The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Shipping board freighter loading tin plate at Cardiff, Wales. compete with the government treasury and.a vigorous effort should be made by private owners to destroy the menace of government ownership Marine Review November’ 1924 Private American ships cannot “When the Government Goes Into Business VENTUALLY either the government must take iy over the entire shipping of the United States en- gaged in foreign commerce or get out of the ship- ping business completely. The existing half-and-half condition of affairs, with the United States government competing with privately owned steamships, is intoler- able. Either the shipping board must be reduced to its original function of supervising ocean transportation or the privately owned American ship will disappear from the high seas. No corporation or individual that has to pay taxes can compete with the government which uses taxation to support commercial enterprise. President Coolidge himself exposed the fallacies in our merchant marine policy in a recent speech at Wash- ington in which he said: ‘When the government goes into business, it lays a tax on everybody else in that business and uses the money that it collects from its competitors to establish a monopoly and drive them out of busi- ness. When the government really starts in a line of business it closes that line to the people. It has been an American ideal that the door of opportunity should remain open.” If the present administration remains in power, it will be interesting to observe to what extent the opera- tions of the shipping board and the Emergency Fleet corporation are brought into line with the President’s expressed policies. 417 . Boat exchange. 99 The danger which lies in continued government ownership and operation is clearly indicated by the experience which the owners of tugs in New York harbor are now going ‘through. Not satisfied with its masterly inactive fleet of ocean liners, the shipping board some time ago went into the towing business in New York in competition with privately owned tugs. In response to repeated protest by the New York Tow Admiral Palmer, head of the Emerg- ency Fleet corporation, agreed early last summer that the government’s tugs would be withdrawn. Summer ~has passed into autumn and winter is at hand with the government’s tugs still in operation in competition with vessels owned by tax paying citizens of New York. It would be safe to predict that unless the New York Tow Boat exchange is successful in its efforts to get the government tugs out of New York harbor, it will not be long before similar government-owned small craft wil] be operating in competition with private con- cerns in all of the principal harbors of the country. Government ownership and operation of public utili- ties leads inevitably to government ownership and operation of purely private enterprises. It is for this reason that MARINE REVIEW believes the shipping board should be forbidden to own and operate steamships and that the fleet it now has on hand, most of which is obsolete, should be sold off at public auction as fast as possible to all comers for what it will bring.