Private profit-seeking threatened Britain’s wartime shipping capacity.

Evidence

The case of the British naval sector illustrates a general pattern. As the War Cabinet reported to Parliament, “If shipping failed, we could neither continue in the war nor maintain our population.” Soon, the conflict between public needs and private interests plainly surfaced: selling British ships abroad was extremely profitable. By February 1917, private shipowners had sold ships to rival nations at such a rate that there were not even enough vessels to import the essential goods for a nation at war. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 167

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance of the public-private conflict that justifies state intervention and later gets reversed by austerity. — connects to: World War I compelled Britain and Italy to subordinate private profit to political need — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 107; Private profit-seeking by shipowners nearly collapsed Britain’s wartime supply — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 125