The Virtues of the Market

A Nation Not Afraid, by Enoch Powell. British Book Centre, $6.75 In his great book, The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer speaks of an Australian aboriginal tribe which believes that the rising and setting of the sun are controlled magically by their own medicine man. They imagine that sunset can be delayed by fixing a clod of earth in the fork of a tree and that it is necessary, if the sun is to rise, that a fire or light should be kindled during the hours of darkness on behalf of the tribe.” Mr. Enoch Powell maintains that the British government’s attempts— indeed any government’s attempts—to control the movement of the economy by budgetary and monetary manipulation are about as effective as the medicine man’s candle: and he puts into the same category the trade unions’ clamorous incantations over wage levels.

“Contrary to popular belief,” he says, “there is no reason whatever to suppose that the remuneration of labour in general has been raised by the combination of labour through the trade unions to a higher level than it would have stood otherwise. … No doubt in individual occupations combination has from time to time succeeded in raising real wages above what they would have been in its absence; but any such gain, which is invariably at the expense of workers in other employments and of the general public, is always temporary and usually brief.” Through local wage deals, and after another bout of inflation, the pattern of supply and demand reasserts itself. The function of the union leaders has been purely ceremonial: “to dramatise and personalise the abstract and impersonal forces by which man’s life is governed, and create the comfortable illusion that they can be manipulated.” But the ceremonies, unfortunately, produce real effects, though not the ones intended. “If the ‘twopenny candle on earth’ does not cause the sun to rise in the heavens, still if we are not careful with it, it can set fire to the little hut and burn it down.” Innumerable innocent people will suffer—in Britain they certainly have suffered—from the tax policies and inflation which are an essential part and an inevitable consequence of the ceremonies.

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Anthony Lejeune

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A Nation Not Afraid, by Enoch Powell. British Book Centre, $6.75 In his great book, The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer speaks of an Australian aboriginal tribe which believes that the rising and setting of the sun are controlled magically by their own medicine man. They imagine that sunset can be delayed by fixing a clod of earth in the fork of a tree and that it is necessary, if the sun is to rise, that a fire or light should be kindled during the hours of darkness on behalf of the tribe.” Mr. Enoch Powell maintains that the British government’s attempts— indeed any government’s attempts—to control the movement of the economy by budgetary and monetary manipulation are about as effective as the medicine man’s candle: and he puts into the same category the trade unions’ clamorous incantations over wage levels.

“Contrary to popular belief,” he says, “there is no reason whatever to suppose that the remuneration of labour in general has been raised by the combination of labour through the trade unions to a higher level than it would have stood otherwise. … No doubt in individual occupations combination has from time to time succeeded in raising real wages above what they would have been in its absence; but any such gain, which is invariably at the expense of workers in other employments and of the general public, is always temporary and usually brief.” Through local wage deals, and after another bout of inflation, the pattern of supply and demand reasserts itself. The function of the union leaders has been purely ceremonial: “to dramatise and personalise the abstract and impersonal forces by which man’s life is governed, and create the comfortable illusion that they can be manipulated.” But the ceremonies, unfortunately, produce real effects, though not the ones intended. “If the ‘twopenny candle on earth’ does not cause the sun to rise in the heavens, still if we are not careful with it, it can set fire to the little hut and burn it down.” Innumerable innocent people will suffer—in Britain they certainly have suffered—from the tax policies and inflation which are an essential part and an inevitable consequence of the ceremonies.