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Government and Private Management in Air Transportation 

Address delivered by COL. EDGAR S. GORRELL, President, Air Transport Association of America, at Engineering and Maintenance Conference, Air Transport Association of America, Kansas City, Mo., February 5, 1940. 

SOME have thought that a society where individuals are free to do as they will is not only desirable but attainable. However they may be, the saw of any society is far below the horizon, and we cannot afford to act on the assumption that freedom even approximately so broad is to be found in the span of our lives. 
Nonetheless our democracy is committed to the proposition that, even at the cost of a degree of waste and injustice, freedom is good -- freedom in the sense of minimizing rather than aggrandizing the power and competence of the State. Adherence to this proposition means simply that we approach all questions of extending the State's power by placing the burden of proof upon the proponents of State power. We do not say that any proposal for increasing the State's power is wrong. But we do say that it will be assumed to be wrong until it is demonstrated by preponderance of proof that the increase in the State's power is right. And in the path of the State's case we have quite deliberately thrown certain impediments to make it more difficult for the State to gain its ends: we have, for instance, a due process clause in the Constitution and a division of jurisdiction between governmental agencies, our dual federalism, which sometimes appear to leave an area into which even strongly persuasive cases cannot always justify State encroachment. 
This, as I see it, is what the American system really amounts to. It is not explicable in terms of inexorable laws of reason and of nature which were invoked to justify the liberal revolt against feudalism. It is not 

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