Time Will Run Back

by Henry Hazlitt

  “Well, maybe we shouldn’t permit private individuals to own and run these things for a profit, Adams, but just at their own expense and on their own time.”

  “Where would they get the capital to start such projects, chief? How long could they stand the loss? Out of what would they pay the expenses? And if their newspapers criticized the government, how long would they hold the particular jobs, the means of livelihood, that the government had assigned to them?”

  “The government would have to promise them immunity from punishment,” said Peter.

  “Oh, come now, chief, we’ve been through all that! That’s what you promised them in the elections, and they didn’t believe you. For the basic situation remains. You have the power to punish them. You have economic life-and-death power over them. The only thing to prevent you from exercising that power would be self-restraint—a quixotic determination to keep your own promise. And that wouldn’t be good enough for a cautious man. He would doubt its reality or its permanence.”

  Whenever Peter was stuck for an answer to Adams, he either gazed out of the window or lit a cigarette. This time he did both.

  “You confront me with a bleak outlook,” he said at last. “The other day you convinced me that socialism is incompatible with democracy, incompatible with the expression of any free, uncoerced majority will. You are forcing me to admit that the reign of slavery and terror imposed by my father and Bolshekov is not an accident, not some monstrous perversion of the socialist ideal, but merely the logical and inevitable outcome of the socialist ideal! You are forcing me to admit that complete socialism means complete deprivation of individual liberty and an absolute government dictatorship.”

  Adams looked almost appalled by the extent of his own victory, but he continued: “I’m sorry to seem so negative and disheartening, but I haven’t even mentioned some considerations. For example, once we adopt a Five Year Plan we’ve got to adhere to it; we’ve got to follow it. We can’t have some new transitory majority constantly upsetting, reversing and disorganizing our planned economy—”

  “All right, all right,” broke in Peter. “I’ve had enough discouragement for one day.” This way of terminating my conferences with Adams, he thought, is becoming a habit.

  Chapter 21

  ADAMS was nearly a full hour late for the daily conference with Peter.

  He arrived pale and shaken. “Some of Bolshekov’s men just tried to assassinate me!” He was breathing hard.

  “Where? How?”

  “A few minutes after I left the offices”—he paused to catch his breath—“of the Central Planning Board to come here.... I was in my car.... Another limousine whisked by.... A man in the rear machine gunned my car.... aiming at me.... I crouched on the floor. My chauffeur was killed.... The car plunged up on the sidewalk and crashed into a building.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Miraculously, no. But I had a very close call. I don’t mind admitting that my nerves are on edge.”

  “What have you done?” “I’ve called the police, and they say they are going to have the bullets extracted from the chauffeur’s body and examined. I don’t think I’m going to get much information from that.”

  “Did you get the car’s number?”

  “No. And no witnesses.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “Exactly like the one I use—I used—myself.” “You say this was done by Bolshekov’s men. How do you know?”

  Adams stared incredulously at him. “Who else? Who else has the motive? Who else could get the equipment, hire the assassin? Who else would dare? The worst of it is, we don’t know how much support he has, how deep his control goes over the police themselves. Now do you believe me when I tell you that it’s his life or ours? You must have him liquidated immediately!”

  “I’m not going to have any man shot, or even tried, on mere suspicion,” said Peter. “First, we must have evidence.”

  “Moral certainty isn’t enough!” Adams was bitter.

  “We can never achieve good ends except by good means,” Peter said. “I want to do everything to protect you, but I told you I am determined to stop lawless violence on the part of the government itself. I mean it.”

  “How long do you think you’re going to be the government when you allow Bolshekov to try to have us assassinated without any risk to himself?”

  Peter did not answer.

  “You know if it’s me today, chief, it’s going to be you to morrow.”

  Peter gazed out of the window.

  “You’re not even going to remove Bolshekov?”

  “I’m not sure that wouldn’t be the most dangerous course of all,” Peter replied at length. “He’s still too strong, too widely and foolishly admired, and has too big and fanatic a personal following. I must first of all discredit him—or rather, let him discredit himself.”

  “How? By introducing ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom?’” Adams’ tone was contemptuous.

  “No,” said Peter. “By showing the people that we can get far more production than he could.”

  Adams stared at him as if he could hardly believe in such irrelevance. He finally took a pinch of snuff to calm himself. Then he seemed to decide to play along. “And how do you think you are going to do that?”

  “Well,” said Peter, “we certainly couldn’t get less production. I’ve just been studying the latest reports, which you must also have received, on the agricultural situation, on the famine in Kansas, and on the new outbreak of famine in the Chinese, Indian and Argentinian Soviet Republics.”

  Adams stared at him again. His expression said: Isn’t there going to be any more discussion of the fact that I have just had a narrow escape from death? Peter remained stony-faced. Adams finally relaxed into a sardonic smile. “The famine is very serious, but I don’t see what can be done about it. We have signs all over every Soviet Republic: Work! Work! Produce! Produce! Production Is The Answer! We have even sent in trained speakers to whip up popular fervor. None of it does any good. The peasants in the American Republic, especially, need to be taught our Russian know-how.”

  “Let’s take a look at our system of incentives,” Peter suggested.

  “Our system of incentives is very good,” replied Adams. “Each collective farm is assigned a minimum quota of wheat, rice, beans, or what not, that it must turn over to the State. In addition it is allowed to retain a maximum fixed amount of its own production for its own consumption.”

  “How much is that fixed maximum?”

  “That depends on the particular collective. But what we allow the collective to retain, after it has met its full quota, averages about 5 per cent of what it must turn over to the State.”

  “Suppose a collective produces more than the minimum quota for the State?”

  “We take it, of course. What else could be done with the surplus?”

  “But that doesn’t seem to give any incentive, Adams, for the collective to produce an excess.”

  “The collective has the satisfaction of knowing, chief, that it is adding to the supplies available for everyone.”

  “Very noble. But it doesn’t seem to act as much of a production incentive with most people. I had a long discussion of that with Bolshekov.”

  “Well, if the collective farm’s total production falls below its assigned quota, chief, then both the quota reserved for the State and the quota reserved for the collective’s own consumption are cut by the same percentage as its total production has fallen short. In other words, if a collective produces only one-half of its total production quota, then the State set-aside is reduced by one-half, and collective’s reserve for its own consumption is reduced by one-half.”

  “But even if the collective met its full quota, Adams, the reserve for its own consumption has been calculated to be just about enough to keep the workers on the farm alive, hasn’t it?”

  “Practically... yes.”

  “So under the illustration you have just given, they would be allowe
d only half enough to keep them alive?” “True; but Wonworld consumers would have suffered correspondingly.”

  “Oh, no. What happened to Wonworld consumers generally would depend upon the change in the total production of all the farms considered together, not of any one farm. And it would depend also on how accurately or fairly the expected ‘normal’ production of an individual farm had been figured. And if this arrangement is made to apply one way, Adams, why can’t it be made to apply the other? If the collective produces more than its quota for the State, in addition to a minimum reserve balance for its own consumption, why shouldn’t it be allowed to keep the excess for itself?”

  “What would it do with that excess, chief? The members of the collective are already entitled to enough over for their own consumption, if they produce it. What could they do with more than they need? Hoard it? And why should any surplus be withheld from the Wonworld consumers who need it?”

  “What I am getting at is this, Adams. It seems to me that we would get much more production if workers were rewarded in proportion to their production.”

  “That would be a direct violation, chief, of the Marxist platinum rule: ‘To each according to his needs.’”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Peter; “but it might help to make real instead of merely rhetorical the first part of that rule: ‘From each according to his ability’ “

  “Chief, how are you going to reward workers in proportion to their production? How would you go about it?”

  “It seems to me that it ought to be simple.”

  “It seems to me that it would be impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, in the first place, chief, how would you determine what the production of any individual worker actually was? Let’s take the simplest possible case. Let’s take a collective with ioo hands. Let’s say it produces 2500 bushels of wheat. How many bushels has each worker produced?”

  “Are we back in kindergarten, Adams? Each worker has produced 25 bushels.”

  “Wrong,” said Adams. “The average production of 100 hands was 25 bushels each. But some of these hands were sick and produced nothing at all. Others were ignorant, inept or careless, and actually on net balance destroyed part of the total production that would otherwise have been achieved. Some hands worked two or three times as hard as others, and presumably produced two or three times as much wheat—if there were any way of measuring their individual contribution. But there isn’t. All we can say is that the average result of all the work and machinery and rain and sunlight applied to those acres was 25 bushels of wheat for each hand employed. But you can’t assign any particular production to any particular hand.”

  “I concede your point,” said Peter. “We couldn’t reward each worker in the collective in proportion to his individual production. But we could at least reward the group according to their total production, and let them divide it up evenly among themselves. If one collective turned out 25 bushels of wheat per man per year, and another collective 50 bushels, then those in the second collective should share twice as much among them as those in the first.”

  “Why, chief? What would be the justice in that?”

  “We would be rewarding workers—or at least groups of workers—in proportion at least to their group production.”

  “We wouldn’t be doing anything of the kind,” said Adams.

  “Not only would it be impossible to tell what any individual worker had contributed to the total production on a collective, but it would be impossible to tell what the workers had produced collectively.”

  “But certainly we would know that, Adams!”

  “No, we would not. All we would know is that the workers, their animals, their tools, their land, insects and the weather working or acting in combination had produced a certain total net result. But we wouldn’t know what to attribute to any one factor.”

  “We would know that-—”

  “Let’s begin with the weather, chief. If the collectives in the Southern Hemisphere got the right amount of rain and the collectives in the Northern Hemisphere had a drought, then those in the North might produce only half as much wheat per acre or per hand as those in the South. But it would be through no fault of their own. And for the same reasons the wheat yield on any one collective would fluctuate from year to year. It would be merely a matter of luck.”

  “I concede the element of luck,” said Peter. “But your argument seems to be stronger against the system we already have than against the system I propose. The minimum production and collection quotas that we assign to the individual collectives don’t take account of this mere luck. Moreover, it seems to me that this element of luck is confined largely to farming. It doesn’t exist in manufacturing, for instance.”

  “I have only begun,” replied Adams. “Let’s consider the land, now. The soil conditions are different on every collective. With poor soil the hands on one collective can produce, say, only half as much wheat per man per hour of work as the hands on a collective with good soil. Or, putting the matter the other way, the hands on a collective with exceptionally good soil could produce twice as much wheat per man per hour of work as the hands on a collective with average soil.”

  He looked at Peter for confirmation. Peter nodded.

  “Then it isn’t the fault of the workers on the poor soil, chief, that they produced only half the average production; and it isn’t the merit of the workers on the very good soil that they produced twice as much as the average production.”

  Peter nodded again.

  “Very well,” Adams continued. “Now let’s go on to the animals and tools and machinery. If one collective has horses and the other hasn’t any, or even if one collective has better horses than the next, the first will, other things being equal, produce more wheat per man than the second.”

  Peter nodded.

  “And if one collective has a few crude hand tools for the workers and the other has more tools or better tools, or if the second has tractors and the first has none, or if the second has more tractors per man or per acre or better tractors than the first, or if the first has a tractor that has broken down and the second has a tractor that works, then the second collective, other things being equal, is going to produce more bushels of wheat per man than the first.”

  Peter agreed again.

  “So the net of all this is,” Adams concluded triumphantly, “that we cannot attribute the collective production even to the workers collectively. The production is the combined result of the workers and the weather and the land and the animals and the tools and tractors collectively, and you can’t separate the contribution of one of these factors from the contribution of another.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” sighed Peter.

  “And this doesn’t apply just to agriculture,” Adams continued, pressing home his point. “The same thing applies even more in manufacturing. The output of the workers in a factory depends entirely upon the amount and kind and quality of the machinery with which they have to work. The output of a factory with the best shoe machinery may be ioo pairs of shoes per man in the same time a worker with only a few hand tools could turn out only one or two pairs of shoes.”

  “When did you think of all this?” asked Peter.

  “I thought of it just now, chief, in answer to your proposal.”

  “That’s what I suspected. It seems to me, Adams,” Peter said with pretended severity, “that you are a violent deviationist. You have been flatly contradicting Marx.”

  “Where?” Adams asked. He seemed seriously alarmed.

  “Marx declared in the first volume of Das Kapital—I have been doing a lot of studying in the last few months—Marx declared that labor is the one and only factor that produces value. He doesn’t say anything about the contribution of tools and equipment to production. He contended that the workers were being robbed of whatever part of the value of the total production they did not get—even though it would have been impossible for them to turn out this production wi
thout the help of the tools and machines with which somebody else provided them.”

  “Oh, I’m sure, chief, that Marx couldn’t have said anything so foolish as that machines don’t contribute anything to the total of production! I’m sorry that I can’t cite the relevant passages off-hand, but I assume that he just took the contribution of machines for granted and averaged it out.... Or perhaps his point was that labor had originally built the machines anyhow.”

  “Now don’t try to edit or revise Marx,” said Peter tauntingly. “Revisionism is a serious crime in Wonworld.”

  Adams still looked anxious about this.

  “Within the privacy of these four walls,” Peter quickly assured him, “you have entirely persuaded me that you are right, whether Marx agrees with you or not. Production is the joint achievement of labor and capital, land and nature. And I’ll admit I don’t see how we can find which factor contributes which percentage.”

  “I’d like to point out,” said Adams, “that our present editions of Marx are all expurgated to prevent anyone from knowing what capitalism was really like and so prevent any efforts to restore it. Now perhaps the original editions of Marx did admit that capital contributed to production and to what Marx called value....”

  “Well, we’ll have a search made for all the relevant passages, Adams. Meanwhile I’m afraid all your criticisms of my proposal are right.”

  “I wasn’t through, chief.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Your proposal, you remember, was to reward workers in proportion to their production—I suppose by giving each of them what he himself had presumably contributed to production?”

  Peter nodded.

  “Then you would give the wheat grower a certain amount of wheat and the shoemaker a certain amount of shoes. But what would you give the road maker? Part of the road? What would you give the sewer worker? Part of the sewer? What would you give the telephone girl? Part of the wire? What would you give the barber? Part of the hair he cut off? What would you give the surgeon? Part of the patient?”