Every organization of human beings for any purpose whatever naturally has some supervisory, administrative, and executive arrangement by which are conducted the various details and purposes for which the organization exists. It necessarily must also be so with socialism, which equally requires some administrative machinery of general management. The necessary work which would fall on the general administration, as well as on its numerous subordinate branches, would be something tremendous, thousands of times greater than the work done by any government or corporation at the present day.
Let us take a concise view of the multifarious duties of the socialistic management. Its necessary duties would be the following:—
1. To find out exactly what articles should be produced and what services rendered, both as regards quality and quantity, for a community of many millions.
2. To find out each would-be worker's capacity, and to give him such work as is fitted for him, and is socially required.
3. To see that each worker actually performs what can be reasonably required from him or what he is pledged to do; that no one steals, idles, or bungles; in other words, that the collective interests of the whole community shall be protected as much as possible against losses due to the possible dishonesty, incompetence, recklessness, or laziness of its individual members.
4. To apportion to the individual members of the community the rewards for their various kinds and amounts of social labor according to some basis of distribution; that is, to see that each contributor to the common stock of social utilities receives his proper share of food, clothing, shelter, and other commodities to be distributed from the community's storehouses for individual personal use and consumption. This is really the problem of values and wages for commodities and services.
It is no wonder that socialists spend all their energies in explaining and denouncing the wrongs and evils of the present system, and merely suggest the various duties incumbent on their socialistic community, while they studiously fight shy of explaining how their socialistic "co-operative commonwealth" is to carry out the necessary details of its business.
The imagination may run riot in conceiving some all-wise and all-virtuous human agency to perform all these various functions; but the imagination, in its flights of fancy, is not obliged to consider imperfections of human nature or of human ability. Common sense confronts the socialist with the practical question: Where on this planet can you find the ability and honesty necessary for the successful administration of such gigantic interests? And such collective interests and property estimated by any measure of value would amount, not to millions, but to billions.
Some system of electing the administration and the various heads and managers could doubtless be devised without insuperable difficulty. But what reason is there for supposing that there can exist anywhere the wisdom to conduct all the collective affairs and interests of a whole nation? At present the owners of wealth used in production have the greatest difficulty in finding talent and experience capable of successfully conducting business, and the larger the scale of operations the more rare is the talent requisite, and the higher is the price willingly accorded to it. A slight miscalculation often involves the loss and destruction of millions; and the bigger the interests involved, the bigger the losses. Fancy for a moment the scale of loss into which a mistake in the conduct of collective social industry would plunge the community, and mistakes would occur in all branches. At present losses are principally borne by those directly involved; under socialism, everybody would have to suffer not only from his own mistakes, but from the mistakes of everybody else. Socialists may calmly tell us: "Very well, then, a divided loss is felt less keenly, and the community would be merely the general insurer of each member." True enough, but the magnitude of the operations would involve a corresponding magnitude of mistakes and losses; and each honest man has a lurking feeling that he would like to suffer only his own losses, and no other person's. And if such a general insurance existed, some men who made the fewest mistakes would be constantly making up for the greater number of mistakes of others. Human nature kicks at such an unequal distribution of risks and responsibilities, in which one man indirectly is made to suffer disproportionately for his errors in favor of some one else more liable to them.
In fact, as soon as the magnitude of the labors of a socialistic administration is contemplated, the impossibility of finding the talent requisite for such tasks is apparent. Demi-gods could not cope with such work. Nor can socialists make any effective comparison with the large works now performed by the government, such as the management of a post-office or a railroad, or the maintenance of an army. As regards the post-office in all countries, and the railroad in some, their management is founded on the fact that government has a monopoly, can fix its own prices, and can practically force people to pay more than the service is worth under free competition; or by charging less than the rates would be under free enterprise, and then indirectly taxing the non-users of the same for this benefit to the users. Government monopoly means extortion and maximum cost to the consumer, regardless of the question whether free competition would make the burden lighter to him; or else it means a cheap service for those who use it, while the deficit is mainly made up out of the pockets of those tax-payers who use it least. Neither a government post-office nor a government railroad in any country lives in any other way. They are parasites on the productive powers of other industries, which contribute a sort of quasi-tax for their use, wholly apart from what would be the competitive market value of their services, in the same way as other monopolies. This quasi-tax from the rest of the industries is the difference between the present cost to the rest of the community of the service, and what would be the cost to the community under free competition which reduces the cost of anything to the consuming community to a minimum? Any government can run some branches of industry in this way provided the drain on the rest of the industries be not too great to be borne. But it cannot run all industries in this way, any more than two creatures can be parasites on each other, or two persons can tax each other for their mutual support.
Even if the requisite ability could be found to conduct the whole production and distribution of a community (and such ability does not exist on earth), it is difficult to conceive that the handling of such vast sums of wealth would not expose the administrative powers to very powerful and almost irresistible temptations. At present every owner of wealth keeps the sharpest eye on the fingers of everybody who handles it for him. Human nature is frail, and it is much less apt to lapse from grace when the gaze of an able and interested watcher is on it than when that watchfulness is weakened.
Even now governments everywhere are characterized by the minimum of intelligence requisite for their necessary work, by the constant tendencies toward incompetence, laziness, dishonesty, and wastefulness. These tendencies are natural because the sharp eye of individual private ownership is not on them, and collective ownership is never, and can never be, a good guardian of property. Every public official is in a tacit conspiracy with every other public official to get as much from the public, and to do as little for it, as possible. Above the natural market value of public services rendered by officials to the rest of the community, the community pays indirectly a heavy tax for their incompetence, laziness, dishonesty, and wastefulness.
Under socialism, in which the interests and properties managed by the higher officials would be multiplied a thousandfold, the opportunities for the frailties of human nature to play would be multiplied infinitely, and the ability of the community to watch over its collective interests effectively would be reduced to a mere shadow. The many thousands at the top of affairs would have to watch the conduct of the many millions at the bottom. Every man would have to watch the conduct of all other men; every group of officials would have to watch all other groups of officials; and every group of ordinary workers would have to watch all other groups of ordinary workers. This would be absolutely necessary to prevent human frailty from reaping unfair advantages for single individuals, and causing corresponding losses to the community from dishonesty, laziness, favoritism, incompetence, and wastefulness on the part of individual officials or workers. Can any man in his right senses, viewing human nature as it actually is, believe that such a wholesale mutual watchfulness is at all possible?
Socialists are either living in a dreamland or else they are waiting for the advent of a human being whose counterpart has not yet been seen on this planet. Their so-called "ethical man," who is unselfish, who is willing to labor for others, who will always do his duty, who will always take his fair share without hankering for more, who will suffer inconvenience for the sake of his neighbor, and who is endowed with a thousand other benevolent virtues, does not exist, and will only come with the millennium. He is about on a par with the so-called "economic man" of the older economists—the man who always seeks every possible advantage, and yields only so much as is absolutely forced from him. The latter is a monster of unscrupulous selfishness, while the former is a wonder of altruistic virtue, and both are about as typical of the human race as a Shylock or a Father Damien.
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