As I conclude book 3 of Collectanea of Conservative Concepts abridgement of the Annals of America and other historical antiquities on the premise that the Truths contained therein are as pertinent today (if not more so) as when they were written, I found the following astonishing essay in Volume 18. In true Marxist-Leninist dogma, the Devil will tell you nine Truths to lure you into believing one Big Lie:
“There is enough in our ever-swollen granaries so that no American need to go to bed hungry.”
“There is evidence that something like 30 percent of our productive facilities are standing idle most of the time.”
“Planned obsolescence, which is the design and sales strategy of many manufacturers, is latent abundance, just as the fields left unturned by wheat and barley and rice farmers are latent abundance. It is not only what is produced that counts up to a total of abundance but what is capable of being produced.”
“Technological unemployment may soon grow to the proportions of a crisis.”
“An apparently unavoidable condition of the Age of Abundance is increasing structural unemployment and underemployment. The novelty of this is that the majority of victims of technological displacement will be permanently out of work.”
“The emerging fact is that every year from now on we shall be able, because of accelerating technology, to produce goods and services needed by the nation with fewer and fewer of the available hands – say 90 percent or less.”
“There is a way to defer indefinitely the need for coping with problems of abundance in the United States. This is by deciding to return to a state of scarcity. Unabundance [sic] can be ours again by the simple act of deciding to share what we have with those who need it elsewhere in the world.” [NOTE: say, like baby formula to illegal aliens on our border or the government buying up and pigeon-holing alternative, cheaper cures for the flu.]
“Federal intervention will also have to go far beyond defense contracting in depressed areas (?) if structural unemployment is to be dealt with. National planning is one step in a basic reorganization of our public and private institutions, but it is far from the only one. It must be emphasized that national planning and the radical alterations proposed with regard to such matters as foreign trade are put forth as minimum measures needed by this country if it is to cope successfully with technology and abundance, and get into step with a swiftly changing world.”
“National planning will be recognition that the government bears the final responsibility for the quality and content and prosperity of the nation. This may be called modern mercantilism.”
“In an abundant society the problem is not an economic one of keeping the machine running regardless of what it puts out, but a political one of achieving the common good. And planning is one of its major means.”
“We shall have to stop automatically regarding the unemployed as lazy, unlucky, indolent, and unworthy. We shall have to find means, public or private, of paying people to do no work. This suggestion goes severely against the grain, and it will have to be adopted slowly. The first steps have been taken. Unemployment insurance [for successively extended periods of time] and supplementary unemployment benefit plans reached by company-union negotiations are examples. As these come to be accepted as civic-industry policy, so may plans for six-month work years, or retirement at fifty or fifty-five at full pay until pension schemes take hold. So may continuation of education well into adult years at public expense. So may payment from the public treasury for nonproductive effort, such as writing novels, painting pictures, composing music, doing graduate work, and taking part in the expanding functions of government. Is a physicist more valuable to the community than a playwright? Why? [DUH!] The responsibility of the individual to the general welfare runs far beyond the purely economic.” [NOTE: for individual citizens’ responsibility to the community see The Federalist Papers and On Democracy by Alexis de Tocqueville]
“The essential change in outlook will be to regard the new leisure – including the leisure of the liberated margin – as desirable, as a good, and to direct public policy to accepting it as a good in itself. This suggests some but far from all of the changes in conventional attitudes that will be compelled the moment that full employment is seen to be an obsolescent goal, and abandoned. The revolution in economic theory that is indicated by abundance is dramatically illustrated here.”
“Deliberation on the ways and the standards for getting purchasing power into the hands of the liberated margin may be the beginning of methodical social justice in the American political economy. Abundance may compel social justice as conscience never has. The liberated margin will have to get “what it is due.” This means developing a basis of distribution of income which is not tied to work as a measure. For decisions about “due-ness” will have to be made without economic criteria; at least without the criterion of what members of the liberated margin are worth in the employment market, for there is no such market for them.
The criteria of capitalism, are, in fact, largely irrelevant to conditions of abundance. Efficiency, administration, progress, success, profit, competition, and private gain are words of high standing in the lexicon of capitalism. Presumably among those terms are some of the “pseudo-moral principles” that Keynes saw on the way to the ashcan as society progressively solved its economic problems. In any event, a community of abundance will find less use for these ideas and will turn instead to ideas like justice, law, government, general welfare, virtue, cooperation, and public responsibility as the touchstones of policy.
Abundance will enable a reversal of the old order of things. Modern mercantilism will remove the economic machine from the middle of the landscape to one side, where, under planning by inducement, its ever more efficient automata will provide the goods and services required by the general welfare. Humanity, with its politics and pastimes and poetry, and conversation, will then occupy the central place in the landscape. Management of machines for human ends, not management by them, is the true object of industrial civilization.
This is the promise of modern mercantilism, and, if the time is not yet, it is yet time worth striving for. Meanwhile the chief necessity is to revive respect for law and government as the proper instruments of the general welfare. Without this respect the economic future of this country and that of other nations linked to it will be determined, and stultified, by the accidents of private ambition and the hope of private gain. With this respect the Age of Abundance can be made into the Age of the General Welfare, and the United States can become in fact the moral commonwealth it has always claimed to be.” – W.H. Ferry: Problems of Abundance, Bulletin of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, January 1962; Annals Vol. 18, p. 83
It goes without saying that this is what Barack Hussein Obama meant when he promised to “fundamentally change America.”
What employment is being created from new technologies is being negated by the substitution of education for indoctrination of our youth in public education by the National Education Association and the National Teachers’ Association unions. [see: Standing Up to Goliath by Rebecca Friedrichs, 2018]
