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From International Socialist Review, Vol.20 No.2, Spring 1959, p.34.
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Planned economy is a favorite target of Big Business sharpshooters. Planning on a nationwide scale, they say, would induce so much uniformity in food, clothing, housing, and small but important things that a free people would find it intolerable. And they question the value of leisure for a lower class that wouldn’t know what to do with it. Yet on occasion some of them venture into rather audacious planning of the lives of Americans.
For instance, Lieut. Gen. Clarence R. Huebner, New York State Civilian Defense Commissioner, made public a Five Year Plan last January to put the United States in underground fallout shelters. Even small countries will soon be able to “take out” any other nation with nuclear weapons, and so, he confidently predicted, by 1964 only those Americans brave enough to take a calculated risk will ever see sunshine.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal, not yet ready for a Five Year Plan that would put them permanently in the Hudson Tubes to live “like a mole, or perhaps, a scared rabbit,” considered the prediction to be a way of putting the arm on Congress for more funds.
“Civil Defense officials all over begin to tell us of impending disaster. Unless, naturally, the nation spends billions upon billions of dollars for shelters which Civil Defense officials, equally naturally, will have some sort of jurisdiction over.”
But even this staunch voice of free enterprise and the stock exchange did not come out one hundred per cent against planning. Its idea is to put the same “billions upon billions of dollars” into the “shelter of national strength,” presumably H-bombs and guided missiles.
From which one can conclude that it’s getting more and more difficult to escape planning. The question is simply, which kind do you prefer?
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Last updated on: 2 May 2009