"Free enterprise and the market economy mean WAR; Socialism and planned economy mean PEACE."
"Laski's Imperialism," Detroit Evening Times, December 1945.
The following article was published in the Detroit Evening Times on December 12, 1945.
Laski’s Imperialism
WHILE his British Labor Party is making a start at its task of socializing the United Kingdom, Prof. Harold J. Laski is even now prepared to apply his dogmas to the whole world.
He declared as much at a left-wing forum held in New York City to propagandize the surrender of the atomic bomb secret to Soviet Russia.
Calling for socialism on a “world scale” under an “international government,” Prof. Laski decreed:
“Free enterprise and the market economy mean WAR; Socialism and planned economy mean PEACE.”1
Life magazine published a longer version of Laski’s quote from his lecture in New York City on “The Challenge of the Atomic Bomb,” which is worth reprinting here.2
We have come to the boundaries of the final dividing line between liberalism and socialism….There is no middle way. Free enterprise and the market economy mean war; socialism and planned economy mean peace. All attempts to find a compromise are a Satanic illusion. We must plan our civilization or we must perish.
The Detroit Evening Times article continued:
It is not often that a pundit succeeds in combining in one sentence two errors as vast as these.
* * *
IT IS historically THE REVERSE OF TRUTH that “free enterprise” and “the market economy”—that is, unrestricted invention and unfettered commerce—have been causes of war.
Commerce has always been one of the greatest civilizing agents known and one of the greatest forces for peace.
From the very beginning of recorded time, the arts and sciences have been developed and diffused by commerce.
It was merchants of the Orient who transmitted the arithmetic of the Chaldeans and the alphabet of the Phoenicians to the west.
It was merchants from Athens and Corinth who transplanted the classic Greek culture to Italy and Gaul, and it was Latin merchants and not Latin soldiers who implanted Roman law in the nations of modern Europe.
It was commerce as much as anything else that establish the 13 colonies out of which our own nation grew.
* * *
THERE have been wars aplenty, NOT caused by commerce, but caused by POLITICS of one kind or another and occurring IN SPITE OF COMMERCE.
The whole course of history teaches that, far from “free enterprise” and the “market economy” provoking wars, ward INTERRUPT or DESTROY free enterprise and the markets.
* * *
THE notion is even more ludicrously false that “Socialism and planned economy mean peace.”
Planned economy has been attempted many times—by the Babylonians under Hammurabi and by the Romans under the Gracchi and again under Diocletian, for examples.
But wars did not cease, neither “civil” nor “foreign” wars.
Furthermore, the greatest “experiments” in “Socialism and planned economy” ever made were in Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany—and these enslaved lands, in which “free enterprise” and “the market economy” were obliterated, were THE NATIONS THAT STARTED WORLD WAR II.
* * *
A PLANNED economy did not dissuade Hitler’s National Socialism from ravishing Czecho-Slovakia and overrunning France—and also attacking Communist Russia; nor did Russia’s “planned economy” protect the Baltic republics and Finland.
Prof. Laski cannot have forgotten that World War II really began when Hitler’s “Socialism” and “planned economy” joined forces with Stalin’s “planned economy” and “Socialism” in the fourth partition of Poland.
A large part of the Laski address was as usual a paean of praise to Soviet Russia, where—he said—”the business man” has “ceased to count” and where—he should have said—the “common people” count so little that they have none of the luxuries and few of the necessities of existence.
They have no telephones in their “homes,” no motor cars in their “garages” and hardly enough food at their meager meals.3
National Endowment for the Humanities, “Detroit Evening Times. (Detroit, Mich) 1921-1958, December 12, 1945, REDLINE, Image 10,” Chroniclingamerica.loc.gov, December 12, 1945, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88063294/1945-12-12/ed-1/seq-10/.
Editorial, “What Is ‘Liberalism’?,” Life (Time Incorporated, January 7, 1946), Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/Life-1946-01-07-Vol-20-No-1/page/26/mode/2up?
National Endowment for the Humanities.