Abstract The article focuses on the 1948 revision of the American Accounting Association's statement of principles. The proposal of the committees, masquerading under the label "concepts and standards," is precisely in line with the idea that the private owner is entitled to nothing more once he has as a matter of bookkeeping-written off his costs. It is precisely in line with the accounting ideas of those who have been campaigning for the impairment and minimizing of private property rights in every possible way and the concurrent glorifying and maximizing of the so-called public interest in property, looking toward the goal of complete suppression of private rights and complete state ownership, or socialism. It seems to echo the arbitrary accounting policy of one of the agencies participating in this campaign, the Federal Power Commission, which provides for writing off recorded assets and the related equity of investors, retroactively for an indefinite period, on one flimsy excuse or another, and at the same time insists that under no circumstances can there be any restorations or adjustments in the other direction, as this would constitute that terrible thing labeled "reaccounting" by members of the Commission's staff.
Herbert E. Miller (Sat,) studied this question.