TWO CONCEPTIONS OF PLANNING

...it is between predictable State action and unpredictable State improvisation...

...Must we junk the rule that would confine government spending to natural monopoly and begin to subsidize the construction industry, which is distinctly not a natural monopol ? An excellent humanitarian case can be made out for public housing projects...

...When the United Automobile Workers union urged its membership to pool their savings for home-building on land purchased collectively without going to the sub-dividing contractor, it started something that ought to be finished...

...Every union should follow suit, for if labor can control the circumstances of its own housing, it has one more cushion to fall back on when it is bargaining with management...

...Must we have public housing, as Alvin Hansen seems to think...

...Each type of writer wears blinkers that keep him from sensing and evaluating the relative pressure of two surging sub-political forces...

...Vainly I try to argue with the No-Plan boys that the issue is partly the fault of a defective understanding of semantics by a man who once wrote a book on semantics...

...But he doesn't draw conclusions from his instinctive response...

...For artificial monopoly is a legal creation, and it ean be changed by changing the laws of trade and incorporation...

...The ad writers who ring the changes on "free enterprise" and the American Way are not concerned with the fear that hangs over the Monongahela valley and Hamtranck...

...To forestall uncertainty, planning and spending have got to be brought within the rule of law...

...Why don't they try to get order, predictability, the rule of law, into their scheme of things...

...Stuart Chase instinctively recognizes this when he glorifies the TVA...

...Paving The Way For A Dictator A sounder approach, so it would seem to me, would be to encourage and cultivate the private building association and to blast the monopoly aspects of the building trades out of the pathway of prefabricated housing...

...Because if the State, in the interests of "compensa...

...Well, why don't the Planners draw up a moral rationale of State compensatory action...

...What the business men of my acquaintance really want is a moral rationale of government action, of State investment and "compensatory" spending...

...If the job is muffed we will be ground to pieces between the colliding forces of crude laissez faire and the crude "Iet-the-State-do-it...

...They want to know where the line is to be draivn...

...The attempt to deal with two mutually incompatible fears demands a repressive control from the top, with the buttressing aid of a propaganda that means all things to all men, the business men and the labor boys alike...

...It is fear of the Planning State, fear of Government competition in the things they are doing...

...And they often halt the trend toward the decentralization of population...

...It is the job of the liberal intellectuals to write that law, and to write it liberally...

...It is fear that the State won't step in after the war to plan for full employment, social security, "freedom from want...

...For it is out of such collision that the Fascist State, the "corporative" economy, is born...

...so are the labor boys...

...He goes on to talk about a "mixed economy" without defining the nature of the mixture...

...Fear will crash against fear...

...There is no reason why the private building association, worked out on mutual lines, cannot provide the capital for a real building boom, particularly if the cheap mass manufacture of prefabricated materials is there to support it...

...But what if government investment in natural monopolies isn't enough to keep the national income up to a projected $160,000,000,000 a year...

...Living as I do in two worlds, I myself am haunted by a third fear, the fear of what must happen if and when the two fears collide...

...My friend Stuart Chase, on the other hand, fails to take the small town fear of my Cheshire, Waterbury, and New Haven acquaintances into his "compensatory economy" account...

...I speak, of course, as a libertarian who fears the growth of the State...

...The threat of unpredictable State "dynamism" means a dampening down of individual dynamism...

...How do you begin to get a moral rationale of State compensatory economic action...

...I know that I am probably on the losing end in this fight...

...But must the collision between the Plan and No-Plan boys come to pass, with heaven knows what cost to individual freedom, democracy, and all the other social values we prize...

...Few liberals agree with me these days...

...They want to know how much flour, how much sugar, and how much yeast is going into the pan to bake the cake of the mixed economy if they are going to have to eat it...

...What the No-Planners fear, what makes them into No-Planners, is the Technocratic idea of planning that became current in the early 1930s, when the fuglemen of the planning concept talked about top-down control, master blue-printing, a "soviet" of engineers a la Veblen, an Economic High Command, a "continental economy" run by a General Staff...

...Where Do You Draw The Line...

...And my third fear will disappear, too...

...Here is a proper sphere for Government spending...

...Under the Swedish scheme, normal governmental expenses are always covered by taxation...

...With this sort of talk going the rounds, the business men of my acquaintance got the idea that State planning means the end of private planning...

...For the two fears that have provoked my third fear arise out of a misunderstanding of the real issue...

...But if we must have State action, the fears that obsess whole strata of the population could be allayed if the role of government planning, the sphere of State investment, is to be described and delimited in advance...

...But depression spending is allowed to run at the bottom of the business cycle...

...boys...

...Roads, big dams, power projects dependent on the flow of rivers—these are Natural Monopolies...

...Public projects have a way of taking tax revenue away from the local community...

...A vast majority of liberal journalists are for the Planning State...

...The second world I have been living in is that of liberal journalism and labor reporting...

...If, however, the solid investment is in a self-liquidating project, such as a power company or a toll bridge, it is paid for out of receipts...

...Eric Johnston, president of the Chamber of Commerce, recognizes it when he admits that Grand Coulee would never have come into existence if the State hadn't planned it that way...

...The first world is that of a Connecticut small town, distinctly bourgeois in its flavor, a world of small business men, men with factory administrative jobs, insurance salesmen, and the like...

...Look To The Swedes It seems to me that what the Planners must do is to forget their chatter about Planning-in-General and begin to talk about a Plan-in-Particular, a rational Design for an Enterprise System...

...Where there is artificial monopoly, it is Thurman Arnold, not the top-down Planners, who should be called in for advice...

...If it can be done, then the two fears of which I have spoken will magically disappear...

...It is uncertainty that men fear more than anything else, whether they are steel workers in Canton or business men in Rotary...

...Why don't they distinguish clearly between the things that belong to the State-Caesar and the things that belong to the individual or the free association of individuals...

...The Swedes set up their national bookkeeping under three headings...

...Whenever I go to Detroit or Pittsburgh, to talk to anyone connected with the CIO, I sense a second ground tone of fear...

...As for the integrated budget: look to the Swedes...

...But there it is...

...The issue is not between Planning and No-Planning...

...Why don't they face the issue that taxes are always unpalatable to specific individuals and that Government borrowing, since it involves the creation of new bank money, has its effect on the value of money that is already in existence...

...But down the line from where I live, in Bridgeport, a socialist mayor, Jasper McLevy, is afraid of them for certain hard-headed reasons...

...and the dictator, with his cops and his Goebbels all-things-to-all-men propaganda machine, will walk in...

...The integrated budget would create the atmosphere of certainty that private individuals need if they are to plan their own disposal of cash-in-the-bank...

...A man can hold out longer on strike if he doesn't have to pay monthly rent...

...I know, for I see and talk with the people who are afraid of Planning, of a "compensatory economy...

...They are usually set down in areas that become the slums of tomorrow, under federal auspices...

...It seems to me that you start with semantics, with a proper definition of terms...

...Whenever I sit in on one of their discussion groups (they are open-minded, and even invite the secretary of the Waterbury Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers unit over to talk to them), I sense a ground tone of fear...

...It is a paradoxical thing that the literature of the Planners has compounded the uncertainty that they hoped to eradicate...

...And the solid government investment is amortized over the years in accordance with standard rules of accountancy...

...He doesn't seem to care that business men are concerned with the proportions of the mixture...

...Why don't they get hep to the idea of the integrated budget, which is something different from both the balanced and the unbalanced budgets...

...Threat Of The Unpredictable One of the reasons why I am haunted by the third fear is that the intellectuals, the writers, the people who make our slogans and shape our attitudes, seem completely unaware of the psychological atmosphere of their own vast and variegated nation...

...There is such a thing as a Natural Monopoly...

...They like State action, and think they can control it, eventually if not immediately...

...If a government building doesn't bring in any income, it is amortized out of taxes spread over a twenty year interval...

...it is cleared off by extra taxation over the balance of the cycle, when the upswing is in full play...

...I am not persuaded that it is too late to do something to avert the smash...

...tion," or "full employment," or "abundance," has the right to move in on any sector of the economy without s notice, it means that individual business men can't afford to take chances on inventory, on investment, on any number of things...

...The government should be permitted to invest in any natural competitive realms...