The professional businessman is the field agent of the army whose
lieutenant-commander-in-chief is the scientist. The businessman carries
scientific discoveries from the laboratory of the inventor to industrial
plants, and transforms them into material products that fill men’s physical
needs and expand the comfort of men’s existence. By creating a mass market, he
makes these products available to every income level of society. By using
machines, he increases the productivity of human labor, thus raising labor’s
economic rewards. By organizing human effort into productive enterprises, he
creates employment for men of countless professions. He is the great
liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from
bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery
of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has
released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness
and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist
centuries—and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.