The Secret Knowledge

How often must this experiment be tried?

Israel’s economy wanes under socialism, and burgeons under the free market; West Germany throve, while East Germany, the slave state, lived in starvation until the fall of Communism; Cubans in Miami grow rich, and the prison they risked their lives to flee continues as an eighteenth-century feudal fiefdom. California taxes its flagship movie industry out of the state, and Toronto, Ireland, and the Czech Republic reap the benefits; the United States taxes the auto industry to Japan, the textile industry to China, and so on, and then wonders at the fall of the dollar.

I don’t know anything about the auto industry, but I am a member of another big business which has killed itself.

Anyone working in show business for any time—actually working, that is, writing, acting, designing, lighting, crafting—has said to himself, when the middle managers come on the set: “Why are those fools elected to do that job?”

The affronted, on continued interaction, comes to see that the problem is not with the supposed abilities or personality of the individual bureaucrat; the problem is the existence of the job itself, which is not only unnecessary to but destructive of actual industry.

In the growth of any successful organization, a now-entrenched bureaucracy may work to change its object from production of a product to protection of its (useless) jobs.

It is inevitable that the bureaucrat, awarded his job as a perquisite of superiors who wish to display their power and provide themselves insulation, will work, not primarily, but exclusively to obtain and exercise those same perquisites in his own behalf.

Thus, at the end, Chrysler and GMC were making cars no one wanted for a price that did not repay their manufacture. The car business had been run, both by labor and management, as a sideline of their bureaucracies, each exploiting its own rights (which is to say its position and potential for further exploitation). Who was left designing and producing cars people wanted to buy and drive?

At this point the hag-ridden industry was “rescued” by the only organization in the world less equipped to ensure productivity: the Federal Government.

What does this “rescue” mean? That the decor and the staffing of the boardroom will change. That the tenor of boardroom life will become more austere is inevitable (see the workers’ uniforms adopted by Stalin, Mao, Ho, and so on), but otherwise it will be Business As Usual, which is to say waste (now on an even greater scale), disregard for the consumer, and increased distance from those personally involved with the success of the product offered.

In a rational, which is to say a free-market world, this situation would self-correct: the public would cease to buy a product which no one cared to make attractive, efficient, or affordable, and the business would change or go broke.

The only businesses excepted from this rational progression are those supported by government, and, of course the Government itself, where waste is the end product.

What are we purchasing with our taxes?

What is Big Government but the Executive’s cocaine dream, an activity devoted solely to jockeying for position, in which he may find license for malversation, and may take the company treasury and direct it toward those people who will support his continued incumbency—it is within the law. Its street name is “earmarks,” but it is theft. Of your money and mine.

The problem is, as with the movie business, not with the identity of placeholders, but with the jobs themselves.

The San Fernando Valley is littered with office campuses housing the executives who supposedly “make” the movies. Many of these buildings occupy space which was, formerly, the lot on which actual movies were once made.

Mismanagement (by labor, capital, and our benevolent government) has driven the actual movie business out of California, and, to the largest extent, out of the country.

What would happen to the movie business if these office campuses and their inhabitants were all to disappear tomorrow?

Nothing.

It is not just that a movie studio could be run by one person with a cell phone, in the back of a limo—that is how they are run. The accreted bureaucracy serves the Executive as a Royal Court,³⁷ but, like the Big Government it strives to emulate, it makes nothing but waste. It just exists and grows and grows.

Government is the ultimate bureaucracy, from which has been abstracted not only responsibility for the product, but the product itself.

The price is paid not by the consumer (of what? there is no product) but by Government’s victims—those taxed—and many taxed literally out of existence—by the bureaucrat’s unchecked ability to rape the treasury in buying support for his position, his good ideas, or his reelection.

The difference between the Liberal and the Conservative lies, in the main, in the level of abstraction of thought. The Liberal assumes he differs from his opponent on the identity of the person holding the job, and on the content of that person’s proposals. The Conservative cannot persuade him to see the problem differently: that it is the job itself which must be eliminated. The difference is one not of doctrine, but of philosophy.

The worker on the assembly line, on the movie set, and you and I have the same reaction when the Bureaucrats come slumming by: “If the goddamn Suits would finish their tour, stop nodding wisely, and go away, perhaps I might be able to get the job done.”

I received, from an auction house, a notice of the auction of a Glenn Curtiss 1915 seaplane. It is, I think, one of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen. Its hull is mahogany in a series of gentle steps, allowing it to plane on the water. It is a pusher biplane—its engine mounted behind the pilot and pushing backward. Its wings and tail structure are aluminum. It seats two. It looks as if it were designed by Brancusi; indeed, it was designed by his equal.

The aircraft business, around this time, a mere decade after Kitty Hawk, was largely the domain of producers and designers not far removed (if removed at all) from the workshop garage.

Planes were made (as Nevil Shute observes in Slide Rule) largely from wood, with canvas-covered wings; and it cost little to retool. A fellow with a saw could design and build his own plane, buying