egree legally dubious, or that is even of questionable
legitimacy.

Sabotage so understood, as not comprising recourse to force or fraud, is
a necessary and staple expedient of business management, and its
employment is grounded in the elementary and indefeasible rights of
ownership. It is simply that the businessman, like any other owner, is
vested with the right freely to use or not to use his property for any
given purpose. His decision, for reasons of his own, not to employ the
property at his disposal in a particular way at a particular time, is
well and blamelessly within his legitimate discretion, under the rights
of property as universally accepted and defended by modern nations. In
the particular instance of the American nation he is protected in this
right by a constitutional provision that he must not be deprived of his
property without due process of law. When the property at his disposal
is in the shape of industrial plant or industrial material, means of
transportation or stock of goods awaiting distribution, then his
decision not to employ this property, or to limit its use to something
less than full capacity, in the way for which it is adapted, becomes
sabotage, normally and with negligible exceptions. In so doing he
hinders, retards or obstructs the working of the country's industrial
forces by so much. It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to
the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman must be free
to deal or not to deal in any given case; to limit or to withhold the
equipment under his control, without reservation. Business discretion
and business strategy, in fact, has no other means by which to work out
its aims. So that, in effect, all business sagacity reduces itself in
the last analysis to a judicious use of sabotage. Under modern
conditions of large business, particularly, the relation of the
discretionary businessman to industry is that of authoritative
permission and of authoritative limitation or stoppage, and on his
shrewd use of this authority depends the gainfulness of his enterprise.

If this authority were exercised with an eye single to the largest and
most serviceable output of goods and services, or to the most economical
use of the country's material resources and man-power, regardless of
pecuniary consequences, the course of management so carried out would be
not sabotage but industrial strategy. But business is carried on for
pecuniary gain, not with