Time Will Run Back

by Henry Hazlitt

  Peter was silent under these taunts. He had no answer. He lit a cigarette and fell back into his own thoughts. Hadn’t he been a presumptuous fool for supposing that he could solve offhand all the problems that had obviously baffled all the best minds in Wonworld before him? If there were such easy answers as he supposed, wouldn’t they already have been made? Conditions in Wonworld were horrible: that he knew. But you couldn’t reform them simply by rushing in and demanding hysterically that everything be changed. He had been self-complacent and priggish to assume that he was the only man of good will. Reform was something that was possible only after the deepest study....

  “You haven’t answered my questions,” Adams at length reminded him.

  “Have you any more criticisms?”

  “Yes,” continued Adams. “Let’s pass over the insoluble problem of how you are going to give his own production to each worker when he has merely contributed, say, to the production of some single great unit, such as a locomotive, or to the construction of things like sewers and roads and waterworks that can only be used by the community as a whole. Let’s pass over, also, all the workers that perform some intangible service. Let’s concentrate on the simplest possible problem—the workers that do turn out something, like wheat or shoes, that they might individually consume themselves. If you give the wheat growers the wheat, they will have enormously more than they can personally consume, and the rest of the world will starve. If you give the shoemakers the shoes, they will have more than they can possibly wear, and the rest of the world will go barefoot—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute!” shouted Peter, suddenly struck with an idea. “Of course, of course! Why didn’t I think of it before! Let the wheat growers keep the wheat they grow. Let the shoemakers keep the shoes they make. But let them exchange their wheat and shoes with each other to whatever extent they wish! Let everybody have what he makes and let him exchange the surplus above his own needs for whatever he wants of what somebody else makes! Then everybody will have to produce something in order to get something else for it. Everybody will be rewarded in proportion to his own production. That will give him an enormous incentive. And to be able to do this he will have to produce what somebody else wants. Then we won’t have to coax or exhort people to work any more. We won’t have to denounce them for shoddy work. Not only will everybody wish to produce all he can, but he will try to make it of as high quality as possible, so that somebody else will want it enough to give him what he wants in exchange for it. And then he won’t have to take the shoddy goods that the State hands out to him. He can pick and choose, and take only the goods he wants from the people who make them well—”

  “Hold on there!” protested Adams. “What would become of our planned economy? It would be completely disorganized. Production would fall into chaos!”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because each individual would start producing for himself. He would produce the things for which he could get the most other things in exchange that he personally wanted.”

  “But in order to do that,” replied Peter, “he would have to produce precisely the things that other people most wanted.”

  “Who would build the roads, chief? Who would repair the sewers? Would each worker be assigned part of a road or part of a sewer as his own presumptive production to exchange with someone else? And who would take over part of a road or part of a sewer in exchange for his own product? And whom would the iron miners exchange with? They could only exchange their crude material with the steel makers, who are the only ones who would want the iron. And the only things the steel makers would have to offer in exchange would be steel. Would you personally like to take home a couple of steel rails or an I-beam?... It’s just impossible.”

  “Maybe that could be solved by a series of exchanges,” suggested Peter. “It’s true that only the steel makers would ultimately want the product of the iron miners, but the steel makers might be able to offer the iron miners food that they in turn had got in exchange for their steel.”

  “Or part of a railroad that they had exchanged for their steel rails?” Adams’ tone was heavily sarcastic. “No; I haven’t even mentioned yet the real trouble with your idea. At present the Central Planning Board decides what things the population needs, and in what proportions. When you think of the hundreds of different consumption goods and services, that’s a tremendously difficult problem to solve. That’s a major headache all by itself. But when we’ve done this, we’ve only started. For then we have to decide how many factories to build, how many machines to build, how much of each raw material to produce, and how many workers to allot, to produce each of these consumption goods in the right proportions. And then we have to decide how much of each raw material to produce to build the factories and machines themselves.”

  “But the Central Planning Board,” said Peter, “is always making terrible mistakes. We always find ourselves, at the end of every year of our plans, with embarrassing surpluses of this and appalling shortages of that. And when we have a shortage in one thing—for example, our present shortage of nails—it makes a great deal of the rest of our production pointless. We can’t finish our housing program until we get more nails. Meanwhile our production of window frames and doors, shingles and roofing, sidings and washstands, is all perfectly useless.... We have all these things rusting and rotting out in the rain.”

  “How do you expect us not to make mistakes, chief, when we are faced with such a horribly complicated problem? We constantly have the best mathematicians working on the problem of getting the right proportions. Marx forbid that I should defend Bolshekov, whose mess I’ve just taken over, but I must concede—”

  “Let’s not go into that now,”

  “But the point I started to make,” said Adams, “is that if we cannot avoid such terrible mistakes even with our expert overall planning, where we are at least trying to match the production of each thing with that of all the rest, then we can’t even imagine the chaos that would follow if we let each man decide jot himself what to produce. Then nothing would match anything. We would die off like flies!”

  Peter lit a cigarette and looked out again at the squalid city. “Well,” he said at length, “you’ve successfully disheartened me once more. But I’m not through, I’m not through! I’ve got a real idea by the tail, and I’m going to hang on. I’m going to work it out. We haven’t seen the last of economic progress—”

  “For Marx’s sake, chief! First things first! I was nearly murdered a couple of hours ago—remember? What are you going to do about Bolshekov?”

  Chapter 22

  PETER stood before the full-length mirror and admired his brilliant new Air Force uniform.

  He had finally succumbed to Adams’ argument that he must build himself up as a public figure to counter Bolshekov’s influence, and above all that he must solidify his relations with the Air Force. So he had ordered this afternoon’s air maneuvers over Moscow and arranged to review them in the Red Square from the top of Lenin’s Tomb. Following Adams’ advice he had declared a half holiday and ordered all the factory heads of the Moscow district to march their workers to the square to insure a huge audience.

  The uniform was pure white, the only pure white uniform in Wonworld with the exception of his father’s. Adams had arranged to have it covered with ribands and medals. Peter hadn’t the slightest idea of what any of them stood for, but in addition to the uniform they made him look so glamorous that even he himself was impressed. Forms, flash, ostentation, pomp, ceremony, distort the judgment of everybody, he thought, even those who pride themselves most on their realism or cynicism.

  Sergei entered. “Colonel Torganev and your escort wait upon you, Your Highness.”

  “I’ll be right out, Sergei.” He took one last look in the mirror, put his cap on at a rakish angle, and left.

  Centered among his air officers, at the top of Lenin’s Tomb, with a sea of faces as far as his eye could reach looking toward him, Peter raised his arm. The b
and blared forth, and the air maneuvers began....

  “How much are we producing, Adams?”

  Adams looked bewildered.

  “How much is Wonworld producing?” repeated Peter.

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything.”

  “That’s a meaningless question, chief. I can tell you how much we are producing of iron, of wheat, of cotton, of shoes, of whisky, or of any other single thing—At any rate, I can telephone the Central Planning Board and ask them to look up the statistics. But I can’t tell you how much we are producing of ‘everything.’ That question doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I ask you how much we are producing,” said Peter, “and you offer to tell me how much we are producing of thousands of different things. I could read tables and tables of such figures and be completely groggy at the end, and know no more than I did before. All I want is one figure: the total.”

  “But, chief, how can you possibly have such a figure? What is 200,000,000 pairs of shoes added to 1,000,000,000 bushels of wheat added to 1,000,000 quarts of gin? It’s 1,201,000,000—of what? You can only add things of precisely the same kind—otherwise the total is meaningless.”

  “Let’s take the shoes,” said Peter. “Those shoes are of different sizes and qualities, aren’t they?”

  “Of course.”

  “So if you have a pair of bad baby shoes, made for Proletarian children, and a pair of the best men’s shoes, made for the Protectorate, you add them to get two pairs of shoes?”

  Adams nodded.

  “And it’s by adding all different sizes, types and qualities of shoes that you get your total, say, of 200,000,000 pairs?” Adams nodded. “And again, Adams, your 1,000,000,000 bushels of wheat represents wheat of all different grades, quality and condition?”

  Adams nodded.

  “So,” concluded Peter, “even your totals of individual commodities are rather meaningless, aren’t they?”

  “Perhaps they are, chief; but you’re only proving my point. That would make the total of ‘everything,’ if you could figure it, still more meaningless.”

  “And you prefer thousands of different meaningless figures, Adams, to one single meaningless figure?”

  “But when these totals consist of the same commodities, chief, they do at least have some definite meaning. If you started breaking down shoes to subtotals in accordance with different sizes and qualities, you might end with 200,000,000 different classifications of shoes alone, for I suppose there are no two pairs of shoes exactly alike. You’ve got to be reasonable about these things. To know that we make, say, 200,000,000 pairs of shoes a year, no matter how they vary in size and type and quality, is good enough for practical decisions.”

  “It is precisely enough knowledge for making practical decisions that I’m trying to get,” said Peter. “Suppose somebody in the Central Planning Board thought that we needed more shoes. And suppose we could make them only by taking more labor away from the production of leather belts, or even away from the production of wheat. Suppose we increased the production of shoes from 200,000,000 to 250,000,000 pairs a year, but only at the cost of reducing the production of wheat from 1,000,000,000 to 800,000,000 bushels a year. Would we be better off or worse off?”

  “That’s hard to say. We could only judge from the volume of complaints.”

  “The complaints of the people who would be shot for complaining?”

  “No, chief; but from—from the judgment of members of the Central Planning Board.”

  “Well, suppose you and I were two members of the Board, and that you thought we were better off as a result of the change and I thought we were worse off. How would the decision be made between us?”

  “Well, you’re the boss,” said Adams, grinning.

  “Let’s skip that. Suppose I couldn’t make up my own mind. Is there any way I could decide the point? Would there be any objective guidance?”

  Adams shrugged his shoulders.

  “If we were producing 250,000,000 pairs of shoes and 800,000,000 bushels of wheat,” Peter continued, “would we be producing more on net balance than when we were producing 200,000,000 pairs of shoes and 1,000,000,000 bushels of wheat—or would we be producing less?”

  Adams shrugged his shoulders again. “I suppose it would depend on the relative urgency of our needs.”

  “And who would decide that?”

  “Perhaps we would have to interview the entire Wonworld population, man by man, woman by woman, and child by child—assuming we could get honest answers free from fear.”

  “So when we compare the hundreds of different commodities we produced last year, Adams, with the hundreds of different commodities we are producing this year, with some totals up and some totals down, there is no way of knowing whether, on net balance, our total production has gone up or down, or how much?”

  “Our overall production this year is 14.3 per cent higher than last year,” replied Adams, deadpan.

  Peter stared at him. “But I thought—”

  “That is the official figure of the Central Planning Board, chief.

  That is the official figure of the Five Year Plan.”

  “How was it arrived at?”

  Adams’ face slowly broadened into a grin. “I arrived at it.

  By divine revelation, by direct communion with the spirit of Karl Marx.”

  “You mean you just pulled the figure out of the air?”

  “For propaganda purposes. It’s part of our indispensable statistical demagogy. If it weren’t precise, people would begin to think it was a mere guess.” He smiled shrewdly.

  “But seriously then, Adams, strictly between you and me, we haven’t the least knowledge of whether total overall production has gone up or down?”

  “Not the least.”

  “And no way of finding out?”

  “Can you think of any, chief?”

  “But the question has to be answered,” said Peter. “Otherwise we are planning completely in the dark. Otherwise we are flying blind. Our resources of labor and land and the tools of production are strictly limited; we simply must know how to apportion the production of thousands of different commodities and services in order to provide most satisfactorily for everybody’s need. And we can’t even begin to solve that problem unless we have”—his mind groped for the concept—“some common... some common unit of measurement. If we find that we want to produce more overcoats, and that we can do so only by producing fewer trousers, or shoes—or even cigarettes—we have to find which commodity we can afford to produce less of. And therefore we have to find out how many overcoats are equivalent to how many cigarettes, or how many cigarettes to how many—clarinets, or what not. And we can only do that by finding some quantity or quality common to all of them.”

  Adams thought a moment. “How about weight?” he suggested. “You are trying to measure the quantity of production. Very well: we measure the quantity of coal produced by the number of tons. We measure the production of pig iron and steel by tonnages. We can convert wheat production and all other production into tonnage figures—and so we can get the total overall tonnage of production.”

  “That doesn’t seem to me to be any better than adding bushels of wheat to pairs of shoes and quarts of whisky,” said Peter. “How does weight matter? Are we going to add a ton of fine watches to a ton of coal? If you add a ton of gravel to a ton of binoculars you get two tons—of what? Would such a total mean anything? Wouldn’t such information be entirely worthless for practical guidance—or even as an abstract figure?”

  “But what other standard have you?” asked Adams. “Would you like volume better than weight? Would you like to measure production by the cubic foot?” “A cubic foot of feathers, I suppose,” said Peter sarcastically, “to count for as much as a cubic foot of platinum?” “Well, weight and volume are the only common units I can think of, chief.”

  “For our purposes they are meaningless,” said Peter. “There’s no difference in weight between coal s
till unmined in the earth and the same coal in the furnace of this building. If tonnages are what matter we may as well count them in the earth itself, without going to all the trouble of digging the coal up, breaking it, washing it, sorting it by sizes, loading it on freight cars, unloading it into trucks, delivering it to houses and factories, and so on.” He thought of another gibe: “And what is the weight of a haircut? What is the volume of a shoeshine?”

  “Maybe we could measure production by energy, chief! By kilowatt hours!”

  “Worse and worse,” said Peter. “You can measure electrical power by kilowatt hours, and then you have to stop.”

  “Maybe we could find certain equivalents, chief.”

  “Well, find them. A bushel of wheat is equivalent to how many kilowatt hours? Maybe,” Peter added in an even more ironic tone, “we could measure production in triangles!”

  “Well, you raised the problem, chief. I didn’t.”

  “I apologize for my sarcasm, Adams. You have no more responsibility for solving this problem than I have. But we’ve got to solve it. Otherwise our boasted planning is meaningless—except on the basis of supplying people with their most primitive and obvious needs as we estimate those needs. We’ve got to have some common unit to measure all our production. Otherwise, I repeat, we’re working completely in the dark.”

  He lit a cigarette. Adams took a pinch of snuff, and got up and walked back and forth. He began warming up to the subject.

  “I’ve got it—now I’ve really got it!” he shouted finally. “It’s incredible that I didn’t think of it before, chief! I went a few weeks ago to the Politburo’s private library and took out the master copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital—the one unexpurgated copy—at least they claim this one’s unexpurgated—and I’ve been studying afresh all these weeks since you accused me of being a deviationist. And here I’d already forgotten that Marx raised and solved that very problem in the first pages of the first volume. It’s solved, it’s solved! All our work has already been done for us! The greatness of Marx was beyond bounds!”