Factories, warehouses, and fields are still intact and are ready to produce in unlimited quantities, but the urge to go ahead has been paralyzed by a decline in buying power. The existing troubles are man-made, and the remedies must be man-conceived and man-executed.
In the present inadequate economic organization of society, far too much is staked on the unpredictable whims and caprices of the consumer. Changing habits of consumption have destroyed property values and opportunities for employment. The welfare of society has been left to pure chance and accident.
In a word, people generally, in a frightened and hysterical mood, are using everything that they own longer than was their custom before the depression. In the earlier period of prosperity, the American people did not wait until the last possible bit of use had been extracted from every commodity. They replaced old articles with new for reasons of fashion and up-to-dateness. They gave up old homes and old automobiles long before they were worn out, merely because they were obsolete. All business, transportation, and labor had adjusted themselves to the prevailing habits of the American people. Perhaps, prior to the panic, people were too extravagant; if so, they have now gone to the other extreme and have become retrenchment-mad.
People everywhere are today disobeying the law of obsolescence. They are using their old cars, their old tires, their old radios and their old clothing much longer than statisticians had expected on the basis of earlier experience.
The question before the American people is whether they want to risk their future on such continued planless, haphazard, fickle attitudes of owners of ships and shoes and sealing wax.
What the people can afford is very different at a time when the majority are gainfully employed than it is in a period when perhaps ten million are without gainful employment. The job of modern management is to balance production with consumption—to enable one large group, like the factory workers in the cities, to exchange the products of their hours of labor for the output of farmers. The prevailing defeatist assumption that depression and unemployment must continue because we have too much of everything, is the counsel of despair.
Society is suffering untold loss in foregoing the workpower of ten million human beings. The present deadlock is the inevitable result of traveling along blind alleys. Chaos must unavoidably flow from an unplanned economic existence.
In the future, we must not only plan what we shall do, but we should also apply management and planning to undoing the obsolete jobs of the past. This thought constitutes the essence of my plan for ending the depression and for restoring affluence and a better standard of living to the average man.
My proposal would put the entire country on the road to recovery, and eventually restore normal employment conditions and sound prosperity. My suggested remedy would provide a permanent source of income for the Federal Government and would relieve it for all time of the difficulties of balancing its budget.
Briefly stated, the essence of my plan for accomplishing these much-to-be-desired ends is to chart the obsolescence of capital and consumption goods at the time of their production.