One Worldism; F. Chodorov

The UN-it is moonshine to. think otherwise-consists of two hostile camps, one held together by the American dollar, the other by fear of the Soviet army. Neither law, morality, nor ideology is a cementing influence. If the American dollar is withdrawn the West will break up, its members entering into new alignments dictated by expediency; if the Soviet power shows weakness, the Red Empire will splinter. In short, it is evident now-even as it always was to anyone familiar with the history of political alliances that the high moral purpose written into the charter of the UN is but a fairy tale. World peace is not to be achieved through this or any other political concoction simply because peace and power politics are antithetical. ~War," said von Clausewitz, '''is merely the continuation of politics by other means." SocialPower Peace is the business of Society. Society is a coopera tive effort, springing spontaneously from man's urge to improve on his circumstances and widen his horizon.

It is voluntary, completely free of force. It comes because man has .learned that the task of life is easier of accom plishment through the exchange of goods, services, and ideas. The greater the volume and the fluidity of such exchanges, the richer and fuller the life of every member of Society. That is the law of association~and of peace. [418 ] It is in the free market place that man's peaceful ways are expressed. Here the· individual voluntarily gives up possession of what he has in abundance to gain posses sion of what he lacks. It is in the market place that Society flourishes because it is in the market place that the individual flourishes. Not only does he find here the satisfactions for which he craves, but he also learns of the desires of his fellow men so that he may the better serve them. More than that, it is in the market place that he learns of and swaps ideas, hopes, and dreams and comes away with values of greater worth to him than the material things he acquired.

Society has no geographical limits; it is as big as its Inarket place, its area of exchanges. The Malayan and the American are automatically enrolled in the same Society by the exchange of rubber for a juke box; and, when trade demands, the barriers of language disappear. South American music became the idiom of the North American dance floor because automobiles are swapped for coffee and bananas. Society is the spontaneous organi zation of people who voluntarily do business with one another. The law of association-the supreme law of Society-,. is self-operating; it needs no enforcement agency. Its motor force is in the nature of man. His insatiable appe tite for material, cultural, and spiritual desires drives him to join up. The compulsion is so strong that he makes an automobile out of an oxcart, a telephone system out of a drum, .so as to overcome the handicaps of time and space; contact is of the essence in the market place technique.

[419 ] Society grows because the seed of it is in the human being; it is made of man, but not by men. PoliticalPower Government is the monopoly of coercion. Its function is to prevent individuals from using violence or other ooercive methods on one another, so that the business of Society-the exchange of goods, services and ideas-may be carried on in safety and tranquility. Its contribution to social progress, though necessary, is purely negative. In this country, tradition and the Constitution hold that the function of government is to protect the individual in the enjoyment of those rights which inhere in him by virtue of existence, and which are the gifts of the Creator. And in the beginning, before tradition and the spirit of the Constitution were perverted, Americans took for granted that government had no other competence. But the hard fact is that this monopoly of coercion is vested in humans-of which government· is necessarily c()mposed~and that these humans are no different in make-up from those they are called upon to coerce. It would be expecting too much for them scrupulously to resist the temptation to use the power they wield for purposes purely personal. The temptation is heightened by the fiction that political power can be used to pro mote the "general good," a fiction that politicians are ever ready to foster and believe. Whenever the power of government is so used, the "general good" turns out to be a special advantage granted to some group of citizens, [420 ] to the disadvantage of another, accompanied by a fur ther increase in the glory and emoluments of political office. Since government cannot produce a single eco nomic good, and lives only· by what it takes from the property of individuals, every "general good" venture increases its need for taxes, and every increase in taxes enables it to venture further. Thus in time the agency established for the purpose of protecting Society becomes its master.

This tendency of government to expand upon its power and its prerogatives is inherent in it simply because it is composed of men who have ambition and who dream dreams of their own. But the expansion is always at the expense of Society. Therefore, the concern of Society, particularly in the last few centuries, has been to find some way to keep government within bounds. Thus came constitutionalism. Thus came the idea that to safeguard freedom-from government, of course-it is necessary to keep government small, so that it can be subject to con stant surveillance, and poor, so that it cannot get out of hand. That idea found expression in the establishment of the American government. The constitutional limits of the powers of the central government, the system of checks and balances to restrain any tendency toward centraliza~ tion of authority, the vesting of all general powers in separate autonomous States, the delimitation of its taxing power-all bear witness to the common recognition in 1789 of the truth that Society flourishes best under small and impotent government.

[421 ] The Miracle of Freedom The wisdom of the Founding Fathers was demon strated in the miracle of the market place that sprang from what was wilderness and prairie a few years back. \iVealth multiplied at a rate unheard of in human history; out of wheat lands grew towns and cities; small shops '\\Jere transmuted into factories; storekeepers became de partment store operators; schools, colleges, churches took their place in the human scheme of things, and out of the abundance came a demand for those cultural satis factions which men seek when their larders are full lectures, the circus, the road show, and the concert. Free men built a rich Society. Neither federal nor state governments were in position to intervene, since their income from taxes was insufficient for such mis chief. There were no border guards to prevent men from lTIovingto where their fancy or the prospect of profit on their labors might lure them, no custom collectors to filch any of their produce, no inquisitional agents to deprive them of their savings. In time, the free trade area .approximated in size the border-ridden eastern Europe (outside Russia), and free men performed the materialistic miracle of the ages. Government, on the whole, did not try to interfere with them, and certainly could not help them.

During this time of material growth, a century and a quarter, the country suffered from three freebooting ven tures-hardly wars-instigated by conniving politicians, and one war; meanwhile, the strong governments of [422 ] Europe were always either warring one another or send ing their armies all over the world to augment their. inadequate tax-and-tariff incomes with what they could pick up from colonials. And, be it noted, the one Amer ican war of that era was caused by the tariff disabilities from which· the South suHered; compelled to sell their cotton at the price fixed by world demand, and to buy all their manufactured products at tariff-laden prices from the industrial Northeast, Southerners;' sense of eco nomic hurt spilled over into other areas of disconten4 and other causes for war obscured the original one. Thirty years before secession detonated the conflict, John C. Calhoun warned that if protectionism became the settled policy of the government, the separation of the Union would "inevitably;';' follow.

A Nonpolitical Solution One Worldism is.not an impossible ideal. But, it is not approachable by the road of political power. On· the contrary, the organization of the world into a single Society-which is what the sincere One Worlders (not the communists and socialists) hope for-can only be effected by the voluntary cooperation of the peoples of the world via an unfettered market place. The first step in that direction is the removal of all barriers to trade, all of which are political. Not only must tariffs go, but also such impediments to exchange as quotas, special embargoes, and the pegging of moneys at false values~ Free trade is trade in which government is in no wa.y [423] involved. If General Motors is willing to sell its pr:>duct to somebody in Moscow, on a credit basis, it must do so at its own risk; it cannot call on the U. S. Marines to collect on defaulted bills. Nor is it free trade when the government pledges the taxpayers' money against loss to foreign investors; that is likely to be a subsidy, or an excuse for intervention in foreign affairs.

What this proposal amounts to, in the final analysis, is a general recognition of the fact that political power is incapable of doing anything that men cannot do for themselves; that when it invades the market place, except as an impartial policeman, it must be destructive and predatory; that it is without competence to improve the '~general good," and that when it attempts to do so it causes injustice and, therefore, friction. The best that government can do for Society is to perform its negative functions and otherwise get out of its way. An international political organization with practically unlimited power and unlimited revenues certainly will not do that. [424 ] COFFEE, BUTTER, AND POLITICS OTHERs-The Wall Street Journal and economist Sumner Slichter, for example-have' already pOinted to the strik ing contrast between the attitude of some of our congress men toward coffee prices on the one hand and .butter prices on the other. But the contrast will bear further emphasis.