The Secret Knowledge

and righteous feelings.

Government is an organic cultural organism. It lives by growing, and it grows by accretion. It will arrogate to itself all the power it can by the apparent mechanism of legislation and the less apparent but more virulent operation of bureaucratic growth, by usage, and precedent.

The Constitution reserves to the Congress the power to declare war. But Roosevelt declared war on Japan and asked the Congress to affirm that this state of war existed. The act was reasonable and defensible as a pro-forma inversion of the usual process. But ever since Korea and Vietnam and the War Powers Act and so on, the President has achieved the de facto power to declare war, enshrined not in law but in custom.

The Written Law says Congress has the power, but the Unwritten Law, by which the written law is understood, is that such power has become the Executive’s. But, defenders might say, the President may declare, not a “war” but a “police action,” or a “widening of the sphere of defense,” under such and such conditions and various new stipulations. Such an elaboration of detail may stem from a desire for Justice, or from a desire to protect the “spirit” of the Constitution, but it, by demanding an accompanying elaboration of oversight and bureaucracy, merely exacerbates the problem it pretends to address, for it entrenches a new, bigger, more powerful class of bureaucrats, paid by the State to deal magically with the issue of when it is acceptable for a President to declare a war by simply calling it something else (the answer, now, “always”); to enforce new rules, which is to say, to meddle and obstruct the possibility of simple rules of human interaction (e.g. “The Congress shall have the power to declare war”).

The Liberal state, in the worthy desire to exorcise greed, poverty, and unhappiness, has given birth to a radical view of the world: that it is the responsibility of the State to protect anyone who may claim to be powerless. But what check is upon these champions? And what inducement do they possess to refrain, since to refrain is to diminish their power and, so, their livelihoods? Is it not evident that to be accused before the bureaucrats of OSHA, Equal Opportunity Commission, FDA, Consumer Safety Board, and so on, is to be found guilty, for the organization’s first and only responsibility is to grow, and, in contrast to the free market, it is not the populace, but the government which characterizes failure and success, and that all government programs must not only expand after success, but expand after failure, in order “to bring about eventual success.” Note that all this hocus-pocus is taking place with the money actually earned by hardworking individuals.

We have abundant natural resources. But if there were a system in which there was no waste, we would all be wearing the same clothes, for our clothes would be chosen for us on the basis of the theory of maximum conservation of resources. As would our cars. But suppose someone wanted a different car. Could he alter it? With what resources, if the State had decided that he had “all that he needed”? But suppose he foresaw a way to make his car even more efficient. Could he experiment on it? Again, using what resources of time or energy? But perhaps as a Hobby. But what if his Hobby required more energy or time than that deemed useful by the State? ³⁶ Could he stint himself of sleep and food? Why should he, if his eventual invention were to be taken by the State—appropriated for the Good of All? And if his subsequent fatigue robbed the State of his exertion in those activities it deemed more useful?

A fixation on natural resources blinds one to the worth of human resources: We live in and are designed to exploit (which is another word for “use”) the natural world. The Socialist vision constrains human inventiveness and imagination.

Why would the worker on the assembly line come forward with a better idea? Why, if his compensation was always the same, would he even fantasize about it, which is the beginning of all progress?

Socialism is the end of all invention; it is the happy face of slavery. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

—J. S. Mill

14

R100

The controversy of capitalism versus state enterprise has been argued, tested, and fought out in many ways in many countries, but surely the airship venture in England stands as the most curious determination in this matter.

—Nevil Shute, Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer

Nevil Shute was one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century.

He wrote the novels On the Beach, A Town like Alice, No Highway in the Sky, and so on. Many of his books (the above included) were made into very successful films.

By day he was an aircraft designer.

His novels, like those of Dreiser and Trollope, were romantic paeans to those processes the lay populace might presume mundane. Dreiser wrote The Trilogy of Desire, some thousands of pages, on the subject of street railway franchises; Trollope wrote the Palliser series about the romance of Parliament dealing with Irish Home Rule, and decimal coinage. Shute, in the main, wrote about aviation.

Aviation was his day job. He was a very successful designer of aircraft. His company, Airspeed Ltd., designed some of the first commercial air transports in the world. He designed the trainer which was used by the RAF until World War II; Airspeed eventually merged with de Havilland. He was the real thing.

In 1925, Vickers Ltd., for which Shute then worked as chief stress engineer, was commissioned, by the British government, to design a rigid airship (that is, a zeppelin) practicable for transocean and transglobal passenger travel.

But the British government decided to hedge its bets; it awarded the contract to two groups, Shute’s (Vickers), and a governmental group under the auspices of the Air Ministry.

The groups worked independently, but were free to exchange information with each other. Shute’s group (makers of the airship R100) learned that the government’s group (airship R101) was consistently making choices that were heavier, more complex, and, to the eyes of the free-market Vickers group, unnecessary or, indeed, unsafe.

The certainty of the governmental group drove the Vickers group back to their drawing boards, to retest their results, which they again found technically correct. No, the government ship, R101, was, they determined, too heavy, too complex, and unsafe. The various redundancies and compromises resulting from its design as the work of a government committee had rendered it unairworthy. Shute’s group shared its concerns with the government and were told to “go away.”

The R100 made the first east-to-west commercial airship crossing of the Atlantic, with Shute on board. The R101 set off to Karachi, India, carrying Lord Thomson, Secretary of State for Air, and Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation, who were both proponents of the government’s plan. It crashed and burned in France, after three hundred miles of travel, and the British airship program was scrapped.