Fear Smallness, Not Bigness; L.E. Read

IT WAS a pleasing note: "Thanks for your letter. It's so nice to do business with a person instead of a computer." The comment dealt less with a new-fangled gadget than with a phase of organizationitis. When the job gets bigger than the man, there is a deplorable tendency to overdelegate and lapse into a push button operation - form letters for all occasions, for example. When a job overflows the limits of one's personal attention, there's the "ghosting" of speeches, letters, books, statements of policy, and so on. And ghost is about all that is left of any man who ceases to be personal: an organism without personali ty ! Long ago I decided that when my part in FEE goes beyond what I can attend to personally, then FEE is too big for me. I shall write my own speeches and books, dictate my own letters - and sign them. Assistance and counsel? Yes, all I can muster! Nor is anyone ever "too little"

to be eligible for personal atten tion. It is not my business to pass judgment on who is or isn't im portant to freedom. Noone knows where genius is about to sprout! There comes to mind the story of the man who set forth on a jour ney to Jerusalem to see the Savior: 'Year Smallness, Not Bigness LEONARD E. READ Along the way numerous persons asked for assistance but to each he replied, "Sorry, I haven't time for you; I'm on my way to Jerusalem to see the Savior." In Jerusalem, he learned that one of those by the way side was the Savior. The lesson? Treat each person, regardless of race, creed, color, fame, or fortune, as if he were the Lord so as not to pass by the one who may be most important of all. When a man's job is so big he can't follow this rule, then it's bigger than he can handle! Another test for job-fitness: An individual has moved up the lad der as far as he should go if, on the next higher rung, he could no longer give full personal atten tion to his assigned role. When a man finds himself behaving as impersonally as a computer, it's time to rejoin the human race!

The aforementioned note with its person-computer comparison also reveals one of the reasons for the general fear of bigness in 425 426 THE FREEMAN July business. I do not buy the popular notion that a business is bad be cause it is big. The size of capital investment, markets, employees, sales, profits tells us nothing about goodness or badness. The lone bandit is a social menace; the big gest corporation in the world A T & T - is a benefactor. Size simply is a measure of material dimensions but has nothing, as such, to do with social well-being or morality. Big businesses off·er big jobs that require big men; and men of this caliber are a scarce resource. When big men cannot be found, such jobs are serviced by "ghosts," men who are incapable of remain ing personal and self-responsible; their roles are bigger than they are. We observe numerous persons not big enough for the roles as signed to them in small businesses; indeed, some too inadequate to head a family. But the bigger the operation, the greater the proba bility of more big jobs than big men to fill them. These deficiencies lead careless observers to associate the personal failures with bigness, explaining, in part, their unjusti fiable fear of bigness. They over look the many businesses, formed in response to natural market forces, where most of the big jobs are filled by big men.

There are, however, examples of bigness formed by coercion, an unprincipled force, where the jobs are too big for anyone. We observe this in big or bloated government where there are countless jobs bigger than any man can compe tently fill. When government gets so far out of bounds that its costs can not be met except by inflation and exorbitant taxes, unnatural big ness in businesses results. Merg.ers and conglomerates take place, not in response to normal market forces but as organizations to take advantage of unprincipled govern mental policies. This sort of giant ism tends to create jobs too big for anyone. The point to keep in mind is that bigness in itself is the wrong criterion for forming our own opinions or framing public policy as to economic enterprises. Public policy should concern itself solely with its own righteousness; it should never serve to encourage unnatural formations of enter prises or to deter enterprises that are natural responses to a free market.

Conceding a sane public policy, then nothing need concern us about the bigness of businesses or jobs except the smallness of our selves for the roles we try to play. If we are big enough, then we can act like persons rather than com puters. ~ CLARENCE B. CARSON 1£U91au~ 17. THE FALL OF ENGLAND (Part 2) THE FALL of England should be attributed most directly to the misuse of governmental power by socialists. They turned the power of government on their own peo ple, restricting, inhibiting, and obstructing the exercise of their energy and ingenuity for c_onstruc tive purposes. Of course, these obstructive activities were not ex clusively employed by the Labour Party; socialistic ideas and prac tices had long since become the common coin for virtually all the politicians, thanks to the Fabians and their aids, witting or unwit ting. The Labour Party was only more thoroughgoing than the rest Dr. Carson, Professor of History at Grove City College, Pennsylvania, will be remembered for his eariler FREEMAN series, The Fateful Turn, The' American Tradition and The Flight from Reality.