Time Will Run Back

Chapter 34

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.”