Your pay envelope

by John Richard Meader

Freedom to purchase is impossible unless every possible want is provided for. Perhaps this condition would exist in the Co-operative Commonwealth. Perhaps it wouldn’t!

Let us take another example, John.

Suppose you wanted to build a house. At present you can do this in accordance with any plans that please you. You don’t have to ask anybody’s advice if you don’t want to. But would things be like this under Socialism? You might want to build a bookcase in the centre of the room instead of around the walls. You might have very good reasons for wishing to do this. But do you think it would be a simple matter to convince the committee on carpentering that your plan should be carried out, if they happened to disapprove of your ideas? Under our present system you can get almost any kind of work done if you are willing and able to pay for it. All you have to do is to find the laborer and employ him. Under Socialism, it wouldn’t be a single laborer that would have to be seen, but a committee whose consent would have to be obtained before any laborer could undertake your work.

The Socialists tell us that Socialism will inspire inventors, writers and other mental workers to a degree never before dreamt of.

Is this possible?

An invention to-day stands a fair chance of being put on the market so long as it has the slightest evidence of practicability; somebody can usually be found to furnish the money for the experiments needed to perfect the scheme of the inventor. But how would it be in a Commonwealth where the practicability of an invention and its value as a social factor would have to be determined by a special committee before it could be produced and its merits tested by actual experience? We know how much money has been spent in the experimental work of many inventors. We know, too, that, in the majority of cases, inventions have been perfected in the face of widespread scepticism. Few people believed that the telephone would ever be made of practical value. Even when the telephone had succeeded and become an absolute necessity, the great mass of the people laughed at the idea of wireless telegraphy. Do you think that a committee on inventions would have passed favorably upon such ideas, and would have authorized the necessary appropriations for perfecting them in the face of such strong popular opposition?

Socialists also tell us that freedom is the choicest jewel in our possession; that freedom of press, speech and assemblage are rights which are inherent in human nature and which must be defended, with our lives if need be. But what do we find under Socialism? Could there be any freedom of press when the Socialist State owned every press, when the Socialist State employed every printer, when the Socialist State controlled every sheet of white paper?

Before a printed word could be given to the world, it would have to pass the censorship of the special bureau entrusted with these responsibilities. Such a committee would have to determine whether an author’s work was worth printing or not; and suppose, by any chance, an author or an editor desired to give expression to opinions that did not harmonize perfectly with those of the ruling majority, do you suppose that the State-owned presses would be permitted to run in the publication of such theories?

There is one thing, John, that you can depend upon; and that is that the Socialist scheme makes absolutely no provision for freedom. The Socialists talk as if we were “wage slaves,” but no conditions existing to-day—not excepting the worst—represent such galling servitude as would exist under the despotic bureaucracy that Socialism would develop. It is true that you might be guaranteed against unemployment so long as you were willing to take the kind of work provided for you. It is true that you might exchange your labor checks for the commodities that other workers had produced—so long as you desired to purchase the kind of things that the officials of the Commonwealth wanted you to buy. It is true that you might be permitted to write and speak and teach, so long as you desired to promulgate ideas approved by the majority. Once you begin to think along the lines advocated by the minority, what do you think would happen to you? If a full stomach were all that man required for his happiness, the Co-operative Commonwealth might seem to offer an enviable state of existence. It is because Socialists believe that a full stomach is the highest aim of man, that they fail to recognize the inadequate character of their proposed Commonwealth.

It is an elaborate program that Socialism has planned—a program that provides for free services on every hand, free amusements, free excursions, free transportation, free professional services, etc. Education, of course, will be free, not only the tuition and the books but the clothes the children wear and the victuals they eat. “Will the State be able to carry out this program?” asked Godkin in The Forum (June, 1894). “It cannot give more than it gets; will we be rich enough to pay the extravagant bills of Socialism?” It is assumed by Socialists that the wealth of the State will be unlimited, but on what foundations is this assumption based?