The Liberal state, in the worthy desire to exorcise greed, poverty, and unhappiness, has given birth to a radical view of the world: that it is the responsibility of the State to protect anyone who may claim to be powerless. But what check is upon these champions? And what inducement do they possess to refrain, since to refrain is to diminish their power and, so, their livelihoods? Is it not evident that to be accused before the bureaucrats of OSHA, Equal Opportunity Commission, FDA, Consumer Safety Board, and so on, is to be found guilty, for the organization’s first and only responsibility is to grow, and, in contrast to the free market, it is not the populace, but the government which characterizes failure and success, and that all government programs must not only expand after success, but expand after failure, in order “to bring about eventual success.” Note that all this hocus-pocus is taking place with the money actually earned by hardworking individuals.
We have abundant natural resources. But if there were a system in which there was no waste, we would all be wearing the same clothes, for our clothes would be chosen for us on the basis of the theory of maximum conservation of resources. As would our cars. But suppose someone wanted a different car. Could he alter it? With what resources, if the State had decided that he had “all that he needed”? But suppose he foresaw a way to make his car even more efficient. Could he experiment on it? Again, using what resources of time or energy? But perhaps as a Hobby. But what if his Hobby required more energy or time than that deemed useful by the State?36 Could he stint himself of sleep and food? Why should he, if his eventual invention were to be taken by the State—appropriated for the Good of All? And if his subsequent fatigue robbed the State of his exertion in those activities it deemed more useful?
A fixation on natural resources blinds one to the worth of human resources: We live in and are designed to exploit (which is another word for “use”) the natural world. The Socialist vision constrains human inventiveness and imagination.
Why would the worker on the assembly line come forward with a better idea? Why, if his compensation was always the same, would he even fantasize about it, which is the beginning of all progress?
Socialism is the end of all invention; it is the happy face of slavery. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
—J. S. Mill
14
R100
The controversy of capitalism versus state enterprise has been argued, tested, and fought out in many ways in many countries, but surely the airship venture in England stands as the most curious determination in this matter.
—Nevil Shute, Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer
Nevil Shute was one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century.
He wrote the novels On the Beach, A Town like Alice, No Highway in the Sky, and so on. Many of his books (the above included) were made into very successful films.
By day he was an aircraft designer.
His novels, like those of Dreiser and Trollope, were romantic paeans to those processes the lay populace might presume mundane. Dreiser wrote The Trilogy of Desire, some thousands of pages, on the subject of street railway franchises; Trollope wrote the Palliser series about the romance of Parliament dealing with Irish Home Rule, and decimal coinage. Shute, in the main, wrote about aviation.
Aviation was his day job. He was a very successful designer of aircraft. His company, Airspeed Ltd., designed some of the first commercial air transports in the world. He designed the trainer which was used by the RAF until World War II; Airspeed eventually merged with de Havilland. He was the real thing.
In 1925, Vickers Ltd., for which Shute then worked as chief stress engineer, was commissioned, by the British government, to design a rigid airship (that is, a zeppelin) practicable for transocean and transglobal passenger travel.
But the British government decided to hedge its bets; it awarded the contract to two groups, Shute’s (Vickers), and a governmental group under the auspices of the Air Ministry.
The groups worked independently, but were free to exchange information with each other. Shute’s group (makers of the airship R100) learned that the government’s group (airship R101) was consistently making choices that were heavier, more complex, and, to the eyes of the free-market Vickers group, unnecessary or, indeed, unsafe.
The certainty of the governmental group drove the Vickers group back to their drawing boards, to retest their results, which they again found technically correct. No, the government ship, R101, was, they determined, too heavy, too complex, and unsafe. The various redundancies and compromises resulting from its design as the work of a government committee had rendered it unairworthy. Shute’s group shared its concerns with the government and were told to “go away.”
The R100 made the first east-to-west commercial airship crossing of the Atlantic, with Shute on board. The R101 set off to Karachi, India, carrying Lord Thomson, Secretary of State for Air, and Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation, who were both proponents of the government’s plan. It crashed and burned in France, after three hundred miles of travel, and the British airship program was scrapped.
How often must this experiment be tried?
Israel’s economy wanes under socialism, and burgeons under the free market; West Germany throve, while East Germany, the slave state, lived in starvation until the fall of Communism; Cubans in Miami grow rich, and the prison they risked their lives to flee continues as an eighteenth-century feudal fiefdom. California taxes its flagship movie industry out of the state, and Toronto, Ireland, and the Czech Republic reap the benefits; the United States taxes the auto industry to Japan, the textile industry to China, and so on, and then wonders at the fall of the dollar.
I don’t know anything about the auto industry, but I am a member of another big business which has killed itself.
Anyone working in show business for any time—actually working, that is, writing, acting, designing, lighting, crafting—has said to himself, when the middle managers come on the set: “Why are those fools elected to do that job?”
The affronted, on continued interaction, comes to see that the problem is not with the supposed abilities or personality of the individual bureaucrat; the problem is the existence of the job itself, which is not only unnecessary to but destructive of actual industry.
In the growth of any successful organization, a now-entrenched bureaucracy may work to change its object from production of a product to protection of its (useless) jobs.
It is inevitable that the bureaucrat, awarded his job as a perquisite of superiors who wish to display their power and provide themselves insulation, will work, not primarily, but exclusively to obtain and exercise those same perquisites in his own behalf.
Thus, at the end, Chrysler and GMC were making cars no one wanted for a price that did not repay their manufacture. The car business had been run, both by labor and management, as a sideline of their bureaucracies, each exploiting its own rights (which is to say its position and potential for further exploitation). Who was left designing and producing cars people wanted to buy and drive?