ... of a society which produces and distributes goods to the maximum of its technical capacity." The only question worth discussing, therefore, was whether private or public corporations—or more precisely, what particular mix of public and private control—best served that purpose.

Arnold's analysis of the quasi-governmental powers exercised by allegedly private corporations, though not especially original, was penetrating and important. The point he was making can hardly be made too often, since it is the collectivization of private property that deprives it of the moral virtues formerly associated with it. The refusal to recognize this dooms American conservatism, so called, to complete irrelevance in any serious discussion of the moral implications of modern capitalism. Conservative opponents of the New Deal often used rhetoric vaguely reminiscent of nineteenth-century republicanism or producerism, but they never faced up to the obvious differences between private property as it existed in the nineteenth century and the modern corporation, which cannot possibly confer on its stockholders or employees the independence and resourcefulness classically said to go with proprietorship. Conservatives opposed legislation regulating corporations on the grounds that it penalized "initiative, courage, hardihood, frugality, and aspiration," as if those virtues had any place in corporate life. Such a

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