Very few men have ever known that men are free. Among this earth's population now, few know that fact.

For six thousand years at least, a majority has generally believed in pagan gods. A pagan god, whatever it is called, is an Authority which (men believe) controls the energy, the acts, and therefore the fate of all individuals.

The pagan view of the universe is that it is static, motionless, limited, and controlled by an Authority. The pagan view of man is that all individuals are, and by their nature should and must be, controlled by some Authority outside themselves.

Everyone has this belief when he is very young. A chick can scratch as soon as it is dry from the shell, and a fish emerging from the egg can swim, but a baby must be spanked before he can breathe, and then he cannot control the little energy that he has. For a long time, he will kick himself in the eye when he is only trying to taste his toes to find out what they are.

He is hungry, and he cannot get food. He is uncomfortable, and he cannot turn over. Food, warmth, comfort, cleanliness, everything he wants and must have, come from a power outside himself, enormously stronger than he. And this power actually does control the conditions of his life.

It does not control his energy — did you ever try to stop a baby's squawling when he merely wanted to squawl? — but doubtless he feels that it does. He wants food; it feeds him. He tries to lift himself up, and it lifts him. When this great power outside himself coincides with his own energy, and does what he wants to do, it must seem to him that it controls his energy. When it does with him what he does not want done, he knows that he is powerless to resist it.

If a baby were able to control his energy in thinking and speaking, any baby would say that experience proves the existence of a Great Power that controls babies.

Men do not remain babies all their lives. They grow up. A time comes when every normal man is a responsible human being. His energy creates a part of the whole human world of his time. He is free; he is self-controlling and responsible, because he generates his energy and controls it. No one and nothing else can control it.

Nevertheless, during some six thousand years of the Old World's history, a majority of men have believed that some Authority controlled them.

In all that time, human energies have never worked efficiently enough to get from this earth a reliable food supply.

Communism

Many kinds of insects and some animals seem actually to be controlled by an Authority outside themselves.

A honey bee, for instance, behaves as a cell behaves in a human body. A bee apparently has no desires and makes no choices; a Will of the Masses seems to control it. A bee is ruthlessly exhausted, discarded, replaced by another to be worn out in the same changeless labor for the Swarm, just as cells are worn out and replaced. It appears that a bee has no individual life; the Swarm is the living creature.

The nearest human approach to the bee-swarm is communism.

Some sociologists say that Society began in savage communism and developed through barbarism to civilization; others expect Society to reach its final perfection in future world-communism.

To think of human society as an organism, developing, progressing, or retrograding, is to think like a bee — if a bee thinks. It is to think as a pagan thinks. It is to imagine a fantasy.

In the human world there is no entity but the individual person. There is no force but individual energy. In actual human life the only real Society is every living person's contact with everyone he meets.

So far as Society has any real existence, it exists when boy meets girl, when Mrs. Jones telephones Mrs. Smith, when Robinson buys a cigar, when the motorist stops for gasoline, when a lobbyist tips a bellboy and when he meets a Congressman, and when the Congressman votes on a bill; when the postman delivers the mail and the labor bosses discuss a strike and the milliner brings another hat and the dentist says, "Wider, please." Human relationships are so infinitely numerous and varying every moment, that no human mind can begin to grasp them.

To call all these relationships Society, and then discuss the progress or welfare of Society, as if it existed as a bee-swarm does, is simply to escape from reality to fairyland.

No one knows, or can sensibly guess, how or when or where human life began. If it began in communism, it is beginning now. Plenty of groups of all kinds of persons are living in communism. Groups of American communists have always lived in these United States.

The first thing that European intellectuals did, when the thirteen colonies were free of England, was to establish communism here. Hancock, Harvard, Shirley, Tyringham, in Massachusetts; Alfred and New Gloucester in Maine; Mount Lebanon, Watervliet, Groveland, Oneida (Community silver) in New York; South Union and Pleasant Hill in Kentucky; Bethlehem and Economy in Pennsylvania; Union Village, North Union, Watervliet, Whitewater, and Zoar in Ohio; Enfield and Wallingford, Connecticut; Bishop Hill, Illinois; Corning and Bethel, Missouri; Cedarvale, Kansas; Aurora, Oregon, and scores of other American towns and cities, were communist settlements. In the flowering of New England, Emerson's friends created the communist blossom of Brook Farm. Mr. Upton Sinclair, recently almost elected Governor of California, first established his world-wide renown as a revolutionist by founding the communist settlement of Halicon Hall in New Jersey. The American Indians were communists; so, apparently, were the Mound Builders.

Sparta was a barbarian instance of communism. Plutarch describes the Spartans:

Their discipline continued still, after they were grown men. No one was allowed to live after his own fancy, but the city was a sort of camp, in which every man had his share of provisions and business set out. (Lycurgus) bred up his citizens in such a way that they neither would, nor could, live by themselves; they were to make themselves one with the public good and, clustering like bees around their commander, be by their zeal and public spirit all but carried out of themselves.

That "all but" is the stubborn difference between a man and a bee. A bee is wholly carried out of itself. So (the Spartans believed) was Lycurgus. In history, Lycurgus is a legend. The legend is that, like a bee, he poured his whole life-energy into the public good until, growing old, he killed himself to end a life that had no other value.

For five hundred years the Spartans lived in a changeless commune. King Agis IV tried to raise the standard of living; the Spartans killed him. They continued to live as cells of Sparta until less-communistic Greeks defeated them in war and destroyed the commune.

Twenty years ago the Dukhagini in the Dinaric Alps were living in the same obedience to their Law of Lek. I tried for hours to convince some of them that a man can own a house.

A dangerously radical woman of the village was demanding a house. She had helped her husband build it; now she was a childless widow, but she wanted to keep that house. It was an ordinary house; a small, stone-walled, stone-roofed hovel, without floor, window, or chimney.

Obstinately anti-social, she doggedly repeated, "With these hands, my hands, I built up the walls. I laid the roof-stones with my hands. It is my house. I want my house."

The villagers said, "It is a madness. A spirit of the rocks, not human, has entered into her."

They were intelligent. My plea for the woman astounded them, but upon reflection they produced most of the sound arguments for communism: economic equality, economic security, social order.

I said that in America a man owns a house. They could not believe it; they admired America. They had heard of its marvels; during the recent world war they had seen with their eyes the airplanes from that fabulous land.

They questioned me shrewdly. I staggered myself by mentioning taxes; I had to admit that an American pays the tribe for possession of a house. This seemed to concede that the American tribe does own the house. I was routed; their high opinion of my country was restored.

They were unable to imagine that any security, order, or justice could exist among men who were not controlled by some intangible Authority, which could not permit an individual to own a house.

In precisely the same way, Rousseau could not imagine any civilization if Authority did not control individuals. Twenty-five hundred years after Sparta, only two lifetimes ago, all those brilliant European intellectuals were fighting for the Rights of Man, and expecting human rights to destroy Civilization. They could not imagine any free man but the untutored, noble Red Man, naked and solitary in the American wilderness. (They did not bother to learn that the American Indians, though noble and naked, were communists.)

In 1776, these French thinkers had the freest minds in Europe. They could not imagine that an exercise of natural human rights could create a new kind of civilization. They could not imagine actual human rights; they assumed that some Authority must control individuals.

This false assumption underlies all the thought of the Old World, through its whole history, to this day. It underlies a great deal of American thinking.

This delusion has prevailed so long, and it still lures so many honest minds into escaping from facts, because it seems to solve the human problem. The problem is real; it is the problem of controlling the combined energies of many individuals.

Individuals must combine their energies, to survive on this planet. Their combined energies must work under some control. The question is, What controls them?

The Old World answer is, Authority.

This answer is the basis of human life in the Old World. No Old World thinker has ever questioned it. The question that has always engaged Old World minds is, What Authority?

To find The Authority, men's minds have struggled for thousands of years. To find it, active men, century after century, have revolted against their governments, killed their rulers, slaughtered each other in untold millions and set up form after form, every imaginable form, of living Authority.

From Lycurgus to Lenin, communists reject every form of human Authority. To the question, What Authority controls human beings? the honest communist answers, No living man; no King, no Czar, no despot, no dictator, no majority, no group, no class.

A communist makes this answer because he recognizes a fact, the fact of human brotherhood. He truly says that all men are united in one common effort to survive on this earth. All men share a common human necessity, a common human aim. All men are equally entitled to life, and therefore to the necessities of life.

But from this point, a communist reasons on the ancient, pagan assumption that some Authority controls all men. He does not question this pagan superstition; he takes it for granted.

His reasoning therefore continues: Since all men are humanly equal, no man is an Authority controlling other men. If this Authority is no living man, it must be a superhuman, intangible Authority. To find out what this Authority is, observe how men behave. Their first effort is to get food, clothing, shelter. Economic Necessity controls them.

Here is the fallacy that comes from superstitious belief in Authority.

A naked man alone in the woods can flee in circles until he dies of exhaustion, or he can build a shelter of branches, kill and eat a rabbit, and make a garment of rabbit skins. Historically, men have not run in circles and died; they have survived. The fact is that human life is a struggle between the man's energy, which he controls, and the non-human energies of weather and trees and rabbits.

But the communist is looking for the Authority that controls men, and taking it for granted that the man does not control himself, then the Authority that controls him must be his situation, the sum-total of trees and rabbits and weather. That is, the hunter is controlled by what he hunts. A woman does not control her gas-range, it controls her. Does it?

Since a communist does not know that individuals control themselves, he sees them as cells in Society, which (he believes) has a Great Spirit that is to the individual what the swarm is to the bee.

So far as I know, only the American Indians called this intangible Authority, The Great Spirit. Savages call it tabu. Spartans called it Sparta. My Dukhagin friends called it the Law of Lek. Many groups of communists living in these States call it God. Marx called it The Will of the Masses, and The Proletarian State. Communists in this country now call their Authority, The Party Line, and it lives in Moscow.

In theory, communism is the total self-surrender of the individual to the will of this intangible Authority, which of course is always The Good.

The theory and practice of communism are as old as history. They persist, because the theory is partly based on fact. It recognizes the equality and the brotherhood of man.

In practice, no effort to make this theory work has ever permitted human energy to work effectively, because the theory does not recognize the fact that individuals control their own energy.

Communism succeeds in controlling combined human energies, because individuals control their energies in accordance with their view (whether true or false) of the universe, of Reality, of God; and if they believe that an intangible Authority controls them, they act as if such an Authority did control them. If they do not believe this, they do not attempt communism.

All history proves that communism is a feasible way of living. Men have lived, and are living, in communism at every level of culture and at every economic level ever reached in the Old World.

In order to live in communism, it is necessary only that a number of men and women believe two facts and one fallacy; that all men are equal, that all men are brothers — and that an intangible Authority controls individuals.

The Living Authorities

The great majority of human beings on earth believe today that a superhuman Authority controls human beings.

Italians call this pagan god Immortal Italy. Germans call it The German Race. Communists begin to believe that History is its name; that history is not a mere record of men's acts, but a Power that controls men's acts. The god has many names: Society ("Society is responsible." "Society must provide — "); The Industrial Revolution ("The Industrial Revolution creates the Capitalist System."); The Machines ("Man is the slave of The Machines." "This is a war of The Machines.") Some Americans lament the death of the god that created these United States and once made Americans strong and self-reliant. Its name is The Frontier.

Experience contradicts this pagan superstition. Whatever the intangible Authority is called, it cannot be seen nor felt nor smelled nor heard. When a man musters courage to act against or without its control, it does not strike him dead. It does nothing whatever.

From this experience, the believer rarely concludes that his god does not exist. He merely changes its name, or his idea of how it works. (Or, he supposes that it controls everyone but himself. For instance, Mr. Gallup believes that a man's income dictates his opinions. He uses this discovery to make a great change in his own income. Does he find his opinions altering as his income increases?)

Since history began, men in the Old World have never doubted that some Authority controls them. But ordinary experience makes it hard to believe that this superhuman Power is wholly intangible. Most men have believed that it creates a superior kind of man to act as its agent.

The Japanese today believe that their Mikado is a living God. The Tibetans believe that God incarnates Himself in their Great Lama. The Pharaohs of Egypt, and the Emperors of Rome, were believed to be Gods. Until 1911, the Empress of China was sacred.

In 1776, all continental Europeans and the descendants of Europeans living in South America and most of North America believed that a King was God's agent on earth and ruled inferior men by that Divine Right.

After the first world war, all continental Europeans except the French were obeying Kings, and still believing that anyone of Royal ancestry — though crippled, diseased, imbecile, or insane — was, by his birth and nature, a superior kind of human being.

Anyone who believes that Authority controls human beings, and who does not believe that this superhuman Authority is wholly intangible, must believe that it resides in a few living men whose nature is superior to the nature of most men.

Excepting communists, men in the Old World have always believed, and still believe, that superhuman Authority gives some men — by their birth, their race, their color, or by a direct act of God upon an individual — a superior nature and a right to control their inferiors.

Therefore they obey these men, supposed to be superior, who are the Government.

Whenever and wherever any large number of persons believe that Government controls them, they always break the changeless routine of communism. Their energies work, a little, to improve their living conditions.

For instance: During some sixty centuries, human energy (already having the wheel) got a cart onto two wheels, and attached knives to these wheels, to kill men. After a lapse that almost lost the wheel, men got a cart onto four wheels. By George Washington's time, human energy had created a coach, carved and gilded, and suspended by leather straps above four iron-shod wheels. It stands today in the carriage house at Mount Vernon.

Another instance: In Ancient Greece, and perhaps earlier, men knew the principle of the steam engine. The Greeks spread over the known world after the Macedonians conquered it. Yet today on the Tigris and the Euphrates, men are still paddling logs hollowed out by fire, as the American Indians did, or drifting down these rivers in even more primitive bowls of rawhide drawn over basket-work. After thus traveling downstream, they walk back a thousand miles, as the flatboatmen, a century ago, were walking back from New Orleans to Pittsburgh.

In other places, during forty centuries, men built boats with sails. In addition to sails, the Phoenicians used ranks of oars. The Romans used two or three banks of oars, with a slave chained to each oar. Through overseers using whips, the captain thus had some control of the boat's direction and speed. But this advance was lost. Columbus sailed in boats wholly dependent upon the winds.

No one knows the future, and men who carry burdens on their backs might not imagine a wagon. But surely, men have always wanted enough to eat. Yet for six thousand years most men have been hungry. Many of them have always been dying of hunger.

Hunger is normal to nearly all Asiatics and Africans, and always has been. European working classes were hungry until less than a century ago. Only three generations of Europeans have enjoyed enough soup, bread and cheese, spaghetti. They have never yet had enough meat, butter, milk, vegetables and fruits. But no whole villages of Western Europeans have starved to death since 1848.

Famines have continued as before in Africa and Asia. Normally, over the greater part of this earth, a working man gives sixteen hours of literally killing labor for one small bowl of rice. (His ancestors always have.) Every morning in peaceful Shanghai, made prosperous by its European settlements, policemen collected from the streets the bodies of men and women who had died of hunger during the night. It was a routine job.

When men try to make energy work, and it does not work, it fails to work because they are not using that energy in accordance with its own nature. A gasoline engine will never run on water, because it is not the nature of steam to explode when a spark touches it.

When for six thousand years, human energy does not work well enough to get from this earth enough food to keep human beings alive, it does not work because men are not using their energy in accordance with the nature of human energy.

Every human being, by his nature, is free; he controls himself. But in the Old World, men believe that some Authority controls them. They cannot make their energy work by any such belief, because the belief is false.

But they do not question the belief, because when they submit to a living Authority's control, and cannot get food, they can always blame that Authority. This is what they have always done. The history of every group of men who ever obeyed a living Authority is a history of revolts against all forms of that Government.

Look at any available records of any people, living anywhere at any time in the whole history of the Old World.

They revolt against their King, and replace him by another King; they revolt against him, and set up another King. In time they revolt against monarchy; they set up another kind of living Authority. For generations or centuries, they revolt and change these rulers; then they revolt against that kind of Authority, and set up another kind.

From Nebuchadnezzar to Hitler, history is one long record of revolts against certain living rulers, and revolt against kinds of living Authority.

When these revolts succeed, they are called revolutions. But they are revolutions only in the sense that a wheel's turning is a revolution. An Old World revolution is only a movement around a motionless center; it never breaks out of the circle. Firm in the center is belief in Authority. No more than the Communist or the National Socialist (Nazi) today, has any Old World revolutionist ever questioned that belief; they all take it for granted that some Authority controls individuals.

They replace the priest by a king, the king by an oligarchy, the oligarchs by a despot, the despot by an aristocracy, the aristocrats by a majority, the majority by a tyrant, the tyrant by oligarchs, the oligarchs by aristocrats, the aristocrats by a king, the king by a parliament, the parliament by a dictator, the dictator by a king, the king by — there's six thousand years of it, in every language.

Every imaginable kind of living Authority has been tried, and is still being tried somewhere on earth now.

All these kinds have been tried, too, in every possible combination; the priest and the king, the king who is the priest, the king who is God, the king and a senate, the king and the senate and a majority, the senate and a tyrant, the tyrant and the aristocrats, a king and a parliament — Try to think of a combination; somewhere it has been tried.

In 1920 the Albanians tried four quarter-kings and aristocrats and a parliament. The Bedouin of Iraq today combine a tyrant and a majority. The Emir has absolute power of life and death; he owns all property, dictates all marriages, makes all treaties and raids and wars; if he makes one decision that the tribe does not approve, his subjects kill him and give another man his job. This works all right, too; except that the Bedouin do not get enough to eat.

Each of these kinds of living Authority, and every one of the combinations, has worked all right, except that its subjects did not get enough to eat.

Meanwhile, the thinkers from Plato to Spengler have profoundly considered the question, What Authority controls human beings? Every one of them has answered precisely that question.

Plato was a philosopher. He reasoned that the natural Authority is philosophers. He worked out in monstrous detail an ideal system, a totalitarian State (which he called a Republic) in which every human impulse is absolutely controlled by a few philosophers.

Spengler returns to the intangible Authority. He says the Authority is Civilization.

He explains that a Civilization springs (is born? or hatched?) from a changeless, formless, human protoplasm which clings to the surface of the earth, and plows and sows and reaps; this mass is The Eternal Peasant.

Each Civilization grows up, from infancy to youth to maturity. As an adult, it is Greece, or Rome, or England. Then it grows old and has cancer. The cancer appears as a small, unnoticed city; it grows, it becomes a large city, then a Metropolis. At this stage it is too far advanced for surgery; swiftly it swells into a Megapolis, and kills the Civilization.

The helpless human cells in the dying Civilization grow weak, and weaker, losing energy and courage and even desires. The Civilization dies, and they decay into the formless mass, The Eternal Peasant. From this mass another Civilization will spring, to grow up, to grow old, and to die of Megapolis.

This is brilliant and scholarly Old World thinking, now, at this moment. This view of human life is supported by an erudite analysis of all past history, and by a host of Spengler's intellectual followers.

Of course, any American who is not an intellectual knows that this world is not inhabited by gigantic, invisible creatures called Civilizations. He knows that ordinary men and women, using their energies, make a Civilization and keep on making it, every day, every hour, and that nothing but their constant, individual efforts can make a civilization and keep it existing.

I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does not control me. It cannot even make me read Spengler, if I'd rather read a pulp magazine.

Yet on such reasoning as Spengler's, men have tried to act from the beginning of recorded time. On such reasoning, most of the inhabitants of this earth are trying to act now. They do not question their infantile belief that some Authority controls all human beings (except, perhaps, themselves).

Egyptians obeyed the Pharaohs, their living Gods; now the Japanese obey their Mikado. Alexander the Great was a military despot; so was Napoleon; so is Hitler. Twenty-seven hundred years ago, Lycurgus established a commune; twenty years ago Lenin was trying to establish a commune. Nebuchadnezzar was an absolute monarch; so was Louis XV when he governed this country from Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico. Genghis Khan was a tyrant; and what is General Franco?

From time immemorial, and still over most of this earth today, men have never ceased trying to find the Authority that controls human energy. Whether you look at Pharaoh's subjects, obeying a living God, or at Athenian Greeks obeying a majority, you see the same result: people did not get enough to eat.

Egyptians built the pyramids, and sold their children because they could not feed them. Athenians built the Parthenon, and went to their democratic elections through a thin sound of wailing from the pottery jars on their street corners, where babies were dying. Kind friends quickly put the newborn in a jar and set it in a public place, and came back again and again to listen, hoping that before the baby died someone might take her who could afford to feed a child.

If men and women do not want to live like that, then this is a fact: human energy does not work as human beings want it to work, under any kind of Authority that men are able to imagine or devise.

Here is a sketch of a grain-mill and bakery, in the grandeur that was Rome two thousand years ago:

"What a poor sort of slaves were there; some had their skin bruised all over black and blue; some had their backs striped with lashes and were covered rather than clothed with torn rags; some had their members only hidden by a narrow cloth; all were such ragged clouts that you might perceive through them all their naked bodies; some were marked and burned in the forehead with hot irons; some could scarcely see, their eyes and faces were so dim and black with smoke, their eyelids all cankered with the darkness of that reeking place, half blind and sprinkled black and white with dirty flour."[1] 

Here are the English, just before Columbus sailed:

"The houses in what were called cities were built of stones put together without mortar; the roofs were often of turf. The cottages had no other floor than a dried and stiffened bull's hide. In Scotland the peasantry lived on the coarsest food, often on the bark of trees. Bread was accounted a rare delicacy. Over the border in England it was a little better. (Aeneas Sylvius) had bread and wine. The English women gratified their curiosity by breaking the bread into fragments and handing it to one another to smell and giggle at. The cottages were constructed of stakes driven into the ground, interwoven with wattles and covered with flakes of bark or the boughs of trees. The lot of the lower, the laboring, classes for many ages had undergone no amelioration; in a political sense, they were only animals valuable for what their work could produce. They were expected to manifest loyalty to the King and obedience to The Church. There was no career open to them, except to the grave."[2] 

Here are Americans, seven years after this Republic was established.

"Women and children in the month of December traveling a wilderness through ice and snow, passing over large rivers and creeks, without shoes or stocking and hardly as many rags as cover their nakedness, without money or any other provision except what the wilderness affords. Hundreds traveling hundreds of miles, they knew not why nor whither, except it's to Kentucky."[3] 

The snow was two feet deep, for naked legs to wade. Moses Austin, one of the richest men of Baltimore, had lost everything in the crash of the bull-market in western lands. He took refuge one night with twenty of these travelers in a cabin so small that they slept piled upon each other on the earth floor.

They were trying to reach a place where they could live. There were no jobs in the East. The poor had no work, no food; they hoped to get land in the West. But speculators owned every foot of western land; the Henderson Land Company owned Kentucky, and would sell land for $2.50 an acre, when, if there had been jobs, wages were 25 cents for a twelve-hour day.

So much for progress in two thousand years. And why consider such a short time? Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, people lived in caves in France and Spain. People are still living in caves in France and in the Spanish Pyrenees. The cliffs of Chinchilla have always been inhabited. The pottery workers at Coria live in holes in the banks of the Guadalquivir, without windows or floors. In Italy, and in Greece, and in many places in France, human beings are still living underground.

When American Red Cross workers went into the Balkans after the first World War, they found families living in a clay bank in Montenegro's largest city. They were horrified. So was I. I wrote a piece about those homeless victims of war that should have wrung dollars from the stoniest American pocketbook. Only, before I finished it, I went back with an interpreter to give some first aid to those miserable refugees. My sympathetic questions bewildered them. They were living as they always had lived, in their ancestral homes.

I should not have been surprised. Sixty-five years ago my own mother was living in a creek-bank in Minnesota, and it was not necessary then to say that her father was an upstanding, self-respecting, leading citizen of the community. Living underground was nothing unusual; less than sixty years ago, American families were living in dugouts all over the prairie States.

The Planned Economies

Since history began, all the people of the Old World have always lived in what is now called "a planned economy."

When anyone says, "a planned economy," he means, a control of the human energy used in producing and distributing material goods, by an Authority consisting of a few men, and according to a plan made by those men — and enforced by the police.

Americans who have not lived in other countries can only imagine a planned economy, for they are used to living in an economy that individuals plan and control. Whenever an American decides how to earn or how to spend any money, or whether to drive his car or walk, or to get a job or go to college, or to plant corn or alfalfa, or to rent a house or build or buy one, he is planning and controlling the American economy.

One result of this individual planning and control is an enormous waste of things. No one can estimate its colossal sum, for normally a hundred million persons are adding to it every day, every hour.

An average American working man's garbage can would nourish bountifully any European lower-middle-class family. In every American city's slums, every morning before the garbage wagons come, immigrants stunned by this waste are picking over the contents of garbage cans, salvaging metal, paper, bones, fat, to sell to dealers. And Americans shudder to hear that human beings get their living from garbage cans.

In New York City's slums during the dreadful 1930's, when most of the people in the tenements were living on relief, the little neighborhood bakers burned in the gutters every evening the loaves of that morning's bread which they had not sold that day. For in America everyone eats fresh bread. Americans normally throw away every year an estimated hundred thousand tons of good white flour, in pies' lower crusts which they do not eat. Normally every month they throw away twenty thousand tons of white sugar, in the bottoms of coffee cups; they do not bother to stir sugar into coffee.

Every year they throw away 2,500,000 motor cars, not because the cars no longer run, but because new cars run better. Along the highways clean across this continent the old cars lie rotting away, fortunes in metal and leather and cloth. Europeans have been saying bitterly, "In America, the blind beggar rides in a Cadillac, guided by a faithful little Ford on a string."

I knew a mechanic who was out of work and broke in the worst of the depression, with a family to support. He picked up from the dumps in Wyoming enough sound structural iron and good steel cables to build a suspension bridge across Snake river, a bridge that the county could not afford to build at the estimated public cost of $50,000. He and his nine-year-old son built it, using a dragline-rig that he had made entirely from junk. It more than satisfied county inspection. The farmers who needed the bridge gladly paid $2,500 for it, and my friend, after paying for cement and gasoline, cleared about $2,000 for his labor. He plans American economy. Americans do.

During that depression, ten or twelve million Americans lost their jobs. Three or four million were on public relief. The others went on planning American economy and supported themselves and those on relief.

There is no waste of material things in other countries. In France, every cigarette stub in a gutter has always been carefully gathered up, and the tobacco from it is put into new cigarettes. The Government has a monopoly of the processing and sale of tobacco in France.

In Italy, where the climate, the soil, and the people are the same as in California's Napa valley, during the recent Armistice a horde of fierce-eyed children pounced upon every cigarette stub, tin-foil package, orange peeling, or a horse's warm droppings. A quick snatcher might salvage enough in a day to exchange for a hunk of bread.

In the Balkans it is always a sin to let a crumb of cornbread fall. A peasant quickly picks it up from the earthen floor and asks God's pardon for such waste before he eats the crumb.

In the Middle East, the salt is salty earth; to leach out white salt would waste some saltiness. The Old World does not waste an atom of anything. It never has.

The billions of men and women who have lived and died young during all the centuries of Old World history, have always lived in a "planned economy." A planned economy does not waste any material thing. It wastes time, and human energy, and human life.

In communism, the men who establish the commune plan its economy. They can plan it only on the level of the living conditions that have already been created in that place at that time. (In 1900, no one could have planned a radio network.)

They always establish economic equality. To do this, they must plan an economy in which "every individual has his share of provisions and business set out." Therefore, no man can be permitted to live after his own fancy; that would not be communism, it would be individualism.

So no one living in communism can use his energy in a new way. Everyone in the commune must govern his acts in obedience to the Authority that decrees his share of business and provisions.

As long as he believes that this intangible Authority — the Public Good, the Will of the Masses, the Proletarian State, the Law of Lek — does and should control him, he cannot even assert his own will against it.

If he does assert his own desire to change living conditions — if, like King Agis IV, he tries to introduce money; or, like the woman of the Dukhagin, to have one whole hovel to himself, when the commune was not planned on any such high standard of living; or if in Amana, Iowa, in 1900 he had wanted to invent a motor car, or in 1940 to buy one — he cannot do this unless he shakes his comrades' faith in the controlling Authority. And this faith is all that keeps the commune in existence. If he succeeds in using his energy to change living conditions, he destroys the commune because he destroys that faith.

This is the history of scores of communes established in these States.

It is not true to say that communism maintains a low standard of living. Actually there is no standard of living. There cannot be one, because human energy creates all economic conditions in the human world, and creates them continuously in Time.

This planet gives nobody any food, clothing, or shelter. A person is fed or not fed, housed or not housed, clothed or not clothed. But the quality of any food, clothing, or man-made shelter cannot be known at any time in any absolute terms.

George Washington never heard of calories or vitamins; he lived on meats and starches through every winter; he never saw a glass of orange juice; his diet was so deficient that he lost his hair and teeth at an early age. His clothes were uncomfortable and unhygienic. He traveled on foot, on horseback, or in a springless carriage. His house had no toilet or bathtub, no furnace or eating stove, no light but candles. What was his standard of living?

It was so high that forty years ago not one American in ten thousand aspired to it.

Only an Old World mind can think in terms of a definite standard of living. Such ideas come from the ancient pagan faith that this universe is static, changeless and limited. A realist now thinks in terms of dynamic, creative energy, and of human energies working to create an unknowable future.

So it cannot be said that a communist economy is one of scarcity. If human energies are working effectively outside a commune, as they have been working outside the communes in these States, then in contrast, the communist standard of living seems to be low. This contrast causes discontent inside the commune.

But in any catastrophe, such as war or drought or economic shock, which temporarily disrupts a free economy, the communist economy will appear, in contrast, to be one of abundance. This contrast causes envy of the happy communists.

I well remember the incredible abundance of food in the Russian Dukhaber commune in Kansas — or was it southern Nebraska? — during the depression of the 1890s, when I and my parents were traveling among the hundreds of thousands of refugees, walking or riding in covered wagons along all America's dusty or muddy roads, looking for work and food. I can see yet those sleek, unmortgaged cows, those brimming pails of milk, those jars of butter in the spring-house, and the smiling Russian woman with her hair in golden braids, who spoke no known language, but opened the front of her blue blouse and took from next her skin a slab of cold biscuits. That was abundance to most Americans fifty years ago.

But all that can be said accurately about a communist economy is that it is static. At whatever level of living conditions a commune is established, at that level the living conditions remain as long as the commune lasts.

The reason for this historic fact is that nothing but a change in the ways of using human energy productively can change living conditions.

Since individuals actually control human energy, any change in its uses can come only from an individual's efforts, experiments, attempts to create things that do not yet exist. Most of these efforts inevitably fail, causing loss and waste.

Communism prevents such waste by preventing individual initiative in using human energy. This also prevents economic progress.[4] 

Men have improved their living conditions in the Old World whenever they believed that living rulers were the controlling Authority.

Whenever they believed this, human energy worked spasmodically, in jerks, so to speak.

Take any few hundred years of Old World experience, outside the communes, and you see a succession of convulsive efforts and collapses, as if a living thing were roped down and struggling.

This is precisely what was happening. Human energy could not get to work at its natural job of providing for human needs, because whenever men began to develop farming and crafts and trade, the Government stopped them.

They believed that the Emperor was God, or the King was Divine, but he wasn't. Men in Government have no more power to control others than any man has. What they have is the use of force — command of the police and the army. Government, The State, is always a use of force, permitted by the general consent of the governed.

If this fact is not self-evident to you, talk to Americans who learned from experience what Government is. In nearly every American community there are men who lived in this country, somewhere between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast, with no Government whatever. They lived in anarchy, and every man carried a gun.

He had to carry a gun, because there was no Government. Government, as Jefferson said, is a necessary evil. It is evil because it is a use of force, and force has no morality and no moral effect. It is necessary because — to date, and perhaps forever — a few men stupidly use force to injure others, and nothing but force will stop them.

When there was no Government, every man had to be able to defend himself, by force. He seldom shot anybody; the need for force is actually very little. But he had to carry a gun and be able to use it, on the off-chance that he might have to shoot it out with a Bad Man.

This state of affairs is a nuisance. Men do not want to lug guns around; they want to get on with their natural job, building towns, raising cattle, mining, drilling oil wells. To get rid of their guns, they had to get rid of the Bad Men. So they called themselves a vigilance committee, went after the Bad Man, and strung him up.

They did this clean across the country, from the Yadkin and the Mohawk to the Rio Grande and the Golden Gate. The invariable result was that the vigilance committee went bad.

This happened, because men recognize the brotherhood of man. Murder is everywhere abhorred.

So when a man had helped to kill another, disarmed and defenseless even though bad, he felt about his action, later, in one of two ways. He hated to remember it, he did not want to repeat it, he figured there was no need to do it again, and he dropped out of the vigilance committee. Or, having once broken the intangible bond of kinship that protects human life on this earth, he became at heart a killer.

The vigilance committee (it had scores, of local names, the Bald Knobbers, the Sand-lotters) always began as a group of men who used force to stop robbers and murderers. It always became a group of men who robbed, and murdered.

Only a still stronger force could stop them. So the peaceful men organized Government.

They chose one of their number and said to him, in effect, "We'll help you dispose of that gang, and after that, you attend to any Bad Man that shows up. One man can handle that job, if he gives his whole time to it, and you're elected. You carry the gun from now on, Sheriff. And you, Judge, call on twelve of us to decide what the Sheriff ought to do with any Bad Man he catches. Now we've got a Government; we can get our work done without any more interference."

This is the essential element of all Government: force, used with general consent.

In any civilization, the use of force is the whole difference between Government and any other organized group of men. The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government.

Without the use of force, men direct the marvelous organized efficiency of the circus, loading, unloading, transporting and parading hundreds of people and animals, establishing and demolishing a tent-city on a schedule of minutes. One man directs all these intricate activities, by general consent. Anyone who doesn't consent can quit.

Without the use of force, men control the almost infinite complexities of radio, networks of human and other energies encircling the earth and working twenty-four hours a day on a schedule of seconds. Directors control it by the consent of thousands of men all over the earth. If a man in the Ural mountains, in the Sahara desert, in Australia, doesn't want to be at the mike when a man in New York wants him to be there, he can cut bait and go fishing. The only penalty is that if he quits, he has quit.

A traffic cop directs traffic by general consent, too. But he is Government; he has the use of force. When the traffic cop moves his thumb, a driver pulls to the curb. If he does not, he will eventually be stopped by force. He shows up in court when he is told to be there, too, (unless he has a pull at City Hall and uses it); if he does not, policemen will take him there, by force if necessary. He pays his fine, and with no back talk, or he will be put in jail by as much force as is needed to put him there.

A club member pays his dues because he wants to. If he does not want to, he does not pay them, and he is no longer a member of the club.

A citizen (or, in the Old World, a subject) pays taxes because he wants to pay them. If he does not want to, he will pay them anyway, because Government is a group of men who have the use of force. They will take his property or his wages, by force, to pay the taxes they assess upon him. If he tries to lie out of paying, and they find it out, they will put him in jail, by force.

"And serve him right!" all the willing tax-payers will say, for Government is a group of men who have the use of force by general consent. Whenever, in all history, they have lost that consent, their subjects have thrown them out of Government and have given the use of force to another group of men. Government always derives its power (to use force) from the consent of the governed.

But a use of force is not control. No living ruler has ever actually controlled his subjects. There is no superhuman power in Government; men in Government have no natural nor Divine superiority to any other man. And no man can control another. No possible use of force can compel any individual to act. A use of force upon him can only hinder, restrict, or stop his acting.

In actual fact, consent to Government is consent to a use of force to hinder, restrain, or stop individuals and minorities who act in ways that a majority does not approve or does not act to defend. Stop, thief!

A "planned economy" is believed to be a Government's control of the productive uses of human energy. It is believed that the men in Government can control, for the general good, the men who produce and distribute material goods.

In thousands of years, they have never been able to do it.

The actual fact is that a "planned economy" is an absolute monopoly of agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce, held by men in Government and maintained — so far as possible — by police and military force.

Historically, this monopoly is always a use of force to hinder, restrict, or stop the productive uses of human energy.

Its first effect is to prevent the use of human energy in new methods of production, or in producing new things. That is, it prevents economic progress.

The reason is that Government, by its nature, cannot permit a competitor within the field of its activities. Everyone knows that Government is a monopoly of the use of force; it cannot permit individuals to use force against each other, or against the Government, nor can it permit another Government to use force inside its frontiers; if it does, it ceases to be Government.

In the same way, a Government which is, for instance, a monopoly of the production, processing and sale of tobacco (as the French government was) cannot permit a rival tobacco company to compete with it; if it does, it ceases to be Government.

When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it cannot permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it cannot permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.[5] 

Men in Government who imagine that they are controlling a planned economy must prevent economic progress — as, in the past, they have always done. For economic progress is a change in the use of men's productive energy. Only individuals who act against the majority opinion of their time will try to make such a change. And if they are not stopped, they destroy the existing (and majority-approved) Government monopoly.

To know the everlasting majority attitude toward new uses of productive energy, remember that your great-grandfather did not believe that railroads were possible. At the time, a committee of learned men investigating the question for the British Government, reported that railroads were not possible, for the reason that the proposed speed of fifteen miles an hour would kill any human being; the human body could not endure such a pressure of air.

Remember what sensible men thought of Alexander Graham Bell's insisting that a wire could carry a human voice. Remember that ships could not be made of iron because iron does not float. Recall that the horseless carriage could never be more than a rich man's toy, not only because it cost at least five thousand dollars, but also because it ran only on macadam and therefore could never leave the cities. Or, what do you think of the experimenters in New Mexico who are working on rocket-ships to carry men from planet to planet? How much of your own money will you invest in a rocket-line from here to Mars? No majority will ever take up arms against their Government to defend such men as these.

Anyone who is running a going concern believes in it; he has also a selfish interest in it. The owners of river steamboats would never have encouraged the building of railroads. And when men in Government have a monopoly, they have the use of force (backed by majority opinion) to prevent anyone from attacking their monopoly.

A planned economy, therefore, is a use of force to prevent the natural use of human energy. This explains the historic fact, at first surprising, that in all history the earnest, sincere, hardworking ruler has done the most harm to his own people.

Old World Government has always been (supposed to be) an Authority controlling a planned economy. Actually it is a use of force to prevent material progress. The lazy, selfish, dissolute ruler neglects that job. Caligula, for instance, the worst of Roman Emperors, merely wasted goods in extravagant living and enjoyed torturing a few hundreds of his helpless subjects. People always get along comparatively well under a ruler like that.

It was sober, ascetic, conscientious Augustus Caesar who laid the firm foundations of the misery in which all Europeans lived for generations. He began to establish a planned world-economy, the famous Roman Peace that the Roman legions gave the whole world's people by conquering them. (Just such a peace as Hitler, and some of his enemies, are planning now.)

That Roman Peace was designed to last forever. When Diocletian perfected it, its economy was so thoroughly planned and so well administered that farmers could no longer farm nor workers work, and Government took care of them on the relief that taxes provided, until the increasing taxes pushed so many farmers and workers onto tax-supported relief that there was not enough productive energy left to pay the taxes, and the Roman empire with its world peace collapsed into the Dark Ages.

Or consider the planned economies in this country two hundred years ago. Compare the Kings of France and Spain with the rulers of England.

That little half-an-island was blessed for centuries with some of the worst rulers that ever wore a crown. If King John, for instance, had been half the King that Henry the Second was, there never could have been a Magna Carta.

The only truly able Tudor was Elizabeth, and her father had left England in such an uncontrolled state that she had to use all her energy and wit merely to stay on her throne.

Never was a realm so little governed as Elizabeth's. She built up the British navy by doing nothing for it. She gave her sea-captains orders to do as they pleased, on their own responsibility and at their own cost; she would not even pay for the powder and lead with which they defended England against the Spanish armada. She never had a plan, except to wait and see what happened. With great firmness of character, she always decided to decide nothing today. By this highly intelligent means, she let her subjects found the British empire.

After her came the Stuarts. A charming, careless, self-indulgent breed of Divine Right Kings, the poodle dogs of their species, with not a moral nor the slightest sense of responsibility under their curly wigs.

They governed so negligently that under their rule the very butchers and bakers and candlestick makers got up enough energy to chuck them off their throne, and enough independence of mind to behead one of them, Divine though he was supposed to be, and to make an ex-brewer the ruler of England.

Even after such a lesson, the Stuarts were so lazy that you find Charles the Second giving his Parliament this negligent order, "I pray you devise any good short bills that may improve the industry of the nation."[6]  That was all.

This is no way to plan and control a national economy. While the King was uttering such useless words, his police were so out-numbered and terrified that it was no longer necessary to bribe them, and British commerce was thriving under their very noses. So many thousands of smugglers were exporting British wool from every port and cove that someone defined the island as a piece of land entirely surrounded by smugglers.[7] 

Yet when the prospering British wool growers expanded production so rapidly that not even the innumerable smugglers could handle all their wool, Charles offered only one little remedy for overproduction: a decree that no corpse could be buried in England that was not wrapped in woolen cloth. This measure was enforced. But ghouls dug up the corpses to steal the cloth, which, through bootlegging, finally covered the nakedness of London's pantless workingmen.

The badly governed English at last revolted against the Stuarts, at the same time putting into English law a grant of some liberties that they had been lawlessly taking. Then they imported the best of rulers, the German line that is still on the throne. The Germans have always been the most thorough rulers and most submissive subjects in modern Europe. But English luck continued; the first two German Kings of England paid no attention to their job and did not even bother to learn English.

The third George was as austere as Augustus Caesar. So long as he was sane, he never for a moment forgot his duty. He toiled from candlelight to candlelight to prepare himself for governing, and as King he continued his ceaseless labor. He curbed English industry and commerce by more than two thousand new regulations.

But his subjects simply turned into grafters and smugglers and went right on expanding British commerce. In England itself, King George could not keep his subjects from getting bootlegged food, and (except the Canadians) his American subjects got away entirely. While they were doing it, the very London newspapers had the unprecedented audacity to print the discussions in Parliament.[8] 

The rulers on the Continent were much more efficient. Production and commerce were so well controlled in the Germanies that they hardly existed. Obedience to Authority was the German way of life. The Landgrave of Hanou and Hesse had his agents round up 3,500,000 thalers' worth of his peasants and sold them like sheep to King George. And the Hessian peasants, broken hearted, obediently came to the unknown other side of the world and obediently killed Americans, without knowing or asking why, simply believing that they could do nothing else.

Meanwhile in France the planned economy was thoroughly planned and enforced:

In every quarter, and at every moment, the hand of Government was felt. Duties on importation, and on exportation; bounties to raise up a losing trade, and taxes to pull down a remunerative one; this branch of industry forbidden, and that branch of industry encouraged; one article of commerce must not be grown because it was grown in the colonies, another article might be grown and bought, but not sold again, while a third article might be bought and sold, but not leave the country.

Then, too, we find laws to regulate wages; laws to regulate prices; laws to regulate the interest of money; customhouse arrangements of the most vexatious kind, aided by a complicated scheme which was very well called the sliding scale — a scheme of such perverse ingenuity that duties varied on the same article, and no man could calculate beforehand what he would have to pay.

To this uncertainty, itself the bane of all commerce, there was added a severity of exaction, felt by every class of producers and consumers. The tolls were so onerous, as often to double and quadruple the cost of production. A system was organized, and strictly enforced, of interference with markets, interference with manufacturies, interference with machinery, interference even with shops.

The ports swarmed with tide-waiters, whose sole business was to inspect nearly every process of domestic industry, to peer into every package, and tax every article; while, that absurdity might be carried to its extreme height, a large part of all this was by way of protection; that is to say, the money was avowedly raised, and the inconveniences suffered, not for the use of Government, but for the benefit of the people. In other words,' the industrious were robbed, in order that industry might thrive.

Indeed, the extent to which the governing classes have interfered, and the mischiefs which that interference has produced, are so remarkable as to make thoughtful minds wonder how civilization could advance in the face of such repeated obstacles. In some of the European countries the obstacles have, in fact, proved insuperable, and the national progress is thereby stopped.

Even in England, where [Government has] for some centuries been less powerful than elsewhere; there has been inflicted an amount of evil which, though much smaller than that incurred in other countries, is sufficiently serious to form a melancholy chapter in the history of the human mind.

…Thus, to take only such conspicuous facts as do not admit of controversy, it is certain that all the most important interests have been grievously damaged by the attempts of legislatures to aid them…. Instead of leaving industry to take its own course, it has been troubled by an interminable series of regulations, all intended for its good, and all inflicting serious harm.

Such are some of the benefits which European trade owes to the paternal care of European legislatures…. The first inevitable consequence was that in every part of Europe there arose numerous and powerful bands of smugglers, who lived by disobeying the laws. These men, desperate from fear of punishment, spread drunkenness, theft, and dissoluteness, coarse and swinish debaucheries, which were the natural habits of so vagrant and lawless a life.[9] 

Indeed, nothing but smuggling kept the poor from starving to death under that Government monopoly, benevolently planned for their good.[10] 

Weekly in the market places the captured smugglers were mercifully hanged for minor crimes of selling food, and for larger commercial activities they were burned alive or killed more slowly by the more agonizing torture of breaking on the wheel.[11] 

Torture and death could not stop smuggling, because human beings must live. The use of force in an attempt to control the natural uses of human energy always hinders, restricts and hampers those natural uses, but it cannot entirely stop them. Smuggling, graft, and piracy have always been part of history until this last century, because they are necessary protection of human life against the monopoly protected by force which is a "planned economy." Human life will survive on this earth in spite of hell and high water.

What the planned economies did, of course, was to prevent the development of civilization.

Whatever moral and spiritual values a man may develop during his lifetime, whatever heights of philosophy, ethics, art, he may achieve, depend first of all upon his remaining alive. The first necessities are food, clothing, and shelter from weather. The Old World remained brutal, bloody, inhumane and indecent for six thousand years, because never in all that time did men escape from planned economies long enough to establish a reliable food supply.

Every time they almost did it — as they did, during the upheavals and disorganization of Government in fights between groups for the governing power, which are called "the rise of" Egypt or Persia or Greece or Rome or France or Spain — they ended by establishing a firm, good Government, an Authority supposed to control them. This Government then enforced a planned economy with an increasing firmness, restricting the natural use of their energies until they could no longer get enough to eat nor support their Government. Then you see "the fall of" Egypt or Persia or Greece or Rome or Spain or France.

That is the history of planned economy for thousands of years.

The problem of human life on this earth is the problem of finding the method of applying combined human energies to this earth to get from it the necessities of human life.

This problem has never been solved by assuming that an Authority controls individuals. To the degree that men in Government have assumed this authority and responsibility, and have used their actual police force in attempting to control the productive uses of human energy, to that degree the energy has failed to work.

For instance: When the French weavers believed that Louis XIV controlled weaving, there was one whole season when they did not move a shuttle. They were waiting for the King to say how many threads of warp and of woof they might put into each inch of each kind of cloth. True, if they had not waited they would have lost their looms and perhaps their heads, for Government is a use of force. But it is a use of force that depends upon the consent of the governed. If the French people had not believed that the King should and did control weaving, they would not have been so ragged and cold that winter.

Another instance: More than two hundred years ago, the French in Missouri were producing wines that competed in France with the wines of Bordeaux. The Bordeaux vintners set up a howl to the King, for protection. He protected them, by prohibiting the exportation of wine from Missouri.

Notice that everyone, including the Missourians, believed that the King was controlling the production of wine. He was doing nothing of the kind; he couldn't. Human energy produces wine, and individuals control human energy. Louis XIV was using the force that is Government, and force cannot control human energy; it can only stop the use of human energy.

Missourians stopped producing more wine than they drank. If they had not stopped, they might have wrecked the vintners of Bordeaux. Certainly they would have planted more grapes, produced more wine, lowered the price of wine. They would have needed more casks, more boats, more settlers. America might be France today.

The King was encouraging settlements, to hold America for France. He was taking every care of the settlers. Still, there are two facts: They planted no more grapes. The settlements grew very slowly.

Here is another incident: In the spring of 1789, Moses Austin, the first American west of the Mississippi, applied to the Governor in New Orleans for permission to put millstones in a mill to be built at Mine a Breton in Missouri. He had the millstones there, and his request was mere routine, for Don Moses Austin was so important to New Spain that the King had given him one square league of rich mining land.

Six months later, he set his foreman to finishing the mill, while he rode to St.