Frank Knight Quotes
Large scale collective bargaining . . . is merely a seductive name for bilateral monopoly, and means either adjudication of conflicts in terms of power, or deadlock and stoppage, usually injuring outside people more than the immediate parties to the dispute.
Knight, Frank H. "The Role of Principles in Economics and Politics." The American Economic Review, vol. 41, no. 1, 1951, p. 25.
She saw strikes as wasteful where the workers and the companies, the public and the government lost. She favored arbitration which was generally opposed by labor and management and still is today in most cases.
“Operators” referred to an Executives of the Coal Mining Companies most of whom were grossly impolite and unconstructive in the mediation sessions. The President was a very fit man who boxed and wrestled several times a week for exercise and could get very physical as well as social and intellectual.
This is a fascinating historical quotation. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848 in England and in less than 40 years, American politicians were already in fear of the doctrine. Communism had one of the fastest spreads of any ideology. By 1886 we already see the beginnings of a Red Scare. At the time, most laws were designed to protect the wealthy and the middle class, and many discriminated against workers and the poverty stricken.
At the time, most company owners and managers refused to bargain collectively with employee elected organizations. Hoover was then an exceptionally modern business person who realized the importance of good working relations between management and labor and advocated collective bargaining. However, as he got deeper into partisan politics, he backed off urging this. Nationally, in the 1960s collective bargaining had become an instrument of basic sound management, but more and more managements returned to simply refusing to bargain with employee organizations and instead strengthened their managers and supervisors and adopted (by choice and by government regulation) more and more modern, healthy, safe, efficient and attractive working conditions and policies. By the 21st century, labor unions and employee organizations had lost their attractiveness while managers were more attentive to workers and there were very few private companies engaged in collective bargaining.
This was praise indeed as Wellman was generally very conservative.
Frank Hyneman Knight was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the founders of the Chicago School. Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, George Stigler and James M. Buchanan were all students of Knight at Chicago. Ronald Coase said that Knight, without teaching him, was a major influence on his thinking. F.A. Hayek considered Knight to be one of the major figures in preserving and promoting classical liberal thought in the twentieth century. Paul Samuelson named Knight (along with Harry Gunnison Brown, Allyn Abbott Young, Henry Ludwell Moore, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Jacob Viner, and Henry Schultz) as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860.
