|
SALVATION IS NOT FREE
LEMUEL BOULWARE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
JUNE 11, 1949
Every one of you must already be a
pronounced success in your business or
profession—successful in what has long been thought
was the principal, and maybe only, field [or]
activity for which society held you individually
responsible.
But I assume you share my embarrassed
realization that we here—and others like us
everywhere—must not have been doing our whole duty.
What's the evidence [that] we—and too
many other[s] like us—have not been doing this whole
duty?
The evidence is clear. It's the
too—common economic illiteracy among us businessmen,
among our employees and their families and
neighbors, and among the representatives of all of
us in government, in unions, in education, in the
clergy, and elsewhere.
Too many of us just do not understand
how we got this standard of living that's the envy
of the rest of the world.
Too many of us working, and buying,
and voting adults just don't understand the parts
played by the customer, the worker, the manager, as
well as the saver ... that each of these has a
necessary part to play, but not one of them can play
it, or will even try, unless the incentive is there,
unless he thinks he is going to get what's right
from the others for what he does.
The penalty for such economic
ignorance can be—is already—very great in both the
economic and political fields. Our free markets and
our free persons are at stake.
We don't like the proposals for
further greatly enlarged government expenditures now
being urged on the public by a combination of
government and union officials.
The size of taxes—now and proposed—is
bad enough.
But the manner of their collection is
disgracefully worse—is infinitely more ominous for
our whole future as well as for the future of any
free market and any free person—for our taxes are
now being based on political rather than economic
considerations.
We see all this unsound program being
misrepresented, “sold” to the public, if you will—by
the public's own representatives in government and
in unions—as though it were a free service by a
great and wealthy and indulgent government. And we
see our government keep trying to give the
impression to the vast majority of citizens that it
can get the money from somebody else—right while the
costs of the current so—called “free” benefits are
at the very moment being taken directly and
indirectly out of the pockets of the whole
public—from you and me—from all our employees—from
everybody.
The costs are being collected from
everybody in the taxes the government hides in
consumer prices ... in the inflation, from deficit
spending and unsound monetary practices, which also
turn right up in consumer prices . . . in the prices
that are higher than they would be, even under these
circumstances, if it had not become “the thing to
do” to tax unfairly, and otherwise be hostile to,
the income and savings of the very people who would
finance more arm—lengthening equipment and methods
to make bigger real values available in every store.
Despite these real causes, we see the
profits and other supposed inhumanities of
businessmen or their corporations all the while
being blamed for high prices—for supposedly keeping
the worker from getting back more of what he
produces.
There are other things we don't
like—other things that are frightening—in the
public's misinformation and consequent vulnerability
to current economic and political demagoguery.
We all believe, of course, that good
unions are possible and have a useful function they
can perform in the employee and public interest. We
have had ample evidence of how wise government
representatives can promote that free play of
incentives and rewards which brings a higher
standard of living.
But we are horrified at the way
representatives, both in government and in unions,
so frequently say and do things they—as well as
we—know to be economically unsound.
We can hardly believe our eyes when
we see the platforms of our two major parties
incorporating just about the same unsound
economics—just about the same something—for—nothing
promises.
There seems never, never any honest
explanation that all of us pay the bill, and pay it
soon, if not immediately. We've got to learn that—in
government programs as elsewhere—there isn't any
such thing as “a free lunch.” I think we have maybe
got to get something like the Better Business Bureau
after our office holders and politicians—low and
high—in all parties.
If it were not for what we see along
this line over here in America, we would be hard—put
to explain why the British Conservative Party
platform for next year is so shockingly close to
being economically the same as the British Socialist
Labor Party platform.
The plain fact is that most all
politicians in all parties and all lands—no matter
what their private convictions on economic
matters—think that the majority of adults everywhere
are so misinformed that they not only believe
“something—for—nothing” is really possible, but
demand it. They think the public just would not
understand or support them if they spoke and acted
soundly.
Hence so many public leaders openly
espouse and support unsound schemes. For years, from
within our own government has come a persistent
endorsement and following of such unsound and
demagogic ideas—so much so as to be an actual attack
from within on the very free economic and political
system our officials are sworn to defend and
protect. You all may know—as I do—government and
union officials who are appalled, even frightened,
at what they find themselves saying and doing in
order to fit in with public ignorance of economic
facts.
But I suspect our greatest
consternation—our deepest distress of all—is over
the low estate in which we businessmen find
ourselves before our employees and the public.
Here we are—with incredible
achievements to show for our management of the
business side of our wonderful system of freedoms,
incentives, and competition.
We are great physicists, chemists,
engineers. We are phenomenal manufacturers. We have
been fabulous financiers. We are superb in
individual selling and mass marketing.
People like—and respect—the results
of our separate professional skills.
But taken as the whole man of
business, each of us is too likely to be condemned
by a majority of the public as anti-social. We
always seem to be coldly against everything—never
seem to know clearly what are the good objectives we
claim to be seeking—never seem to be willing or able
to speak up warmly and convincingly to prove that
what we are doing is for the common good.
As a result, too many of our
employees and too many of their friends and
representatives—in unions, in government, among
educators and clergy, in the whole public—in other
words too many of our real bosses—not only do not
respect us but also do not like us. They do not
understand or appreciate what we are trying to do.
And let's be frank about it—there are times when it
looks like we don't, either.
Too many people just don't think that
the jobs we provide are what they ought to be. They
don't think that the economic and social
consequences of our activities, and the system back
of our activities, are what they ought to be for the
good of each community and of the nation.
They do not even credit us with good
intentions toward them—with being on their
side—whereas we thoroughly believe that being on
their side is being on the side of what's good for
all.
They even doubt our honesty and
competence in this broader economic and social
field—where they have been led to believe some
magic, some escape from the rules of arithmetic, is
possible.
Hence, our participation is not
sought—or even tolerated—in important public
affairs.
It has become popular, and therefore
politically expedient, to heap injustices upon us,
and even to put limitations on our carrying out what
people want us to do for them.
Yet we are the same people who give
those very folks, who distrust us, the products and
prices and responsible guarantees which they have
proved they trust and like—proved in the hundreds of
millions of individual instances of daily customer
preferences in millions of separate free markets.
We have got to admit that our
business system and our businessmen have produced a
fantastic fairyland of well—being ... especially
when we think of the new burdens we are carrying and
when we think of what is now, or has ever been,
possible anywhere else in the world. But people are
being taught to look right at this and not see it—to
see something different and bad.
How do people all over the world get
this way? Why do they reject businessmen, who have a
fine record of raising the standard of living
through voluntary action inspired by the incentive
to save and to compete? Why do so many choose,
instead, the government planners—skimming off for
state purposes everything above a bare subsistence
standard of living—and with their inevitable
necessity in the end, directly or indirectly, of
having to shut off free choice and free speech in
order that their planning failure will be masked?
This can only be the fault of us
businessmen ourselves. We have been looking right at
this new kind of robber barons who have gotten more
and more successful elsewhere out around the world
during the last thirty years. They always get
themselves cloaked in the mantle of the common man.
But their objective is power—and power direct rather
than through money. Their methods are therefore
political and not commercial.
Businessmen, unthinkingly continuing
to devote themselves purely to the customary
commercial pursuits, where their only skill has
been, have meanwhile in country after country been
gradually weakened and then displaced. Along with
their displacement went freedom—for all the
people—freedom and any hope of human dignity,
plenty, and the good life.
This can only prove that just too
pitifully few businessmen had the alertness to know
when they were pushed beyond the commercial field
into the political arena. And when they did awaken
to their state, too few businessmen seemingly had
the courage, or intelligence, or energy to go about
correcting misinformation and teaching sound
economics.
Yet when most businessmen face
essentially this exact type of spurious emotional
attacks and something-for-nothing appeals in the
commercial field, they have no trouble or the
slightest hesitancy in dealing with them
devastatingly.
We businessmen are bold and
imaginative before commercial competitors. We are
cowardly and silent in public when confronted with
union and other economic and political doctrines
contrary to our beliefs.
Incidentally, a distinguished
professor recently told me that he was beginning to
believe that the missing ingredient in the
businessman's employee relations, community
relations, and public relations is summed up in the
one word “politics”—not party politics, of course,
but private and public political action by managers,
farmers, stockholders, bond holders, insurance
policy holders, savings bank depositors, pensioners,
and any other upstanding citizens with an interest
in keeping the value of money honest, the standard
of living rising, and the freedom of choice, speech,
worship, and movement really free—in other words,
the insistence by citizens on the mastery of sound
economics by themselves and then on sound economic
teaching and practices by their representative in
government, in unions, even in education and the
clergy, as well as in business.
We have got to get just as aroused
and just as active about all kinds of socialists as
we are about the communist brand of socialist. Our
real danger is that, while we are scared to death of
communism, too many of us seemingly haven't even
come to fear socialism at all. The intentions of
communists are, of course, the ultimate in the wrong
direction. But the potentialities for evil of the
socialists—who are careful not to be known as
such—are just out of this world, and simply because
we are not alerted at all.
Fortune sagely points out that “a
democratic government can corrupt an unvigilant
people” because of the failure of “so many of its
citizens to act on or even fully understand two
basic, timeless facts:
1. In the long run the government
can give them only what it takes out of their
pockets, and
2. Sometimes the government may
seem to be doing many of them good when it is only
debauching and corrupting them all.”
A vivid but hard lesson that's right
at the core of what we have got to learn about
representation in government and unions and other
organizations—is that leaders are just not often
leaders any more. They are followers. They do, and
are supposed to do, what the folks back home—or the
people represented—want done, regardless of the
ignorance that prompts those wants.
If we want bad—or even good—leaders
to do what is right economically and politically, we
must see that a majority of us, as citizens at the
grass roots know what is right economically, do what
is accordingly right within the area of our own
economic and political activities, and then get and
stay forcefully articulate—in private and public—in
getting our representatives in government, unions,
and elsewhere to act with economic and political
horse—sense.
Let's keep in mind that communism and
socialism have only recently—and erroneously—come to
be thought of by the public as two different things.
Communism is just a slight variant of socialism, as
were fascism and nazism, and is now the British type
which is just communism a little less brutal, a
little more gentlemanly yet, and in not so much of a
hurry.
Our great problem in this country—and
the world—is to learn the economic fallacies of the
whole socialist theory—and then to act accordingly
to keep people from being fooled and pauperized and
silenced and enslaved, and to keep our great
nation—as we know and love it—from going on the
ash—heap of history.
A really free people can live well
materially and spiritually where there is the
incentive to work, create, compete, save, invest,
and profit.
But there must be either force to
drive men to work. Or there must be incentive to
make men want to work.
It's “the carrot or the stick”—now,
as in all history of man or other animal. And that
applies to each of us right here in this room.
People that start out free—with no
force over them, but also with no incentive—will
starve in any organized society having a subdivision
of effort—any society except in that modern—times
impossible one where each person serves all his own
wants.
Let's watch our British friends to
see what happens in their experiment.
Probably the only thing that can save
British socialism is for us in America to stay
strong enough to keep helping them—for us not to
debilitate ourselves by continuing our drift into
that same socialism. In other words, the recipients
of free drinks in this international barroom of
socialism have got to see that the American
bartender doesn't become a drunk, too.
Meanwhile, what do we have to do to
be saved here? What can management do to promote
sound economic understanding and resulting sound
public action?
We have simply got to learn, and
preach, and practice what's the good alternative to
socialism. And we have to [sic] interpret this to a
majority of adults in a way that is understandable
and credible and attractive.
What we have to do is show the worker
and farmer and other citizen that profitable,
competitive business does more for him now, and
offers the promise of more of the things he wants in
the future, than do any of the unsound substitutes
being put forward.
So what we really have to do is only
just exactly, and faithfully, and every bit as we do
when we encounter any other unfair or dishonest
salesman out with an unsound product trying to
compete for our good customer's favor.
In fact, I'll bet all you honorable
and experienced businessmen here hope for no greater
blessing than that your competitors will show up as
liars and with bad products.
You know that a few—or many—customers
may be fooled for a while.
But you also know that if you keep
your product honest, and if you keep warmly plugging
the truth to those customers, you will keep most of
them and soon get the rest back.
We have become sophisticated in the
product field—we don't expect to get something for
nothing or, as businessmen, to have to offer it.
Millions of man-days of hard and honest selling have
done that for us.
We have become just as sensible and
sophisticated in the field of morals.
A few husbands will fall for the
harlots, but about 99.44 percent of the time the
wife today triumphs over the mistress. That's the
triumph of millions upon millions of character
lessons taught at the mother's knee, or at church,
or in the hard knocks of life.
With triumphs like these—in the very
difficult fields of products and morals—to show what
we can do when we really try, there is just no sense
in our having the slightest hesitancy in taking on
the selling of whatever our study together teaches
us to be the sound, and honest, and good, and richly
rewarding economic program that's really the one for
us all here in America.
Just as in the case of any parents
facing up finally to telling the truth about Santa
Claus, we are quite likely to be worse off in some
quarters before beginning to be better off.
Even if the employee—and his family
and neighbors—feel he has got the best pay, best
working conditions, and best boss in town—if he
feels his boss and company have been literally “born
again,” are on his side, and are really putting
human considerations first—it still isn't enough.
He goes into the grocery or other
store, finds prices that seem outlandishly high. In
a flash, this seems to confirm a lot he has been
told—told by the agents of those very ones who have
been doing the diluting of the money and causing the
high prices while blaming businessmen.
He concludes that the grocer—and his
own boss back at the shop—are the representatives of
a system that is not being operated by people on his
side, but by people who are against him—who are
maybe even exploiting him, as claimed.
His family and neighbors are too
likely to conclude the same. Unfortunately, the
facts will not speak for themselves in this area
anymore than they will in the commercial area. The
facts have got first to be good—but then they have
got to be constantly pointed out and explain and
repeated to him—just as the commercial customer has
to be both initially sold and then kept constantly
reminded.
For us to accomplish this—and have a
favorable climate for our further operations—the
public has got to be helped to understand the
rudiments sound economics, and then the public has
got to have itself and its representatives be guided
by the sound principles of economics so learned.
This is a big and hard job. But we
think it can be done, and that it’s got to be done
if business management—in fact, [i]f our free system
of incentives and competition, is to survive.
But this is no job for one company or
for the employers and other good citizens in a few
communities. It's the job for every businessman
citizen—to go back to school on economics
individually, in small groups, big groups . . . to
learn from simple text books, from organized
courses, from individual discussions with business
associates, in neighboring groups, at the club or
bar, on the train or bus.
Let's learn again that socialism is
just communism in not so much of a hurry—but in
quite a hurry.
Let's appreciate again how silence
and lack of sophistication by us businessmen and
other free enterprisers in the last thirty years
have guaranteed the coming of the things that now
terrify us.
Let's consider the tragedy—and the
peril—in how pitifully few of us in management at
the moment are really competent to do anything about
it have the energy and courage to be even trying!
The current rapid trend has got to be
changed, or we are through with every good thing we
cherish.
And we businessmen have got to do the
job. It will not be done by others we are the only
ones left to do it.
So—let's do it.
Let's here at this moment covenant
together that we ourselves—without waiting for any
others—are now individually going to make the start
... that we are each going to study until we
understand this wonderful system of ours ... that we
are going to find out how to preserve and improve it
rather than let it be damaged or even perish along
with our free market and our free persons ... that
we are going to do our part in seeing that a
majority of citizens understand the economic facts
of life, the proper working of our system toward its
good ends, and the fallacy of all these contrary
something-for-nothing fairy tales ... that we
ourselves are then going to act with economic and
political horse—sense in our daily business and
personal lives, and that we are publicly going to
encourage an increasing majority of citizens to
insist very vocally on their representatives acting
with the same economic and political horse-sense
toward the greatest and surest further attainment of
our material and spiritual needs and desires.
And let us businessmen stop being
Nervous Nellies about this! There is no such thing
as a humiliating defeat in a just cause. And,
anyhow, let's go at this job fearlessly—recognizing
that mightier than armies is the power of a
righteous idea whose time has come.
So let's boldly take—and continue
from there on—the leadership that's expected of
people like us in this patriot's job of standing up,
speaking out, and being counted—no matter who has to
be contradicted!
In The Truth About Boulwarism,
159-67, Lemuel Boulware appends these remarks and
describes them as excerpts from his 1949 Harvard
speech "which may still be significant."
|
