Philip Gibbs Quotes
In less than twenty-five years . . . the motor-car will be obsolete, because the aeroplane will run along the ground as well as fly over it.
Gibbs, Philip. The Day After To-Morrow: What is Going to Happen to the World. Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1928, p. 23.
La Guardia was the first member of Congress with flying experience and was alarmed that although Americans had invented the airplane, most airplanes were developed and manufactured in Europe and not America:
It is perhaps ironic that Langley had the vision of air flight while Wilber Wright, the inventor of the first airplane a few years later, saw it’s role much more limited. See: {42182}.
What Mises says in this quotation is true. What he does not say that by the time the automobile was developed and then the airplane, the Railroad monopoly had impeded and destroyed so many different entities that the governments had cracked down and curtailed much of the ability of the Railroads to exercise monopolist power. If the Railroads had as much power in 1920 as they did in 1870, there probably never would have been a thriving auto industry and the airlines would likely never have succeeded. Mises again exaggerates a basic point that large monopolistic companies and industries often have not been able to stave off new technology and approaches. While true in many cases, the cause is not necessarily fundamental to economics but has sometimes (as with the railroads) been caused by Government regulation and reform. A better example is that the large sail dominated shipping industry was not able to stop the coal fired steam engine ships. Indeed the shipping owners embraced the new technology. The best examples of Mises point occurred after Mises died. For example, Microsoft was not able to prevent Google from dominating many of Microsoft’s positions in the IT world.
Sir Philip Armand Hamilton Gibbs KBE was an English journalist and prolific author of books who served as one of five official British reporters during the First World War. Four of his siblings were also writers, A. Hamilton Gibbs, Francis Hamilton Gibbs, Helen Hamilton Gibbs, and Cosmo Hamilton, as was his father Henry James Gibbs, and his own son, Anthony.
