THE PERILS OF PEACE
Coleman, Mcalister
The Perils Of Peace By McALISTER COLEMAN THE Fat Boys are getting feverish. Down the halls of the hospital marked "Free Enterprise," (changed from Finance and Monopoly Capitalism) run the nurses...
...Hayek is even more droopy than von Mises...
...These attendants on a mighty apprehensive bunch are masked as economists...
...It so happens that in truth neither of these day and night nurses are living in the 20th Century...
...Everyone in his sober senses does demand that the aluminum, and steel, and magnesium and rubber, and chemical plants go right ahead under democratic controls turning out suclrproducts instead of shutting down said plants for the benefit of Alcoa, the Dow Chemical Company, and the U. S. Steel Corporation...
...They both start with the proposition that they are sounding off on behalf of the extension of democracy...
...Have A Heart, GI Joe' Now let Friedrich and Ludwig come forward and explain in simple language, if that's possible, to an ex-service man looking for a job in the new synthetic rubber or light metals or plastics industry that it is far, far better for him to go to sleep under bridges and set up an apple-stand than to give himself over to the "serfdom" of a socially useful enterprise under government auspices...
...A most portentous looking character named Friedrich Hayek and another one called Ludwig von Mises, both professional Austrian refugees, have sounded off to the effect that if the mean old government would keep its nose out of business, "the money calculus of profit-seeking business," as Nurse von Mises puts it in Omnipotent Government, would make every thing fine and dandy for the Common Man...
...Though, of course, Eric Johnston's reading has been confined to hotel menus and telephone books, it is amusing to hear how he echoes the philosophy of such professional apologists as we have been describing...
...Down the halls of the hospital marked "Free Enterprise," (changed from Finance and Monopoly Capitalism) run the nurses with swabs and sedatives...
...No one would bother with the drippings of these two were it not that they are acclaimed with such awe by influential book reviewers, genuine liberals such as John Chamberlain, and a large cross-section of would-be intellectuals who are delighted to find polysyllabic alibis, written by presumably authoritative economists, for their weak-kneed surrender to the philosophy of grab and greed...
...The theme is that hoary one that we are all going to Hades in a hanging-basket, because a few stiff-necked folks don't want to let the Fat Boys out of bed and back onto our collective necks again...
...The affairs of the Common Man are to be managed not by representatives of his own choosing, but rather by those same Fat Boys now tossing feverishly in the private rooms—"the captains of industry and all their aides...
...Their techniques are also familiar...
...Posing as prophets of a new day, such economists are in reality leading a surging march back to Adam Smith and Ricardo, accumulating en route a phony prestige and, no doubt, some nice royalties...
...They are way, way back at the start of the 19th Century when the word "competition" meant something and there was a chance that the unmanaged economic system might be free to do other than produce a succession of devastating panics and two of the largest scaled slaughters of mankind, since we crawled out of the primeval ooze...
...In fact, glooms Hayek, we are in the mess we are all in on account of the rise of "socialist" ideas...
...They love the C. M. so much that it grieves their great hearts to see him faHing into the fallacy that he can take care of his own affairs...
...No one in his sober senses has ever suggested that all these mighty plants into which we the people have so liberally poured our hard-earned money are to go on making machine-guns and bombers and cartridges when peace comes...
...They are the highbrow counterparts of the ineffable Eric A. Johnston, president of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States...
...These lads are simply rehashing .the old, old corned beef about bureaucracy, as though a nation of 130,000,-000 people could be run on the basis of a corner grocery store, the incentives of the cash nexus, and the rest of the blah that was current in the gas-lit parlors up on the hill in the early Eighties...
...Let the Fat Boys go on their own sweet way, and pretty soon you'll be back in the glorious days of pre-war Austria, I presume, though Hayek doesn't say so flatly in his book, The Road to Serfdom...
...He says that all planning for production for use leads us straight into serfdom...
...Once you start planning, it is all up with you...
...The Common Man," says von Mises, "is the customer for whom the captains of industry aHd all their aides are working...
...Here, read these two books by these big-shot economists and see how planning for your security and welfare will lead you straight down the road to social and economic perdition...
...Does this ex-and-jobless GI want to do anything to aid in the "impetus to socialism" that will heighten the fever of the Fat Boys, who are currently quaking in their beds over the Perils of Peace...
...It turns out that wailers like Eric who are tearing their shirts over the Perils of Peace (which are getting to be as hair-raising, and interminable as the Perils of Pauline) are now concerned about what shall be done with the Government-owned war plants after the wan Eric has sent a warning to all Chambers of Commerce against the "socialism" which will follow as the night the day, if American communities in which these plants are located try to keep them in operation, so as to give thousands on thousands of useful jobs for returning soldiers, produce invaluable civilian goods such as aluminum, magnesium, synthetic rubber, and a vast range of chemicals and, in general, keep the economy going through the tough times that are ahead...
...I don't know how it is out your way beyond the Hudson just now, but there has been an awful lot of such Wailing Wall stuff recently here in the East...
...Eric is now letting out a Cassandra cry about the Perils of Peace...
...Remember that "these captains of industry and all their aides" have been working for you all the time you were away—on a basis to be sure that has netted them profits which make the profits of the last war look like the take of a peanut-vendor...
...Two of them have just now written books on the same theme, reviewed solemnly in the New York Times within a week...
...Have a heart, Joe...
...The Old Corned Beef The breed of these two is familiar enough to anyone who has had to wade through the dreary morass of monopoly capitalism apologetics...
...They protest (me thinks too much) their lasting love for the Common Man...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 43
