Government in Business
by
[Macmillan, $2,00]
HAVING written one excellent book, — his brilliant syllabus of the new economies in his Economy of Abundance,— Stuart Chase is entitled to drop down a peg or two in performance. This, unhappily, he has done in the present volume, Government in Business.
But the book is not to be dismissed. It touches upon a subject of great present irritation. It arranges the materials for meditation on the subject and supplies to the reader a vivid picture of our troubled economy as it drifts into all sorts of dubious public controls.
Mr. Chase’s thesis may be quickly outlined. After six excellent chapters in which he paints the long and growing invasion of the field of private enterprise by the public authority, either as policeman or as owner, he brings the prologue of his volume to a close with a chapter which appeared in Harper’s under the title of the ’Parade of the Gravediggers. The author put six Credible witnesses on the stand to testify to the decadence of capitalism. All this is but the prelude to what may be called Mr. Chase’s programme of survival Survival is a state of sufficiency somewhere between the subsistence levels of Messrs. Hoover and Roosevelt and the abundance levels of the technocrats and the Huey Longs.
It is out of this programme that Mr. Chase forms his criteria for government action in the field of enterprise. The primary formula he takes from Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom, apparently, Mr. Chase continues to trust. ‘The herculean task of the United States Government is to take care that its citizens have the necessities of life,’the President has said.
Mr. Chase, however, gives this a good deal more meaning than Mr. Roosevelt had in mind. He makes up what he calls his budget of Survival. For the whole population this comprises a supply of food, clothing, shelter, education, recreation, and services, which would have a money value of $135,000,000,000, — about $4400 per worker, — a good deal more income than has ever been produced in this country. Mr. Chase then lays down as a fundamental doctrine that the state is bound to see that goods and services in this volume flow to the population.
He then divides industries into two main groups — those which are essential to supply this budget and those which are not (luxury industries). This distinction would mark the frontier of government interference in industry. The government would regulate, control, or own the former group. It would stay out of the latter.
Mr. Chase’s argument breaks down at this point. Having staked off the area for government action, and assured us quite properly that our technological machine can easily produce this $135,000,000,000 of goods, he does not tell us what government should do to get this budget distributed to the people. He offers no plan for producing the $135,000,000,000 of purchasing power with which the citizens may claim the goods. Somehow he persists in thinking that in some way the Roosevelt Administration has intervened in industry to ensure this flow of the supply.
He is also vague about the form of controls, which is the important point. There is to be minor regulation, major regulation, control without ownership, and ownership according to necessities. But how these controls will be directed to increasing production and increasing national money income and getting it into the hands of the citizens is left out of the plan.
Government direction of investment and credit is part of the plan. But, as Mr. Chase so well knows, investment means debt, and debt is the great problem in what Mr. Chase very happily calls our ‘ profit-andloss system.’ How government regulation will provide for the liquidation of debt in a money economy is omitted.
These I set down as defects in Mr. Chase’s argument. But despite all this the book is written in his usual lively and provocative style and is full of sage observations as well as important data upon the question which, more than any other, is troubling the minds of Americans as they head into another national campaign.
JOHN T. FLYNN