Time Will Run Back (36 page)

“Right, Adams—though I should prefer to put the matter a little differently. What must be kept in mind, in choosing the best or most economical methods of production, is not merely the most efficient technical method of producing one particular commodity at one particular stage of one particular industry, but the most economical use of
all
available resources of labor and time and means of production to achieve the greatest general
all-around
production for a uniform satisfaction of consumer wants. And this doesn’t necessarily mean the use of the most perfect technical equipment at one particular point when this can only be achieved at the cost of robbing other industries and making them technically more
in
efficient.”

“So, as you see it, chief, an engineer or other technician wouldn’t necessarily be able to decide what really was the most efficient means of producing a product?”

“No. He would only be able to answer the
engineering
question. But the individual enterpriser must take into consideration the most
economical
method of producing that product when
everything
is considered.”

“From his own standpoint,” said Adams.

“Yes, from his own standpoint,” agreed Peter. “But what is most economical from his standpoint happens to be also what is most economical from the standpoint of the whole community. In other words, by what looks at first like an amazing coincidence the individual enterpriser makes the same kind of decision that an economic dictator—if he could take into consideration all the needs of consumers and all branches of production—would try to make. The economic dictator would have to decide how up-to-date and perfect the machines and productive resources could afford to be
at any one point.
The difference is that the economic dictator, as we discovered, would not know how to solve the problem. In fact, he wouldn’t even recognize clearly what the problem was. And if he did see it, he wouldn’t be able to solve it, because he wouldn’t have a free market system and a free price system to enable him to measure his costs of production against the value of his product—to measure his input against his output.”

“And he—meaning you and I—didn’t have double-entry bookkeeping and cost accounting to help him either, chief.”

“No,” agreed Peter. “And I must admit that it was an inspiration on your part, Adams, to think of bringing Baronio and Patelli along with us to Freeworld. Patelli’s invention of double-entry bookkeeping and cost accounting will go down as two of the great triumphs of the human mind. Such discoveries were not possible under Wonworld’s socialist system. They enable the individual enterpriser to calculate with the greatest nicety, not only for his organization as a whole but for each department within it and for each product, whether resources are being wasted and misdirected or whether they are being used to produce the maximum return.”

BUT these men, these enterprisers,” persisted Adams, “are not trying to do the best thing possible for the community. Each of them is merely interested in maximizing his own profit!”

“That is true, Adams, and that is precisely the great miracle. Each of these men is ‘selfishly’ seeking merely his own private profit. And yet under this new system we have invented, under this private ownership of the means of production, each of these men acts as if he were being led by an invisible hand to produce the things that the whole community most wants, to produce them in the right proportions, and to produce them by the most economical methods.”

“An invisible hand!”
exclaimed Adams. “What a marvelous phrase, chief! For that phrase alone you deserve to be remembered by humanity.”

Peter blushed. “I hope not,” he said. “After all, it’s only a metaphor, and I only mean it as a metaphor. If people thought I really believed that there was some occult and mysterious and supernatural force guiding the actions of enterprisers and workers—or some inevitable harmony between short-run private interest and long-run public welfare—they might ridicule me for it; and I would wish forever afterwards that I had never resorted to figures of speech. No, the new system that we have invented—”

“You
invented it,” said Adams generously, “over my objections to everything.” “Thank Marx for your objections, Adams. They steered me away from false solutions and blind alleys and helped us to find the truth.... Anyway, regardless of who invented it, the new system of free markets and private ownership of the means of production
is
miraculous. I stand by that. It is a miracle. But once it’s been discovered, there’s nothing occult or mysterious about the explanation. For under this system every enterpriser, every workman, is under the greatest incentive to do his utmost to please the consumer. He has to make what the consumers want, otherwise he cannot sell it; he cannot exchange it for the particular things that he wants. And not only does he have to make what the consumers want, he has to make it at least as well as most of those who are already making it; and he has to sell it at least as cheaply as most of those who are already selling it. And if he wants to make more than a bare living, or if he wants to make more than an average wage, he has to make a product
better
than others do, or sell it
cheaper
than others can sell it. For that reason, what a man makes in the hope of selling it will have to be even better than what he might make merely for his personal use.”

“You mean, chief, that production for profit is even better than production for use?”

“Precisely, Adams; because the man who is merely producing a chair for his own use is not competing with everybody else’s production; but if he produces a chair in the hope of selling it, he must compete with the chairs that others are offering to the consumers. Production for profit
is
production for use—for if consumers do not find that a product is good in use, they will soon cease to buy it, and the enterpriser will soon be bankrupt.”

“Then the ‘invisible hand’ you speak about,” said Adams, “is really competition?”

“Competition is certainly the palm of it.”

“But this means that we in the government, chief, must make sure that competition dominates our economic life.”

“Precisely, Adams. We must absolutely forbid coercive monopoly. Perhaps that was the central evil of state socialism. The state’s monopoly of power, and its monopoly of production. But we must do more than fight monopoly and encourage competition. We must draft our laws in such a way as to raise the
level
of competition. We must so draft them that a man who seeks his personal profit cannot attain that selfish goal
except
by promoting the public welfare.”

“And how are we going to do that?”

“We must forbid him, Adams, to do anything that injures the public welfare. Therefore we must forbid theft, fraud, deceit and all misrepresentation of goods. We must illegalize every form of force, violence, extortion, intimidation, coercion. We must compel men to keep their contractual promises, to pay their just obligations and to fulfill their contracts. The corollary to private property is private responsibility. We must not allow a private industry to thrive at the cost of killing or maiming its workers, or injuring consumers of its products, or menacing the public health, or polluting public streams, or polluting the air, or smudging whole communities with the residue of smoke. We must force every industry to pay the costs of the injury it inflicts on the person or property of others.”

“All that isn’t easy to do, chief.”

“It is extremely difficult to do,” agreed Peter, “Especially to do rightly. By our new system we have saved ourselves from the thousand needless headaches of planning. But there is never-ending work to be done in perfecting the system of free enterprise. And it can only be done if, in doing it, we adhere to the principles of freedom. But if we do this, if we make it impossible for people to grow rich by violence or force or theft or fraud or sharp practice, then the only way in which they will be able to succeed in business will be precisely by competition and rivalry in serving the consumers.”

“Are you sure that laws will be enough, chief, however good they may be?”

A heavy rain was coming down. Peter went to the window and looked steadily out at it.

“No,” he said at last, “laws won’t be enough, however good. If the people were so corrupt that they were constantly trying to evade the law, and if the police and judges and government were so corrupt that they made no impartial effort to enforce the law, then even an ideal set of laws would be futile.... No, the majority of individuals must be moral. The society must live by a moral code. The individual enterpriser or trader or workman must not only fear the police, or private retaliation; he must himself believe in honest dealing, in fairness, in justice, in truthfulness, in honor.... Perhaps the greatest vice of the communist system, worse even than its failure to produce goods, was that it destroyed all sense of justice and truth, and made its only ‘morality’ consist in absolute obedience to the commands of the dictator.... But individual freedom is impossible without individual responsibility.”

“In other words,” said Adams, “despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”

Peter looked at him with startled admiration. “Now
you
have coined a wonderful aphorism which should earn you the gratitude of mankind.”

“People will probably remember the aphorism, chief, and forget the author. Or worse, they will continue to remember the aphorism after they have forgotten its meaning.”

“Anyway,” concluded Peter, “it sums up perfectly what I have been trying to say. If we want our new system to endure, we must not only create an institutional framework of law and order, but each of us must contribute toward building up a moral code to which all of us will adhere, not through fear of legal punishment, or even through fear of what other people will think of us, but solely through fear of what each of us would otherwise think of himself.”

“Could we ever develop such a moral code, chief, would we ever live up to it, unless we revived those very religions that communism has been reviling and despising and trying to stamp out all these years?”

Peter looked out again at the rain. “I don’t know. I don’t know.... We can’t just
invent
such a religion. We can’t just throw together some arbitrary credo about the supernatural and then try to force everybody to subscribe to it. But your question stops me, Adams. I’ll admit this much, even now. I’m not sure that men will accept and abide by a moral code, however rational, based on purely utilitarian grounds. Perhaps the masses of mankind will never abide by a moral code unless they feel a deep sense of
reverence
for something....”

“For the universe itself?”

“At least a deep sense of humility, a recognition of their own littleness in the universe, a profound sense of their own bottomless ignorance before the mystery and the miracle of existence Perhaps we need at least a conviction, a faith, that beyond the seemingly blind forces of nature there may be, there must be, some Great Purpose, forever inscrutable to our little minds.”

“Isn’t it an example of the pathetic fallacy, isn’t it very unphilosophic anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, chief, even to use such a term as ‘purpose’ in connection with nature or the universe as a whole? Isn’t it presumptuous, and perhaps meaningless, to say either that the universe has a Purpose or that it has no Purpose? ‘Purpose’ describes a purely human attitude—the use of present limited means to attain future ends.”

Peter was looking at Adams with surprise and admiration. “You sound almost like a trained philosopher!”

“Oh, I used to be quite a student of Dialectical Materialism in my twenties, chief. And then, you know, Hegel was available in the private Politburo library because of his profound influence on Marx, and though I was perhaps his only reader—”

“Well, fortunately, Adams, we don’t have to solve every problem now.” “No. We should be considerate enough to leave a few,” said Adams with an ironic smile, “for our descendants.”

IN Moscow Marshall Zakachetsky was addressing the Politburo. “I have the pleasure to report,” he said, “that the government now has as many planes in operation as it had the day before the Uldanovite counterrevolutionaries flew off with our entire supply. This is even better than it sounds, for we have twice as many long-range bombers as we had then. And all our planes are new. Half of the rebels’ planes, on the other hand, were obsolete when they stole them. They are all now three years older; a good part have probably been junked; they had to start from scratch in building their airplane and motor factories and their machine tools; so it seems impossible—”

“Excellent,” said Bolshekov. “But we’ve got to establish even greater superiority. One year more, and we’ll have a little surprise for them “

Peter’s economic reforms in the Western Hemisphere had succeeded far beyond his fondest dreams. Though only three years had passed since the flight from Moscow, Peter’s statisticians were already informing him that the man-hour productivity of Free-world was at least four times as great as that of Wonworld, and might be much higher.

Peter did not take these statistics too seriously. It was not easy, he had concluded, to measure comparative living standards or comparative human satisfactions. Even in comparing goods, it was not as easy to measure differences in quality as differences in quantity. And as there was no trade between the two half-worlds, because Bolshekov’s regime would not permit it, it was difficult to compare values. But in whatever could be measured in quantity, the achievements of Freeworld were far beyond those of Wonworld. This was true even in the military field, where Peter’s intelligence agents informed him that in ship producing capacity, tank producing capacity, and even in plane producing capacity Freeworld had already surpassed Wonworld, in spite of the latter’s great head start.

But even more than by the record of production, Peter was struck by the startling change that had come over the whole spirit of the people. They worked with an energy and zeal infinitely greater than anything they had shown before. Peter now found people everywhere who regarded their work as a pleasure, a hobby, an exciting adventure. They were constantly thinking of improvements, devising new gadgets, dreaming of new processes that would cut costs of production, or new inventions and new products that consumers might want.