Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN The World in the Grip of an Idea CLARENCE B. CARSON is well known to readers of The Freeman. He has a way of reducing complex things to essentials, presenting his argu ments in simple commonsense lan guage that cuts through the ver biage foisted on the world by ideologists of all stripes. His The World in the Grip of an Idea argues that majority govern ments throughout the world are pretty much all of a piece. Some of them call themselves communist, others profess to be socialist of one type or another (there is Arab social ism, European democratic socialism, Mrican socialism and so on). The Scandinavians speak of their middle way. The British have been ~~gradualist" collectivists since the 1880s, and their Fabianism has rubbed off not only on India but on practically all of their former col onies. The United States, with its 508 Uprogressivism," may have lagged a bit behind England, but it has been going in the same direction.

The Cold War, then, has repre sented a quarrel over means, tempo and personal leadership rather than a struggle over conflicting philosophies. The ~~idea" that grips the world is that everybody should agree that all efforts should be con certed to achieve human felicity on this planet, and that the State is the proper instrument to carry out the grand crusade. The only trouble with the ~~idea" is that no two human beings have the same conception of felicity. One man wants to climb Everest, another is intent on being a gourmet. When the communists run up against this fact they fall back on the Rous seauistic theory that once Usociety" is remade, the U new man" will emerge, willing to forswear individTHE WORLD IN THE GRIP OF AN IDEA 509 ualism in favor of supporting the General Will. The Fascists word it their own way-their goals are na tionalist as well as socialist. Fabians and progressives are willing to ap proach the grand goal in piecemeal fashion. But they all agree that the force of the State is essential to reach the Utopian end.

The Consequences of Force When force is used to make people over, it brutalizes its wielders and makes displaced persons of millions. Some states are worse than others, but, as Harold Laski once said in a moment of confession, ((All governments are bloody." It's a matter of degree. What Mr. Carson has done is to set up a degree chart, which will give consolation to people who are lucky enough to have fallen among Fabians rather than revolutionary Marxists or Fascists. But the degree chart isn't going to help in the long run unless there is a revival of vol untarism and a reinstatement of the idea of society as something quite separate from the State. The quarrel between revolution ary and evolutionary socialism is similar to the quarrel within Chris tendom in the seventeenth century. Mr. Carson devotes separate sec tions to the various anti-religious religions that have taken over in different parts of the world as the socialist gospel has made its con verts. Lenin gave Marxism a terrorist twist in Russia, and Hitler, in the Germany of the late Twenties and Thirties, proved himself an apt pupil of the Bolshevists, whose mur derous zealotry in dispatching the Czar's family included killing the royal spaniel.

The World In the Grip of an Idea by Clarence B. Carson. Published by Arlington House, Westport, Connecticut 06880. 562 pages, $14.95 cloth. The book also is avail able from The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533. It would be too much to blame the emergence of revolutionary socialism on the German mind, for Marx owed much to French revolu tionary theorists as well as to Hegel. And, after all, the most influential preacher of the evolutionary socialist idea was a now-forgotten German named Eduard Bernstein. He saved western Europe for the Fabian ideal. But idealism itself has survived neither in Russia nor in Fabian England or Sweden. Dis pensing with respect for individuals, evolutionary socialism becomes a series of negotiated compromises be tween groups. This entails a tyranny of sorts as individuals are made pawns within a group.

510 THE FREEMAN August Politicaland Splrnual Mr. Carson's history is brilliantly written. It brings us down to the present moment and his theory of the ~~two braces." All socialism is braced to communism, for the idea that has the world in its grip culmi nates in a state power monopoly. But braces, as Mr. Carson explains, work both ways. The dependence of evolutionary socialism on com munism is largely spiritual-it is, says Mr. Carson, ~~the vision of a forward-marching, triumphant world socialism riding the wave of History." But communism itself is a counterproductive economic system. It depends on the non-communist world for inventions, for technologi cal innovation, and even for periodic grain shipments, for survival. Mr. Carson says the mutual de pendence is bound to be only tem porary: the lust of the communists is for domination. Mr. Carson offers his readers a ufearful prospect," with various centers of communism con tending with each other, with ter rorism and violence being stepped up on a world scale.

A Ray of Hope Mr. Carson is not without hope, however. He ends with an odd at tack on all sorts of organization, including the modem corporation. In this he echoes Bertrand Russell who wrote Freedom Versus Organization and the Hilaire Belloc of The Servile State. I think he overreaches himself here: the big corporation is no monster as long as people are free to patronize rivals and to quit their jobs or sell their stock. But he is quite right when he says there is a hint of spring in the air. People are weary of socialism, of depending on institutions. ~~Men," he says, ~~are beginning to relearn an old truth: ~If you want something done right, do it yourself.' Specialization is breaking down ... they are considering indi vidual devices of providing electric ity for their homes. In a thousand uncharted ways they are seeking to disentangle themselves from or ganizations and collectives."

Mr. Carson objects to being a number in a-computer. But omnipo tent government says you must have a social security number. As the computer memory banks become more and more cluttered, however, the police power can't keep up with the infonnation that is stored. More and more people are becoming adept in avoiding getting the details of their lives into the computer in the first place. As Alice Widener has noted, we have a thriving under ground economy. I wish Mr. Carson would devote his next book to exploring the extent of that economy-it might give real sub stance to his feeling that spring is indeed in the air. , 1980 OTHER BOOKS 511 FREE TO CHOOSE: A PERSONAL STATEMENT by Milton and Rose Friedman (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 757 Third Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017) 1979 338 pages. $9.95 cloth Reviewed by William L. Baker STEAMROLLER GOVERNMENT is the bane of twentieth century life. It is the trademark of our time. Expand ing budgets, unfettered taxation, galloping inflation, burgeoning bureaucracy, tireless assaults upon individualism and productivity are the tragic earmarks of our painfully collectivized world. Free to Choose tackles this Leviathan and dispels much of the ignorance, the many cliches, and the persistent myths which envelop the welfare state. Au thor of a growing shelf of free market books and monetary treatises, Mil ton Friedman brings to his latest task the rarefied prestige of the Nobel Prize, a formidable array of mental tools and academic skills.

Mrs. Friedman is a scholar in her own right. Essentially, the Friedmans tell us that the market economy is indis pensable to a free society. It is the free market which generates maximum production and provides the means for every other liberty. As an aid in convincing recalcitrant readers, the authors invoke the tcin_ visible hand" of the redoubtable Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Na tions appeared the same year as the Declaration of Independence C~a curious coincidence"}. The ~~miracle" of American pro ductivity, the authors point out, stems from the market-free men engaged in voluntary exchanges. Private initiative unrestrained by the bureaucratic tyranny of economic controls produced the wealthiest country ever. Critical to this paradigm is the role of prices as transmitters of informationa pe culiarly ~~Austrian" notion. It was Adam Smith's great ~~flash of ge nius," however, that prices (emerg ing as they do from voluntary trans actions) coordinate the myriad ac tivities of millions of unsuspecting actors blissfully unaware that they are part of any general system or plan.

It is this apparent ~~planlessness," this uanarchy of production" of free market capitalism that interven tionists and collectivists decry so vacuously, ignorant that the under lying harmony is bolstered and guided by the phenomenon of price, which in turn is the reliable reflec tion of consumer spending. This issue is not, and never has been, tcplanning" versus ~~not planning" but, rather, who shall do the plan ning? Shall production be dictated by the socialist board of central planning; or shall producers be 512 THE FREEMAN guided by the millions of customers casting their Uballots," expressing their wants in the daily plebiscite of the market? Only the latter is com patible with a society of free people. There is an excellent chapter favoring free trade, establishing the point that ~~controls on foreign trade extend to domestic trade." Social Se curity and other uwelfare" measures are shown to be hollow promises.

Government schooling is severely critiqued, as are labor unions, and the various regulatory agencies al legedly designed to protect the con sumer. Only when they come to the chap ters on inflation and the depression do the Friedmans abandon their free market scenario. Here the authors are all for the Federal Reserve Sys tem (a notorious instrument of gov ernmental hegemony over the mar ket), government sponsorship of the money supply, and a yearly rate of officially prescribed doses of infla tion. It is true that the Friedmans correctly diagnose the economic cul pability of government. Moreover, they easily pierce the standard fal lacies that it is the greedy busi nessman, the unions, or rapacious Arab sheiks that generate inflation. But the ~~cure" which is served up is dubious indeed. It is to control infla tion by carefully calibrated doses of inflation! Government would legally expand the money supply at a fixed annual rate-as if the political process could be trusted to achieve an economic end!

Furthermore, the authors are convinced that the Great Depression resulted from a deflation, a too sharp reduction in the amount of money in circulation. Certainly they err. An elementary application of Say's Law would enable us to under stand that a contraction in the money supply followed by a corres ponding drop in wages and prices need present no insurmountable dif ficulties. Except for the initial period of readjustment inescapable during any period of deflation, no serious curtailment of goods and services need result. However, if the government attempts to artifi cally enforce yesterday's prices with today's monetary quantity, tragic dislocations and bottlenecks are in evitable. That was the legacy of the Great Depression: a futile attempt to prop up inflated prices with a deflated currency. The Friedmans believe that we need a governmentally sponsored central bank of issue. Misesians would argue that the existence of such a bank has been the problem all along. What is really needed is a free market money divorced from the arbitrary acts of power brokers and political collaborators. At any rate, to couple the ~~freemarket"

with a governmental monetary bureaucracy amounts to a regret table contradiction in terms. , the Freeman VOL. 30, NO.9. SEPTEMBER 1980 Against All Enemies, Part I Robert Bearce 515 A call for the better practice of freedom in the United States within the framework of the Constitution. How to Return to Gold Gold as the alternative to further inflation. Henry Hazlltt 523 Remonetizing Gold, Again Randall R. Rader 527 A review of the Greenback era and its message for today. The Corruption of Language Leslie Snyder 537 How language is corrupted to darken truth and unsettle people's rights. The Property Basis of Rights Clarence B. Carson 543 All rights are dependent on property for their conception, delineation and exercise. Competition Charles R. La Dow 554 The case for competition and suggestions for curbing the resw-aints upon it. Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Hayek's Completed Trilogy Arthur Shenfield 558 An article-review of the prospects for liberty set forth in the latest works of F. A. Hayek.