Time Will Run Back

by Henry Hazlitt

  “Listen, soldier, you have been taking part in a revolt. We could shoot you now and throw out your body. Or we could throw you out alive at this speed—”

  “Oh, let’s stop and let him out here,” said Peter.

  “They’d kill me for having fallen into this trap,” said the corporal. “I’m lucky if that’s the worst they do. If they don’t even know what’s happened to me, they may assume I’ve been shot and at least let my family alone.”

  “Do you want to stay with us?”

  “Yes, Your Highness.” He had apparently just recognized Peter.

  “It’s ‘Your Supremacy’ now,” said Adams.

  “No, no,” said Peter. “Tour Highness’ is as high as I care to go.”

  He turned again to the corporal. “Can we trust you?”

  The corporal nodded.

  Adams shook his head. “I think we’d better put him on probation for a while.”

  They bound his hands and feet and sat him between them.

  “Where are we heading?” asked Peter again.

  “For the airfield,” said Adams.

  “Why?”

  “It’s our only chance. You’re head of the Air Force. They’re loyal—I hope.”

  They sped along, the speedometer wavering around ninety. The car lurched and pitched crazily.

  Peter felt sick and heavy. He had shot a man. Killed him. Self-defense—the only way to save his own life—to save Won-world. But he had killed. And he had also killed something in himself. “Means determine ends,” he had said repeatedly to Adams; “means determine ends.” A society founded on horrible means would be a horrible society. Had he been right? Of course. But suppose there were no choice of means? Reason? Moral suasion? Reason with Bolshekov? At that moment? Preposterous! But how about Peter himself? He had solved a problem with murder. Would he try to solve his other problems with murders? Wasn’t it precisely this choice of means that had already made the end-result in Won world so horrible?...

  The airfield came in sight. Two sentries blockaded the road. Peter asked for the commandant.

  Colonel Torganev welcomed them with the greatest warmth. “We heard the broadcast, Your Supremacy. You are the legitimate successor of Stalenin the First. The Air Force is completely loyal. We are at your absolute disposal.”

  Peter thanked him. “What can we do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know how long we could hold this field against the Army,” said Torganev. “I don’t know how long any field around here could be held. So far as we can learn, the Army is completely under the thumb of Bolshekov.”

  “So?” asked Adams.

  “My advice would be, Your Supremacy, to order every member of the Air Force to his respective field, including every officer, every conscript, every mechanic.”

  “And then what?” Peter asked.

  “All would be ready to flee Russia the moment the field became untenable.”

  “And go where?”

  “To the Polish province. Three-fourths of the Wonworld Army is based in Russia and three-fourths consists of Russians.” “What would we do in the Polish province?” “We would see when we got there. First of all, we must be out of reach of the Bolshekovites.”

  Peter issued the orders. They were telephoned, telegraphed and flown. He extended Torganev’s idea and invited every worker in an airplane or motor factory to the airfields. Every field was to load each plane with all the personnel, bombs, gasoline and other supplies that it could hold. Each plane was to take off, the moment it was filled, for its assigned airfield to the west.

  There were not nearly enough fields in the Polish provinces to hold the planes from Russia. Many planes had to be assigned destinations in the Czech, German, and Balkan provinces.

  The Air Force at the Moscow field held out for nearly three days, drawing in men, with supplies, who shot their way into and out of Moscow. Adams himself, without consulting Peter or Torganev, took a jeep with two machine gunners into the heart of Moscow in the dead of night and safely pulled out Baronio and Patelli. “We’ll need their brains,” he explained.

  Peter envied him. He would have risked anything to find Edith and her father and bring them with him. But he did not know where to go; he did not know whether they were still in the Moscow district; he did not even know whether they were still alive. Action at any risk was better than this frustration.

  At the end of the third day Bolshekov’s men had the Moscow airfield surrounded. They began closing in. The field was running out of ammunition. Peter found they had all the men and supplies they could lift.

  He gave the order to leave.

  The bomber carrying Torganev, Adams and Peter landed at the Warsaw airport.

  The commandant was friendly and loyal. Nearly all the planes, Peter learned, had received friendly welcomes from the air personnel at the fields on which they had landed. But the commandant at the Warsaw airfield warned him that there were still enough army troops nearby to make the field’s position untenable, and that in any case Bolshekov would order his army westward till it caught up with them.

  For the next few months Peter’s forces could do nothing but retreat. From each airfield they would pick up all the additional planes, personnel, bombs and equipment they could carry, and fly further west—to French, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish airfields. The task of finding enough fields became increasingly urgent.

  Bolshekov’s army rolled slowly but steadily westward, filling up the Balkan, Polish and German provinces, recruiting new men, consolidating its positions.

  “Why not bomb Bolshekov’s territory?” suggested Adams. “To what purpose?” answered Peter. “We would only earn hatred. We could never land and take over.” So they bombed and machine-gunned only the concentrations of Bolshekov’s men that tried to move in on the airfields.

  Torganev warned that the Air Force could not hold out on the continent. “Perhaps we can hold the British Isles,” he suggested. “The Channel should make it possible.” But their advance planes found there only about a fourth of the number of airfields needed to hold the Force.

  “We have only one permanent hope,” said Adams. “The Western Hemisphere.”

  Torganev conceded that even the British Isles could afford, at best, only a temporary base. The Air Force and the islands themselves would be dependent on the outside for food and supplies—and Bolshekov had control of the Navy and the merchant marine. It would be futile for the Air Force to bomb the continent if it could not land. Bolshekov would in time build up another air force of his own. Space and industrial capacity were necessary to maintain and expand Peter’s air force. And the only counterweight to Bolshekov’s army would have to be a bigger and better army.

  Peter’s side needed space. It needed a continent. And if Peter didn’t soon establish himself on the Western Hemisphere, Bolshekov would.

  Peter yielded to the argument.

  They prepared to move three-quarters of the Air Force to the Americas. But only their long-range bombers were capable of making the trip. The planes still remaining on the Continent were to stay as long as they could hold out without seizure, and then crowd themselves up in the British Isles. The only long-run solution, they decided, was to have the long-range bombers make continuous back and forth trips until they had transported the whole Air Force personnel and supplies to the Americas.

  Peter sent a few advance long-range bombers to the American provinces to find out how they were received.

  The advance groups were not only welcomed; they were virtually embraced.

  The intelligence reports that came back explained this reception on several grounds. There was practically no army whatever in the Western Hemisphere, except for a token force here and there consisting of American privates but commanded mainly by Russian officers. This arrangement had always been resented. Though no one had been allowed to say so openly, and though every effort had been made to expunge the historical record, the Americans felt that they were still being treated as a conquered people.
They felt that they were still being drained by taxes to support the luxurious public buildings of Moscow. Though everyone had now spoken only Marxanto for generations, the Americans could still recognize and resent a Russian accent. They feared Russia. They feared Bolshekov. Peter’s introduction of a system of free exchange of consumption goods had given them their first taste of what economic liberty might be like. Though Peter was a Russian, he was now “fighting Russia.” And the fact that Adams was an American was found to be an additional reason why the Americans tended to align themselves on Peter’s side.

  Peter was surprised to learn of these signs of sectional feeling. They marred what he had been taught to regard as the wonderful unity of Wonworld. But as American sectional prejudice was on his side, he was happy to take full advantage of it.

  When he landed in New York he got a tremendous ovation. People lined the sidewalks throughout his route. Along Fifth Avenue a sea of faces looked out of windows; thousands of arms waved handkerchiefs. Peter found himself in a snowstorm of confetti and shredded newspapers.

  It was his greatest day of personal triumph. It was the end of his retreat. From here he could organize a counterforce, and shape a world to his new ideals.

  It could stand a little shaping. The greater part of Moscow was a slum, but it was relieved by a few decent public buildings. But judging from the squalor of Fifth Avenue, New York must be all slum.

  Could it be true, as the histories said, that this city had once been the metropolis of capitalism?

  PART THREE: DISCOVERY

  Chapter 32

  PETER named the territory over which he ruled Freeworld. He was installed in Washington in a decrepit, smelly old building which someone, evidently with a fine sense of irony, had once named The White House. This, he was told, was where the old capitalist emperors used to live.

  “Alone?” he asked—“with all this floor space?”

  He assigned apartments in it to Adams and other officials.

  “I am going to introduce my new economic reform immediately,” he told Adams.

  “We can’t afford any such diversion now,” Adams protested. “The first thing to do is to prosecute the war against Bolshekov. We have the planes and the trained aviation personnel; but he still has the factories. He will immediately build up a new air force. What we must do is to set up airplane factories, motor works, aluminum smelters. We must build up an army, a navy, a merchant marine. We must expand steel capacity—”

  “I know, I know,” said Peter. “You are entirely right. But it will take several years for Bolshekov to build up an air force to challenge the one we already have. And it will certainly take years for us to do what you propose. My reforms, instead of diverting us, will enable us to do all these things faster”

  Adams shrugged his shoulders resignedly.

  Peter delivered his first Freeworld radio speech. He announced his new reform.

  But it was one thing to declare that there would be “private ownership of the means of production.” It was quite another thing to work out the details. It was all very well to say that the individual worker would hereafter own his own hammer, sickle, plow, saw, or paintbrush. But what about a great machine on which many men worked? Especially if it was an integral part of a whole set of machines constituting a factory? Could each worker own a different part of the machine? Could each worker own a specific part of a whole factory—one a part of the roof, another a part of a floor, another a window? What would happen if one worker quarreled with the others and wanted to take his particular piece of the factory away with him?

  “The problem is insoluble,” said Adams. “The factories, the railroads, the means of production must be owned in common.”

  Peter refused to give up. He thought at last of a solution.

  A factory, a locomotive, any great machine whatever, was a unit. It couldn’t be broken up into pieces to be owned separately. But it could be owned jointly, and not necessarily by everybody in Freeworld. It could be owned simply by those who actually had to do with its operation.

  “My idea is wonderfully simple, Adams,” Peter explained. “Suppose, for example, there are a hundred workers in a textile factory, including the managerial force. Then the ownership of that factory would be divided among the hundred workers. Each would own one-hundredth as his share—”

  “Just as I said, chief. The ownership would have to be in common.”

  “Let me finish, Adams. There would be an enormous difference. These hundred workers wouldn’t have to wait for orders from a central point, perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles away, to learn precisely what they could make in their factory. They could do what they saw had to be done by their managers on the actual spot—”

  “But if we don’t have central planning, chief—”

  “We’ll come to that later. I’ve thought of a wonderful way in which individual ownership can be reconciled with joint ownership, and it combines the advantages of both. Our problem is to divide the ownership of a factory into, say, a hundred parts so that each worker can own an equal share. Yet we don’t want to have the factory itself broken up into a hundred parts. And we don’t want any owner tied to his share for life. He might want to move away, or he might prefer to own something else instead. So what do we do?”

  Adams shrugged his shoulders.

  “We give each worker,” Peter went on triumphantly, “the right to share in one-hundredth of all the advantages or gains that flow from the ownership and operation of that factory! And we also give him the right to sell that right—to exchange it for anything else he wants instead!”

  Adams still looked doubtful.

  “And it seems to me that the simplest way to do that, Adams, is to give each worker, say, an engraved certificate, declaring that he has the right to a one-hundredth share in the ownership of the factory. Each one of these certificates would be called a ‘share.’ Any owner would have the right to exchange his share, if he wanted, for a share of any other factory—or even for consumption goods.”

  “All that is very ingenious, chief. But I still foresee some serious problems.”

  “For example?”

  “Well, suppose one factory has a hundred workers and a second factory, just as big and just as valuable, has only fifty. You would be giving those in the second factory twice as much value as those in the first.”

  “We will have to work that out,” said Peter. “I suppose we will have to do quite a lot of wild guessing. But we can be thankful that we now have a consumers’ goods market.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we may be able to estimate the comparative values of at least some factories by the comparative values and quantities of the consumers’ goods they turn out.”

  “But how about mines, say, turning out raw materials?”

  It was Peter’s turn to shrug his shoulders. “We can’t assure absolute equity. We’ll just have to guess. We’ll try as far as possible, of course, to give everybody an equal share.”

  “That’s only one of the problems I see,” Adams said. “Here’s another, just as important. Some people are in factories making shirts. Others are on farms raising tomatoes. Each of these groups, I agree, could form part of joint enterprises that would exchange their products with others. But how about the people who work on making roads? How about the people who repair the sewers? How about firemen? How about policemen? What sort of ‘shares’ are you going to give them, for example?”

  Peter thoughtfully lit a cigarette. “Maybe we’ll have to work out something special for them. Maybe for the factory that employed a hundred people, for example, we’d print a hundred and ten shares instead of a hundred, and distribute the extra ten among those outside the factory to whom we couldn’t assign any other kind of ownership. Let’s call in the statisticians from our new Freeworld Supreme Economic Council and dump the whole problem in their lap.”

  The statisticians prepared a plan. The work of detailed calculation was assigned to hundreds of regional boards,
and by those in turn to hundreds of thousands of individual factories, workshops, stores and collective farms. The detailed calculations became mountainous.

  Peter wasn’t happy about the plan. It was obviously full of guesswork, and on a wholesale scale. But he could think of no way of removing the guesswork. He had to start somewhere, he decided, somehow.

  He approved the plan; and on Adams’ advice he put it into operation with a flourish. He proclaimed a Freeworld holiday. There were speeches, bands, parades and fireworks. Every day speakers on the radio, on street corners, in shops and factories, explained the plan. Everyone seemed to tingle with anticipation concerning what he was personally going to own. The general feeling reminded Peter of how he himself used to feel at his childhood birthday parties in Bermuda, to which his mother used to invite his tutors and for which she used to bake a special cake, anyone’s slice of which might turn out to contain some special little souvenir or prize.

  No sooner was the new distribution made than markets developed in production goods, and even in the “shares” issued to each person. These markets bore a striking similarity to those that had developed in consumption goods when Peter had first permitted freedom of exchange. The shares were traded in on separate “stock exchanges.” These began by a few brokers meeting on street corners (nicknamed “curb” markets); but trade soon grew to the point where the brokers met in large rooms with great blackboards on them on which the changing quotations were chalked up.

  As with consumer goods, the company shares were at first quoted in terms of the number of cigarette packages for which they would exchange.

  Then happened precisely what Peter had feared. He had hoped that all the shares would sell or exchange for approximately the same amounts. Instead, wide discrepancies developed. For some shares people bid two, three or four times as much as for others. Those who had the less valuable shares complained of discrimination.

  Peter did his best. He pointed out that nobody was forced to sell, and that every group could make their shares worth more by working harder—or even, if they wished, and if their factories could be converted, by producing different goods from those they were already producing.