The Wilmington morning star., 1947-04-14
The Improved Case
BY w. H.

BY w. H. CHAMBERLAIN
It is remarkable how many improved
and unprovable assertions come to be be.
lieved as a result of frequent repetition with
out examination. The Individuals economic
system is often hung on evidence that would
not convict the proverbial dog in a court OF
law. The trend toward collectivism is as.
sumed to be at once irresistible and bene-
fetal. and we are advised to ally ourselves
with this trend on pain Of being swept away
by the predestined tide of history.
1t is taken for granted, without any sup.
porting evidence, IN some circles that a
system based On individual enterprise, effort
and incentives is backward and i~nefficie1 !,
that collectivism is the wave OF the future.
But there are some stubborn and indis-
putable facts which simply do not square
with this theory.
Take, for example, the huge American
subs:dlzation of the war effort Of the powers
with which we were associated, especially
Grea; Britain and Russia. Lend-l e a s e to
Britain against which there was reverse
lend-lease of about ten per cent? ran to over
$40 billion. Aid to Russia (for which there
was no reverse lend-lease Whatever) ran
to about S11 billion. Granting that America
was not subject to bombing, not il the 'front.'
line trenches industrially, is there any coun-
try in the world, especially any country en-
~ AS nN SoPPOoSQ u d
economy, that was capable of a comparable
productive effort?
Mole significant than the spread of col
%lectivls- types of economy under the impetus
Of war and social upheaval is the failure of
collective economics, anywhere in the world,
to justify itself by providing a higher stan
dard of living for the people who live under
it. 1t is now thirty years since the Soviet
system, with its about naturalization of
economi" life, was established in Russia.
And the Russian people live on a standard
so low that their government is desperately
anxious TO prevent them from coming into
any contact with the outside world, for fear
of the effect On their morale. Here is the
principal explanation of the much discussed
Soviet iron curtain.
There is very general testimony to the
effect of the sight of Europe, a shattered,
impoverished and bombWrecked Europe, on
the minds of the Soviet soldiers who saw it
for the first time. OF the million and more
stranded refugees in Europe practically all
are from the Soviet Union and its satellite
states, all Of which enjoy the 'blessings'' of
collectivized economies.
Even making every r e S n b e al
loWance for the effect OF the war on the So
vlet standard of living, certain features Of So
wet economic life, which have nothing to do
with the war, stamp it as permanently and
hopelessly inferior to the American. Any
oHe WHO Ids ever seen a Soviet collective
farm is struck by the large n u m b r of
peasant families working on an amount of
land that could be cultivated by a single
midwestern farm family, with perhaps a
single hired man.
A Soviet economic magazine brought
out the point that it took $50 persons at a
plant in Kemerovo, in Siberia, to produce as
much electricity as a plant Of similar ca
pacity in South Amboy, New Jersey, turned
out with 81. The disproportion is especially
striking in office and paper work. 1t takes
l ZOO, 900 bookkeepers to check up on the
accounts of the cumbersome Soviet eco
nomic bureaucracy-a figure certainly I'M
matched in any other country. 1t is obvious
that under any economic system higher in
dividual productivity the decisive factor
in the standard of living.
OF the East European countries which
have gone in for extensive naturalization
Czechoslovakia had the highest standards of
pre-War education and industrial efficiency.
A recent report of the Foreign Policy Asso-
citation on its socialist experiment comes to
the following conclusion:
"Production has also apparently suffered
from lack of competition under the new eco
|nomic system. In an effort to devise sub
~stitutes for the kind Of stimulation which
competition provided under private enterprise
the government has held numerous output
matches, with appropriate prizes. None of
tneSe ElalcneS seems TO nave increased over
all production rates, however, and news
papers and political parties alike continue to
exhort The workers to greater production"
This same method of exhortation, with
no visible results, has been a mainstay of
the Labor Government in England. 1t would
be unfair to hold the Labor Government re-
sponsible for the impoverishing effect of the
war. But it would be quite fair to suggest
especially in the light of what has happened
in England in the last months. that certain
aspects of labor administration have not been
of much help, to put it mildly, in solving
what would have been in any case difficult
problems of reconstruction. Among such as
poets one may include a mass of confusing
and sometimes conflicting controls, a devil
take the foremost attitude toward private
initiative, a preoccupation with blueprints of
future naturalization at the expense of atten-
ton to pressing immediate production prob
lens.
It is not accidental coincidence that
countries in Europe which worry least about
elaborate future planning, like Belgium and
Switzerland, make the most prosperous inn
preston, that Italian recovery has been
achieved in spite OF, rather than because
Of government regulations.
The trump card of the collectivists is
Americas liability to depression. Some
leftwing comment in England and Europe
gives a curious]y mixed impression of half
hoping for an American depression, to vim
dictate the vulnerability of an individualist
system, and half fearing it, because then
there may be no more American loans to
shore up tottering collectivist economies.
1t is worth remembering, however, that
America, even in times of depression, turns
out more per capita goods than most coun-
tries in normal times. An American
worker on relief gets a more varied and
| n1Ifrlt1nlE nlQf than a p,rroo --1