Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/137

 periods of prosperity and adversity are necessary incidents of a general economic progress. Though, as we have seen, in the generation before the War a beginning had been made in the pensions, subsidies, and other “social services” for the relief of poverty and other personal disabilities, and for the provision of improved education and amenities for the “lower” classes, as well as for the better regulation of hours, wages, and other working conditions, these fragments of “Socialism” and “Communism” carried little consciousness of an organic change of policy in the relations between economics and politics. Now such organic change is clearly discernible in every civilized country, irrespective of its form of government. Dictatorships of the right or left, in Germany, Italy, Russia, and elsewhere, are busily attempting to introduce planned national unity of purpose from the political into the economic field. Its normal procedure may contain little “humanity” or equity; it is rather directed against the wastes of competitive capitalism and for a rigorous control of industry and income for military and other political ends. Its net effect may be to depress wages and to spread poverty, but security of elementary needs and of employment is an essential factor of this policy. To this extent it carries a correction of the waste of individualism and substitutes a conscious for an unconscious use of productive forces. In these States the science and the art of economics are definitely subjected to political ends.