At the risk of "quoting from old books", I have been browsing through a
special supplement to a September 1945 *New Republic* addressing the topic
of full employment. It is interesting to go back and see how the issue was
framed half a century ago, if only because it was possible at that time to
write of "broad and powerful support" for an idea that today would be
ridiculed by political pundits and talking-head economists alike.
The title of the supplement, *The Road to Freedom -- Full Employment*,
made it plain that it was meant as a rejoinder to Frederick Hayek's *The
Road to Serfdom*. Just in case anyone missed the allusion, one article
made it even more explicit:
"It is not accidental that the opponents of full employment -- the big
industrialists and financial monopolists who profit most from the
existence of the labor market as a buyer's market -- have embraced
Mr. Frederick Hayek's arguments, in *The Road to Serfdom*, against
planning."
Glowing accounts of then current books by Sir William Beveridge and Henry
Wallace, as well as discussion of the Wagner-Murray full-employment bill
and the recent British Labour Party electoral landslide suggested that the
idea wasn't just a journalistic brainstorm. As for being "socialistic" --
according to the authors, full employment through government planning was
"private capital's last chance." There's even this delicious quote from
Roosevelt (presumably from a 1942 speech on the Bill of Human Rights):
"private enterprise is ceasing to be private enterprise and is becoming a
cluster of private collectivisms; masking itself as a system of free
enterprise after the American model, it is in fact becoming a concealed
cartel system after the European model."
As the supplement pointed out, what these big industrialists and financial
monopolists were against was not "planning as such, but planning by the
government in the public interest. . ."
In the past two weeks, I've gone to talks by two current authors saying
much the same thing about "globalization". The difference is that today's
authors could talk only vaguely and defensively about their hopes for the
"social movement(s)" against corporate rule. By contrast, the broadly and
powerfully supported demand for full-employment 55-years earlier had the
corporate spokesmen themselves on the defensive.
Now why would I be troubling myself with such archival thoughts from "iffy
sources" (as Jim Devine calls them)? In part because the hollow free
enterprise rhetoric so deftly skewered by the old supplement remains the
stock in trade of anti-democratic propaganda. It doesn't bother today's
CEO anymore than it did yesterday's monopolist that "faith in free markets
and . . . belief in the virtues of competition have nothing to do with the
economic reality of their creation."
But I'm also attracted by a seemingly simplistic opposition between the
"Big Boys" who favoured a buyer's market for labour and the advocates of
government planning who clearly and unequivocally insisted on the
superiority of a seller's market -- not just a marginally less harsh
buyer's market. Some would call that a "maximalist slogan". But
wait. Which is more "maximalist": a planned, moderate labour shortage or a
planned, moderate labour surplus?
Of course, *The Road to Serfdom* argued that the former "inevitably" would
lead to totalitarian socialism. But I don't recall that it specifically
advocated the latter as the alternative. However, given the "encroachment
of the huge economic combines which hide behind the shibboleth of 'free
enterprise'" the latter was the ONLY real alternative (to which, as Dame
Maggie reminded us, there is no alternative).
Tom Walker
