RESOURCES AND HOT AIR
Lonigan, Edna
Resources And Hot Air ENOUGH AND TO SPARE, by Kirtley F. Mather. Harper and Brothers. $2. Reviewed by Edna Lonigan THIS is a most exasperating book. Three-quarters of it is a lively account of...
...Thus it is possible for political organizers to mobilize all the learned professions behind their programs by getting experts very enthusiastic about that on which they are not experts...
...THE importance of this book is that it illustrates the way in which political propaganda is going to be put out more and more in books about science, art, and engineering...
...The last section and the connective tissue are a thinly disguised plea for a change in our form of government...
...Prof...
...Mather means that Jefferson could not take an overall view of the nation's problems at Monticello, or Franklin at Philadelphia, that Willkie's viewpoint on foreign policy was more limited than that of State Department employes...
...into casual columns of dramatic criticism...
...This is possible because of technical advancements in extracting industrial raw materials from crops, and in constantly renewing the fertility of our land by obtaining nitrogen from the air...
...But they don't...
...In another place he says, "The results of [planning] should be crystallized in carefully considered proposals submitted to the higher authorities for integration and approval...
...Mather's doctrine is the Hegelian State...
...One wonders how these writers dispose of people who have been in government service and left...
...He is not aware that in British and American countries the citizens are the power, and they give the government just as much authority as they wish it to have...
...Mather is professor of geology at Harvard...
...Prof...
...There are here no freshly observed facts, no new turns of logic, no quotations from real students of economics or politics...
...scientists will explain that we have a new political philosophy...
...Mather says that "the lawmakers should always strive to give the citizens just as much responsibility for self-government as they are able and willing to assume...
...Likewise singers, actors, and literary critics will carry on the "education" in the new ideas...
...In the United States when citizens wish to plan a hospital or an art museum, an orchestra or a factory, they do their own integrating and their own approving...
...This is the Soviet method of planning...
...Do they take their magic with them when they leave, or does it reside strictly in the place, so that it wears thin as they get farther away from holy ground...
...The technical section of his book describes interestingly how over the last century we have been consuming nature's stored capital in coal, oil, and other limited supplies—although even here there is "enough and to spare"—but we are now returning to the pre-industrial practice of taking our resources out of our annual renewable income from the land...
...The conclusion of his book is devoted to political economy...
...and I said that if communism was to be discussed it must be discussed in a very different and far more thorough fashion...
...Prof...
...Engineers will innocently explain to a bewildered public that we have here a great new economic idea...
...They are the higher authorities...
...Communists are not the only offenders, but Marx had a word for it: "I regarded it as inappropriate, not to say immoral, to smuggle socialist and communist dogmas...
...Mather accepts the old fallacy that officials at the center have a better "over-all perspective" than private citizens...
...There is no threat of scarcity ahead...
...For example, Prof...
...Three-quarters of it is a lively account of the supply of minerals and other natural resources as they are distributed over the earth...
...There are all the cliches about planning that have been in circulation for the last 15 years...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 18
