Scientific Free Enterprise; E. P. Coleson

SCIENTIFIC FREE ENTERPRISE A LOT of so-called liberals have talked about "scientific socialism" so long now that the world has well-nigh fallen for the delusion that socialism is, indeed, scientific. While certainly a number of scientists, engineers, and technicians have had a distressing affinity for socialist and communist causes along with a number of other shortcomings and vices which they share with the gen eral population, it simply is not true that pure science as such has a procollectivist bias. In fact, when it seemed that everyone else was going "liberal" back in the New Deal days, it was the insights of science coupled with an elementary course in economics which helped to hold the writer steady when the issues were not clear or well understood. Some things simply could not be true by the very nature of the world even if everyone ap proved, and I found myself a lonesome minority of one.

At least this has saved me the embarrassment that many a well-meaning individual has experienced who must now make his painful way back from a bankrupt utopia, like the Prodigal Son returning from the swine pen of the Far Country. Dr. Coleson is Professor of Economics at Taylor University, Up land, Indiana. 125 126 EDWARD P. COLESON Actually, New Dealism, the bright hope of multiplied millions of Americans in the 1930's, had a strangely familiar ring to one brought up on science and mathe· matics. We used to have that trouble in engineering, too. A number of craftsmen, long on mechanical skill but short on theory, have wasted their lives trying to rig ingenious machines that would achieve perpetual mo· tion, or simply, something for nothing. Although there are doubtless as many schemes as in· dividuals, the following example may suffice to ill us· trate what is meant. Having grown weary of buying gas for the family car, we invent an electric automobile. It is all very simple. We mount a generator and a motor side by side with each running the other as in Figure 1.

We assume, of course, that there will be a considerable "unearned increnlent" of energy that can be used to Belt Figure .1. PERPETUAL MOTION ELECTRIC AUTOMOBILE. The motor runs the generator and bock wheel of the cor. The generotor produces current to keep the motor running.

SCIENTIFIC FREE ENTERPRISE 127 drive the automobile down the road. We need a push to get it started, but then the "multiplier" takes over, and we have an abundance of power-and all for noth ing-until we put on the brakes at the end of the way. It is a very good scheme, except it won't work. The motor and generator might be coaxed to very nearly run each other but, since there is friction, a little outside power would need to be added to keep them both go ing. If any work is demanded of the combination, there must be an additional input of electricity commensurate with the task to be performed. Most everyone in the sciences quit looking for some thing for nothing quite a while ago, but the politicians are still at it in full force with no indications even yet that they sense even vaguely that the whole business is impossible. Our whole Operation Bootstraps by which we tried to lift ourselves out of the Great Depression under the New Deal reeked with perpetual motionism, as did certain popular private schemes as the chain let ter craze and the Townsend Plan. They never worked and business stagnated all during the 1930's. Having learned nothing and forgotten nothing in the intervening years, we are still trying those same outworn schemes. We have a principle in science, which is used to discourage such hopeless endeavor, called the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy. In plain English, it says you can't get something for nothing.

Now there are better and worse ways of doing things. Suppose we want to lift a 450-pound barrel to a dock 3 feet high. It will require a minimum of 3 x 450 or 1,350 128 EDWARD P. COLESON foot pounds of work to lift it up there. Given the size of the task, nothing on earth can reduce the figure be low 1,350 .£oot pounds. Since we can't lift 450 pounds directly, we may. whittle the task down to size by push ing it up a ramp. In this case we exert a lesser force over a longer distance, but nothing will reduce the mini mum figure. If we use a jack screw, an electric hoist, or a stick of dynamite, the force required is the same. If we ladle the contents up with a. teaspoon into another container and lift the empty barrel up later, we have gotten out of nothing. Indeed, we most certainly have wasted a considerable am.ount of additional effort to no purpose. The engineer of today has long since given up trying to get something for nothing: he is earnestly striving to get as close to 100 per cent efficiency as possible-the irreducible minimum of effort necessary to perform the task. Frictional losses are still high; a steam engine wastes 80 to 85 per cent of its power input, and an auto mobile as much as 75 per cent. Diesels do somewhat bet ter and, recently, reaction engines (rockets or jets) have been developed which are very nearly as efficient as our older engines were wasteful. Still we aren't getting some thing for nothing. Indeed, we are only beginning to get our money's worth.

To Discipline the Mind All of these calculations may seem irrelevant and lun interesting to the person not trained in science and SCIENTIFIC FREE ENTERPRISE 129 mathematics. However, these rigorous disciplines do something to one's mind. It simply is not possible to tell many of us that the government can give without first taking. It is sheer rubbish that there are all sorts of colossal tasks-education, roads, housing, care of the poor and aged, besides subsidizing every group you can think of-jobs that the states simply cannot do but which Uncle Sam can easily handle. Nor can you tell us that inefficiency adds up to prosperity. John Maynard Keynes might convince well-nigh the whole world that pyramid building made ancient Egypt prosperous and two were twice as good as one, but make-work schemes are frictional losses, and reduce the standard of living. A person who spends his life trying to invent and de vise more efficient ways of doing the world's work in industry, or striving to produce enough food on the farm to at least meet mankind's minimum needs, neces sarily bitterly resents deliberate efforts in the opposite direction, disguised to confuse the issue in the public mind. We are rapidly coming to the state described by Thomas Jefferson a century and a half ago: If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements ... as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the six teenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must ... be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves (to the govern ment) to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

To several million American farmers who can scarcely 130 EDWARD P. COLESON make a go of it when they work eight hours a day in a shop in town and as many or more on the land, Jeffer,. son's words will seem ominously prophetic. The old laissez-faire1 doctrine of a self-regulating economy managed by the "invisible hand" is remark ably like the science of ecology, which insists that Na ture balances the budget, gives everyone his due, and keeps the myriad forms of life in check as long as man does not upset the natural scheme of things. The dis astrous results of human interference are well known, as for example, the story of how the timid rabbit well nigh took over the continent of Australia because of a lack of "checks and balances." Professor Pavlov, the noted Russian physiologist, also found in the workings of .the body examples of how artificial inhibitions wrought havoc. These he compared with the paralysis produced by the communist system of national planning. He should have known.

Of course, it can be argued that such analogies drawn from mathematics, mechanics, and biology do not prove that the free system is appropriate in economics and that the fantastic schemes of the national planners lead only to misery and ruin. But as Winston Smith says in Or well's Ig84: "If two and two are four, the rest follows." 1 Laissez faire is here used, not in the sense of doing as one wills regardless of how that might infringe upon the rights of others, but in the classical sense of freedom to· produce, exchange. travel, and the like according to one's own interest within the bounds of due respect for the lives and property of others.