Time Will Run Back

by Henry Hazlitt

  “But socialism, chief, argues that he ought to love everybody, and ought to work for everybody.”

  “But the simple fact is, Adams, that he doesn’t love everybody, and you can’t force him to love everybody. And if you try to force him to love and support everybody, you merely kill his incentives and impoverish everybody. Of course under a regime of freedom you can persuade or exhort a man to widen voluntarily the circle of his love or at least his good will. And if a man here or there under our free market system does love everybody, and does want to produce for everybody and give to everybody, there is nothing to prevent him from doing so to the limit of his capacity.”

  “Then your point,” said Adams, “is that while we may regret that more people are not more charitable than they are, the fault is not that of the free market or of the private enterprise system, but of human nature?”

  “Precisely,” said Peter. “My point is that the nature of human beings primarily determines the nature and working of the economic and social system under which they live—and not, as Karl Marx supposed, the other way round.”

  “But wouldn’t your argument apply also to communism, chief? Aren’t its faults also primarily the faults of the people who adopted and operate it?”

  “The people first embraced communism, Adams, under a delusion; but then were held to it by bayonets. I am talking about systems that people are still free to change peaceably. Communism is infinitely worse than the potential human nature of the majority of people who live under it, because no one is free to make his will known, no one is free to act, without risk of torture or murder. Let me put it this way. An economic or political system is always as good as the people who live under it—as long as they are free to change it.”

  Chapter 40

  IT was June 21, just five years from the day when Peter’s air force had landed in America. The date was now Independence Day, the biggest holiday in Freeworld. Peter had broadcast a radio talk on a hemispheric hookup at noon.

  Now he and Adams were completely alone in the White House.

  “I gave everybody here the day off,” said Peter. “In fact, I insisted that they take it off. There are only two guards outside, with strict orders not to let anybody in—even Cabinet officers—on any excuse. There are no telephone girls at the switchboard, and my own telephone line is dead. It all gives me a wonderful feeling of peace. At last we can have one policy talk without a thousand interruptions. Sometimes during the last few years I’ve felt the way a philosopher would feel if he were information clerk at the Union Station and had to develop his system between questions.”

  A hundred miles east of Nantucket Island, the crew of a Coast Guard ship watched a huge flight of long-range bombers pass above them, headed for the American shore. When the captain trained his binoculars on them, he was reassured to see that they carried the Freeworld markings.

  “What do you think?” he asked the first mate.

  “I suppose it’s got something to do with today’s celebrations.”

  “Hear anything about it in advance?”

  “Nope.”

  “Think we ought to wireless a report of it?”

  “We oughtn’t to make ourselves look foolish.”

  “Just wireless, as a routine report: More than one hundred big bombers, our markings, passed over—then give our position—heading west by south!’

  “Very good, sir.”

  “I have heard you call your new system, chief,” said Adams, “by many different names, which you seem to use interchangeably. Sometimes you call it free enterprise, sometimes competitive private enterprise, sometimes the private ownership system, sometimes the private property system, sometimes the profit-and-loss system, or the profit-seeking system, sometimes the price system, sometimes merely the market economy, or the free market economy. Isn’t it about time you settled on some definite single name for it?”

  “Does it matter?” asked Peter.

  “Well, you know what Bolshekov is calling it in his propaganda!”

  “What is he calling it?”

  “He says it’s nothing but a brazen revival of capitalism!” Peter hit the ceiling. “The dirty son of a Trotsky!” He had slipped into the old profanity without thinking of its literal meaning.

  “Quite true,” said Adams; “but we must have an answer for him.”

  “Well,” said Peter, quieting down, “suppose for the sake of argument that Bolshekov’s charge were true? Suppose, in our persistent gropings toward a better system than communism, we had done nothing better at last but stumble into and rediscover the very same old ‘capitalism’ that we had been reviling for two centuries as the depth of human iniquity and misery? Suppose that were true? How would Bolshekov know it, any more than we do? When we destroyed all the old literature, when our forefathers carefully expurgated even from Marx everything but the mere abuse and left as few hints as they could of how the system actually worked, how can Bolshekov know any better than we what the old capitalism was like?”

  “He doesn’t,” said Adams; “but he’s got hold of a powerful propaganda weapon, and we’ve got to find an answer.”

  “Well, it’s perfectly silly,” said Peter, “to call our new system ‘capitalism.’ We can rightly call it any of the names you just cited, but not that! How does the name apply?”

  “Well, the system certainly makes use of capital, chief, of capital goods, or machinery and tools—”

  “Of course it does. But so does socialism, communism, or any other conceivable economic system. Otherwise mankind couldn’t survive!”

  “Well then,” Adams asked, “how do you suppose the old ‘capitalism’ ever got its name? Why did our filthy bourgeois forefathers ever call it ‘capitalism’?”

  Peter thought for a moment. “Maybe they didn’t. Maybe this was just a term of abuse that its socialist enemies applied to it. Maybe it was merely Karl Marx himself who invented the term, or made it stick.”

  “But why was it considered appropriate even as a term of abuse?”

  “That would be a little hard to guess,” said Peter. “Let’s see.... Let’s assume that the term ‘capital’ already existed, and that it meant money and the tools of production. And let’s say that this capital happened to be privately owned by individuals. Then these private owners might get the name ‘capitalists.’ Now let’s say these capitalists used their capital to establish enterprises and hire workers. If people who disliked this system started to call it ‘capitalism,’ the name itself would adroitly imply that the system existed primarily for the enrichment of the capitalists—and hence for the exploitation or robbery of the hired workers.”

  “So if the defenders of the system were foolish enough themselves to use Marx’s epithet for it,” suggested Adams, “they would begin under a heavy semantic handicap?”

  “Precisely,” said Peter—“or perhaps not. Perhaps they could have proudly embraced this intended smear and turned it to their own advantage. They could have said: ‘You do well to call our system “capitalism.” For it is precisely this system that leads to the maximum accumulation and the most efficient allocation of capital. It is only this system, in short, that makes the fullest use of capital, of the tools of production, and so takes burdens off the back of labor, constantly and enormously increases the worker’s productivity and wages and wellbeing.’,.. Yes, I think we could work out a good propaganda answer to Bolshekov.”

  “Then let me ask—” Adams began.

  “But I might add,” Peter continued, “that Bolshekov is entirely wrong in applying the term ‘capitalism’ to our new system if he means by it that it is necessarily the capitalists who hire the workers. On the contrary, as we see every day, it is enterprisers, often without much or even any capital of their own, who hire both capital and labor at market rates of interest and market rates of wages. They could be just as plausibly accused of exploiting the capitalists as of exploiting the workers, because, of course, each enterpriser is trying to hire both capital and labor as
cheaply as he can.”

  “But isn’t it competition among themselves,” said Adams, “that forces the enterprisers to pay as high rates for both capital and labor as they actually do?”

  “Precisely “

  The bomber flight appeared over Nantucket. Two reconnaissance planes were sent up to have a closer look at it. They were fired upon. The colonel in charge of the Nantucket airfield telephoned the Department of Defense at Washington...

  The bomber flight passed over New York, releasing a few bombs. It passed over Philadelphia, and dropped another load. Interception planes were now rising to meet it....

  The telephone operator at the Department of Defense reported back to the Under-Secretary. “The White House doesn’t answer!” “Ridiculous! Keep ringing....”

  “Have you any other objections?” Peter asked.

  “When I bring up objections to your new system,” answered Adams, “I bring them up as much to clarify my own mind as for any other purpose. I need not tell you that in spite of all these objections I am, on net balance, lost in admiration of your great discovery.”

  “You are tremendously generous. But I must repeat that it isn’t exactly my dis—”

  “I am beginning to think, chief, that it is, in fact, the greatest discovery ever given to mankind. For one thing, it has made possible most of the other discoveries that promise constantly to lift at least the material welfare of mankind—”

  “Let’s not speak slightingly or patronizingly of material or economic welfare,” said Peter. “It is this that makes all cultural progress possible. The highest scientific or spiritual achievements cannot be reached by anyone unless he has rather recently had something to eat.”

  “I agree with all that,” Adams said. “And that is why I am asking you this question. Its enormous productivity is, as I see it, merely one of the consequences of your new system. But what do you consider to be the heart of it? What is its innermost secret?”

  “Its secret?” said Peter. The question excited him. He got up and paced back and forth. “Let’s see.... Its secret, perhaps, is that it protects the right of everyone to keep what he has made. He is allowed to have and to hold the product of his labor... the amount of value he has contributed to production. He engages only in voluntary exchanges. This voluntary exchange implies giving value for equal value, or rather, it implies that no exchange need be made unless each party to the transaction feels that he gains by it. Under this system, then, all economic relations are voluntary.”

  “Including that of employer and employee?”

  “Yes. Under this system the choice of one’s productive role is essentially a voluntary choice.”

  “But if a man has no capital, chief?”

  “The amount of capital a man has or can borrow, Adams, depends usually on his previous productive record—and in any case does not necessarily determine his choice of role. The hired salaried managers of great business firms, or our leading motion picture actors, get huge incomes, but are ‘only employees,’ whereas the man who sets up his own little cigarette stand or gasoline-filling station, or drives his own taxicab, is an ‘enterpriser,’ a ‘capitalist’ or perhaps an ‘employer,’ even though his income may be very low. I am driven to the conclusion that the Marxist separation of ‘employers’ and ‘workers’ into antagonistic and irreconcilable ‘classes’ is nonsensical. The relationship of the employer to the worker is essentially cooperative; it is basically a partnership in production.”

  “But won’t the employer and the worker often disagree as to precisely how much each should get of the value of their joint production?”

  “Of course they will; and so at times will all partners. But it is quite another thing to erect such individual disagreements into a theory of an irresolvable ‘class’ conflict.”

  “Then am I to understand that the secret of your system, chief, is that productive relationships under it are essentially voluntary?”

  “That is certainly part of the secret,” Peter agreed, “and one of the great points of contrast with any collectivist system, whether it is called communism, socialism, central planning or what not. Under all these systems economic relationships are essentially compulsory. They are dictated from the center, from the top. Under them everyone must take the role assigned to him from the top, or the socialist planners cannot carry out their plans. But—”

  He kept pacing back and forth. He was not quite satisfied with his answer. The secret? The secret? Why, of course!

  “The secret of our new system,” he said suddenly, “if it has any secret, is freedom! Simple freedom! You set men free, and each turns to doing what he most wishes to do, or what he thinks he can do best, or what he thinks will bring him the greatest means to happiness. The secret is the freedom of each man to make a living in his own way; the freedom to produce what he wishes; the freedom to keep what he creates, or to share it or dispose of it in accordance with the dictates of his own and not some bureaucrat’s conscience; the freedom to associate with whom he wishes; the freedom to consume what he wishes; the freedom to make and to correct his own mistakes—”

  “But if your great idea, chief, is at bottom simply freedom—”

  “Our great idea, Adams! Freeworld’s great idea!”

  “But don’t you remember, chief, that night you ran through the deserted streets of the Kremlin to my rooms? You thought then that your great discovery was private ownership of the means of production!”

  “Well, yes.... Private ownership of the means of production, Adams, is certainly a great idea. But that is because it is an inescapable corollary, an integral part, of the great idea, which is individual freedom. It is only when the means of production are privately owned that the individual can keep the fruits of his production. It is only when the individual is protected in his right to retain the fruits of his production that he has the incentive to produce. It is only when the individual has the right to own the means of production that he is free to make his living in his own way. And not unless he has this freedom—this economic independence, this liberty to earn his own livelihood without the favor of the state, and without licking the boots of the bureaucratic hierarchy—not unless he has this freedom can he have any freedom whatever. For freedom is indivisible. Freedom is like a living thing. Freedom is a living thing! You may say, if you please, that economic freedom is only the belly of the whole body of freedom. But remember that the belly carries the legs; remember that the belly feeds the heart; remember that unless the belly is there, unless the belly is alive and healthy and whole, the mind cannot think and the spirit cannot dream—”

  “But if freedom is the central virtue of the new system,” asked Adams, “isn’t it also its central danger? Haven’t you granted too much freedom?”

  “Too much?”

  “Yes, chief. You have allowed people to say what they please in speeches, to print what they please in books and newspapers. And what is the result? They are using their freedom of speech continually to criticize your government, to criticize even the marvelous new system that you have made possible—the system that has made their very freedom of speech possible. You allow them to criticize without fear of punishment, without fear of losing their jobs or fortunes or means of livelihood or chance of promotion, and therefore they criticize.”

  “It does seem a bit paradoxical,” Peter said. “Wonworld is a hell; but no one inside dares to criticize it, which is precisely one of the things that makes it a hell. Worse, everyone inside is compelled continually to praise it. And the result is that stupid people, hearing nothing but praise of the system, think they must be living in a heaven, though they are sick and terrorized and wretched. And in Freeworld we have created what is—at least by comparison—a heaven. And one of the very things that makes it a comparative heaven is the freedom to criticize it. But stupid people, when they hear so much criticism, begin to think they must be living in a hell, though no one in our recorded history was ever as well off in material and cultural resourc
es as they are.... I confess I don’t know any answer to this paradox... except, perhaps, still more freedom....”

  “Still more?”

  “Yes, Adams. Still more. You know how futile, when we were still under the old communist-socialist system, were all my efforts to introduce freedom and political democracy. Now, I think, conditions are at last ripe for the introduction of a genuine and free representative government, in which the leaders will be freely selected by the people, and—”

  Suddenly they heard the roar of planes. They rushed toward the window.

  There was an explosion. Then another, still louder. Then the ack-ack of antiaircraft guns. Then a continuous roar.

  “We’re being bombed!” shouted Peter. “Let’s go to the switchboard. The War Department must have been trying to reach me. I must call—-”

  “That’s foolhardy now,” shouted Adams.

  Peter started out of the room. He heard a terrific detonation. He felt the floor crunching under his feet. He looked up to sec the ceiling crack open and fall....

  He lost consciousness.

  Chapter 41

  HE had been deep under water, far down, and felt himself rising to the surface.... He opened his eyes reluctantly, from a sense of duty.