$50 Billion to bailout the United Auto Workers in Detroit.

Will any more cars get bought?

Will auto workers continue to get paid for not working?

Will the golden pensions get tarnished?

How about taking the $50 Billion, buying 3.3 million Toyota Corollas and
give them to the nation's needy?

They would decrease their gasoline bills, decrease their carbon footprint,
decrease our dependence on foreign oil, drive new, safe cars. Heck, you
could even buy some of Detroit's products such as the Plymouth Vibe, a car
designed by Toyota. Naaa, makes too much sense.

5 trillion bailout so far:

http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/11/1...12bailout.html

"Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for
twenty years. It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. There
were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan to
run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody - almost
everybody - voted for it. We didn't know. We thought it was good. No, that's
not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good. The
plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability,
but would be paid according to his need.

"We voted for that plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six
thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs made
long speeches about it, and it wasn't too clear, but nobody asked any
questions. None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us
thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt
guilty and kept his mouth shut - because they made it sound like anyone who'd
oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being.
They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal. Well, how were we
to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our lives - from our parents and
our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every newspaper we ever read
and every movie and every public speech? Hadn't we always been told that
this was righteous and just? Well, maybe there's some excuse for what we did
at that meeting. Still, we voted for the plan - and what we got, we had it
coming to us. You know, ma'am, we are marked men, in a way, those of us who
lived through the four years of that plan in the Twentieth Century factory.
What is it that hell is supposed to be? Evil - plain, naked, smirking evil,
isn't it? Well, that's what we saw and helped to make - and I think we're
damned, every one of us, and maybe we'll never be forgiven .

"Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try
pouring water into a tank where there's a pipe at the bottom draining it out
faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an inch
wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand
slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forthy-eight, then fifty-six - for
your neighbor's supper - for his wife's operation - for his child's
measles - for his mother's wheel chair - for his uncle's shirt - for his
nephew's schooling - for the baby next door - for the baby to be born - for
anyone anywhere around you - it's theirs to receive, from diapers to
dentures - and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month, year
after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in
sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest,
without hope, without end . From each according to his ability, to each
according to his need .

"We're all one big family, they told us, we're all in this together. But you
don't all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day - together, and
you don't all get a bellyache - together. What's whose ability and which of
whose needs comes first? When it's all one pot, you can't let any man decide
what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a
yacht - and if his feelings are all you have to go by, he might prove it,
too. Why not? If it's not right for me to own a car until I've worked myself
into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage
on earth - why can't he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the
ability not to have collapsed? No? He can't? Then why can he demand that I
go without cream for my coffee until he's replastered his living room? . Oh
well . Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his
own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma'am, we voted on it in a public
meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what
would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that
we had become beggars - rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us,
because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights
and no earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to 'the family',
and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was
his 'need' - so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any
lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched
drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that 'the family' would throw him
the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it's miseries, not work, that
had become the coin of the realm - so it turned into a contest between six
thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother's.
How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of
men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

"But that wasn't all. There was something else that we discovered at the
same meeting. The factory's production had fallen by forty percent, in that
first half year, so it was decided that somebody hadn't delivered 'according
to his ability.' Who? How would you tell it? 'The family' voted on that,
too. We voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work
overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime without pay - because
you weren't paid by time and you weren't paid by work, only by need.

"Do I have to tell you what happened after that - and into what sort of
creatures we all started turning, we who had once been humans? We began to
hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we
never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we
do, when we knew that if we did our best for 'the family,' it's not thanks
or rewards that we'd get, but punishment? We knew that for every stinker who'd
ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money - either through his
sloppiness, because he didn't have to care, or through plain incompetence -
it's we who'd have to pay with our nights and our Sundays. So we did our
best to be no good.

"There was one young boy who started out, full of fire for the noble ideal,
a bright kid without any schooling, but with a wonderful head on his
shoulders. The first year, he figured out a work process that saved us
thousands of man-hours. He gave it to 'the family,' didn't ask anything for
it, either, couldn't ask, but that was all right with him. It was for the
ideal, he said. But when he found himself voted as one of our ablest and
sentenced to night work, because we hadn't gotten enough from him, he shut
his mouth and his brain. You can bet he didn't come up with any ideas, the
second year.

"What was it they'd always told us about the vicious competition of the
profit system, where men had to compete for who'd do a better job than his
fellows? Vicious, wasn't it? Well, they should have seen what it was like
when we all had to compete with one another for who'd do the worst job
possible. There's no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a
spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to
do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or
idleness or pulling stick-ups for a living. But there was nothing else for
us to do except to fake unfitness. The one accusation we feared was to be
suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could
never pay off. And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic
pittance would be given to you anyway, whether you worked or not - your
'housing and feeding allowance,' it was called - and above that pittance,
you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you tried. You couldn't
count on buying a new suit of clothes next year - they might give you a
'clothing allowance' or they might not, according to whether nobody broke a
leg, needed an operation or gave birth to more babies. And if there wasn't
enough money for new suits for everybody, then you couldn't get yours,
either.

"There was one man who'd worked hard all his life, because he'd always
wanted to send his son through college. Well, the boy graduated from high
school in the second year of the plan - but 'the family' wouldn't give the
father any 'allowance' for the college. They said his son couldn't go to
college, until we had enough to send everybody's sons to college - and that
we first had to send everybody's children through high school, and we didn't
even have enough for that. The father died the following year, in a knife
fight with somebody in a saloon, a fight over nothing in particular - such
fights were beginning to happen among us all the time.

"Then there was an old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby:
phonograph records. I guess that was all he ever got out of life. In the old
days, he used to skip lunch just to buy himself some new recording of
classical music. Well, they didn't give him any 'allowance' for records -
'personal luxury' they called it. But at the same meeting, Millie Bush,
somebody's daughter, a mean, ugly little eight year old, was voted a pair of
gold braces for her buck teeth - this was 'medical need' because the staff
psychologist had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if
her teeth weren't straightened out. The old guy who loved music, turned to
drink, instead. He got so you never saw him fully conscious any more. But it
seems like there was one thing he couldn't forget. One night, he came
staggering down the street, saw Millie Bush, swung his fist and knocked all
her teeth out. Every one of them.

"Drink, of course, was what we all turned to, some more, some less. Don't
ask how we got the money for it. When all the decent pleasures are
forbidden, there's always ways to get the rotten ones. You don't break into
grocery stores after dark and you don't pick your fellow's pockets to buy
classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it's to get stinking drunk
and forget - you do. Fishing tackle? Hunting guns? Snapshot cameras?
Hobbies? There wasn't any 'amusement allowance' for anybody. 'Amusement' was
the first thing they dropped. Aren't you supposed to be ashamed to object
when anybody asks you to give up anything, if it's something that gave you
pleasure? Even our 'tobacco allowance' was cut to where we got two packs of
cigarettes a month - and this, they told us, was because the money had to go
into the babies' milk fund. Babies was the only item of production that didn't
fall, but rose and kept on rising - because people had nothing else to do, I
guess, and because they didn't have to care, the baby wasn't their burden,
it was 'the family's.' In fact, the best chance you had of getting a raise
and breathing easier for a while was a 'baby allowance.' Either that or a
major disease.

"It didn't take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to
play straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any
pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel's worth of tobacco or chew a stick of
gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that nickel. He felt
ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary nights
of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right,
miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker, but
not a blood-sucker. He wouldn't marry, he wouldn't help his folks back home,
he wouldn't put an extra burden on 'the family.' Besides, if he still had
some sort of sense of responsibility, he couldn't marry or bring children
into the world, when he could plan nothing, promise nothing, count on
nothing. But the shiftless and irresponsible had a field day of it. The bred
babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless
relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant
sister, for an extra 'disability allowance,' they got more sicknesses than
any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture,
their homes - what the hell, 'the family' was paying for it! They found more
ways of getting in 'need' than the rest of us could ever imagine - they
developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed.

"God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a
law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who
observed it - for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the
more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your
honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's dishonesty. The
honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest
won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness? We
were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started. There weren't many
chiselers among us. We knew our jobs and we were proud of it and we worked
for the best factory in the country, where old man Starnes hired nothing but
the pick of the country's labor. Within one year under the new plan, there
wasn't an honest man left among us. That was the evil, the sort of
hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with, but you never
thought to see alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few *******s, but that
it turned decent people into *******s, and there was nothing else that it
could do - and it was called a moral ideal!

"What was it we were supposed to work for? For the love of our brothers?
What brothers? For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around us?
And whether they were cheating or plain incompetent, whether they were
unwilling or unable - what difference did that make to us? If we were tied
for life to the level of their unfitness, faked or real, how long could we
care to go on? We had no way of knowing their ability, we had no way of
controlling their needs - all we knew was that we were beasts of burden
struggling blindly in some sort of place that was half-hospital,
half-stockyards - a place geared to nothing but disability, disaster,
disease - beasts put there for the relief of whatever whoever chose to say
was whichever's need.

"Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the
first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they
swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt,
for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family, for a paint job
on their house - it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations,
our denials, our hunger. We began to spy on one another, each hoping to
catch the others lying about their needs, so as to cut their 'allowance' at
the next meeting. We began to have stool pigeons who informed on people, who
reported that somebody had bootlegged a turkey to his family on some
Sunday - which he'd paid for by gambling, most likely. We began to meddle
into one another's lives. We provoked family quarrels, to get somebody's
relatives thrown out. Any time we saw a man starting to go steady with a
girl, we made life miserable for him. We broke up many engagements. We didn't
want anyone to marry, we didn't want any more dependents to feed.

"In the old days, we used to celebrate if somebody had a baby, we used to
chip in and help him out with the hospital bills, if he happened to be
hard-pressed for the moment. Now, if a baby was born, we didn't speak to the
parents for weeks. Babies, to us, had become what locusts were to farmers.
In the old days, we used to help a man out if he had a bad illness in the
family. Now - well, I'll tell you about just one case. It was the mother of
a man who had been with us for fifteen years. She was a kindly old lady,
cheerful and wise, she knew us all by our first names and we all liked her -
we used to like her. One day, she slipped on the cellar stairs and fell and
broke her hip. We knew what that meant at her age. The staff doctor said
that she'd have to be sent to a hospital in town, for expensive treatments
that would take a long time. The old lady died the night before she was to
leave for town. They never established the cause of death. No, I don't know
whether she was murdered. Nobody said that. Nobody would talk about it at
all. All I know is that I - and that's what I can't forget! - I, too, had
caught myself wishing that she would die. This - may God forgive us! - was
the brotherhood, the security, the abundance that the plan was supposed to
achieve for us!

"Was there any reason why this sort of horror would ever be preached by
anybody? Was there anybody who got any profit from it? There was. The
Starnes heirs. I hope you're not going to remind me that they'd sacrificed a
fortune and turned the factory over to us as a gift. We were fooled by that
one, too. Yes, they gave up the factory. But profit, ma'am, depends on what
it is that you're after. And what the Starnes heirs were after, no money on
earth could buy. Money is too clean and innocent for that.

"Eric Starnes, the youngest - he was a jellyfish that didn't have the guts
to be after anything in particular. He got himself voted as the Director of
our Public Relations Department, which didn't do anything, except that he
had a staff for the not doing of anything, so he didn't have to bother
sticking around the office. The pay he got - well, I shouldn't call it 'pay,'
none of us was 'paid' - the alms voted to him was fairly modest, about ten
times what I got, but that wasn't riches, Eric didn't care for money - he
wouldn't have known what to do with it. He spent his time hanging around
among us, showing how chummy he was and democratic. He wanted to be loved,
it seems. The way he went about it was to keep reminding us that he had
given us the factory. We couldn't stand him.

"Gerald Starnes was our Director of Production. We never learned just what
the size of his rake-off - his alms - had been. It would have taken a staff
of accountants to figure that out, and a staff of engineers to trace the way
it was piped, directly or indirectly, into his office. None of it was
supposed to be for him - it was all for company expenses. Gerald had three
cars, four secretaries, five telephones, and he used to throw champagne and
caviar parties that no tax-paying tycoon in the country could have afforded.
He spent more money in one year than his father had earned in profits in the
last two years of his life. We saw a hundred pound stack - a hundred pounds,
we weighed them - of magazines in Gerald's office, full of stories about our
factory and our noble plan, with big pictures of Gerald Starnes, calling him
a great social crusader. Gerald liked to come into the shops at night,
dressed in his formal clothes, flashing diamond cuff links the size of a
nickel and shaking cigar ashes all over. Any cheap show-off who's got
nothing to parade but his cash, is bad enough - except that he makes no
bones about the cash being his, and you're free to gape at him or not, as
you wish, and mostly you don't. But when a ******* like Gerald Starnes puts
on an act and keeps spouting that he doesn't care for material wealth, that
he's only serving 'the family,' that all the lushness is not for himself,
but for our sake and for the common good, because it's necessary to keep up
the prestige of the company and of the noble plan in the eyes of the
public - then that's when you learn to hate the creature as you've never
hated anything human.

"But his sister Ivy was worse. She really did not care for material wealth.
The alms she got was no bigger than ours, and she went about in scuffed,
flat-heeled shoes and shirtwaists - just to show how selfless she was. She
was our Director of Distribution. She was the lady in charge of our needs.
She was the one who held us by the throat. Of course, distribution was
supposed to be decided by voting - by the voice of the people. But when the
people are six thousand howling voices, trying to decide without yardstick,
rhyme or reason, when there are no rules to the game and each can demand
anything, but has a right to nothing, when everybody holds power over
everybody's life except his own - then it turns out, as it did, that the
voice of the people is Ivy Starnes. By the end of the second year, we
dropped the pretense of the 'family meetings' - in the name of 'production
efficiency and time economy,' one meeting used to take ten days - and all
the petitions of need were simply sent to Miss Starnes' office. No, not
sent. They had to be recited to her in person by every petitioner. Then she
made up a distribution list, which she read to us for our vote of approval
at a meeting that lasted three-quarters of an hour. We voted approval. There
was a ten-minute period on the agenda for discussion and objections. We made
no objections. We knew better by that time. Nobody can divide a factory's
income among thousands of people, without some sort of a gauge to measure
people's value. Her gauge was bootlicking. Selfless? In her father's time,
all of his money wouldn't have given him a chance to speak to his lousiest
wiper and get away with it, as she spoke to our best skilled workers and
their wives. She had pale eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you
ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way her eyes glinted
when she watched some man who'd talked back to her once and who'd just heard
his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when
you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who's ever preached the
slogan: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.'

"This was the whole secret of it. At first, I kept wondering how it could be
possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world could
make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort of
abomination - when five minutes of thought should have told them what would
happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I know they
didn't do it by any kind of mistake. Mistakes of this size are never made
innocently. If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have
no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice - it's
because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell. And we weren't so
innocent, either, when we voted for that plan at the end of the first
meeting. We didn't do it just because we believed that the drippy, old guff
they spewed was good. We had another reason, but the guff helped us to hide
it from our neighbors and from ourselves. The guff gave us a chance to pass
off as virtue something that we'd be ashamed to admit otherwise. There wasn't
a man voting for it who didn't think that under a setup of this kind he'd
muscle in on the profits of the men abler than himself. There wasn't a man
rich and smart enough but that he didn't think that somebody was richer and
smarter, and this plan would give him a share of his better's wealth and
brain. But while he was thinking that he'd get unearned benefits from the
men above, he forgot about the men below who'd get unearned benefits, too.
He forgot about all his inferiors who'd rush to drain him just as he hoped
to drain his superiors. The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled
him to a limousine like his boss's, forgot that every bum and beggar on
earth would come howling that their need entitled them to an icebox like his
own. That was our real motive when we voted - that was the truth of it - but
we didn't like to think it, so the less we liked it, the louder we yelled
about our love for the common good.

"Well, we got what we asked for. By the time we saw what it was that we'd
asked for, it was too late. We were trapped, with no place to go. The best
men among us left the factory in the first week of the plan. We lost our
best engineers, superintendents, foremen and highest-skilled workers. A man
of self-respect doesn't turn into a milch cow for anybody. Some able fellows
tried to stick it out, but they couldn't take it for long. We kept losing
our men, they kept escaping from the factory like from a pesthole - till we
had nothing left except the men of need, but none of the men of ability.

"And the few of us who were still any good, but stayed on, were only those
who had been there too long. In the old days, nobody ever quit the Twentieth
Century - and, somehow, we couldn't make ourselves believe it was gone.
After a while, we couldn't quit, because no other employer would have us -
for which I can't blame him. Nobody would deal with us in any way, no
respectable person or firm. All the small shops, where we traded, started
moving out of Starnesville fast - till we had nothing left but saloons,
gambling joints and crooks who sold us trash at gouging prices. The alms we
got kept falling, but the cost of our living went up. The list of the
factory's needy kept stretching, but the list of its customers shrank. There
was less and less income to divide among more and more people. In the old
days, it used to be said that the Twentieth Century Motor trademark was as
good as the karat mark on gold. I don't know what it was that the Starnes
heirs thought, if they thought at all, but I suppose that like all social
planners and like savages, they thought that this trademark was a magic
stamp which did the trick by some sort of voodoo power and that it would
keep them rich, as it had kept their father. Well, when our customers began
to see that we never delivered an order on time and never put out a motor
that didn't have something wrong with it - the magic stamp began to work the
other way around: people wouldn't take a motor as a gift, if it was marked
Twentieth Century. And it came to where our only customers were men who
never paid and never meant to pay their bills. But Gerald Starnes, doped by
his own publicity, got huffy and went around, with an air of moral
superiority, demanding that businessmen place orders with us, not because
our motors were good, but because we needed the orders so badly.

"By that time a village half-wit could see what generations of professors
had pretended not to notice. What good would our need do to a power plant
when its generators stopped because of our defective engines? What good
would it do to a man caught on an operating table when the electric light
went out? What good would it do to the passengers of a plane when its motor
failed in mid-air? And if they bought our product, not because of its merit,
but because of our need, would that be the good, the right, the moral thing
to do for the owner of that power plant, the surgeon in that hospital, the
maker of that plane?

"Yet this was the moral law that the professors and leaders and thinkers had
wanted to establish all over the earth. If this is what it did in a single
small town where we all knew one another, do you care to think what it would
do on a world scale? Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you
had to live and to work, when you're tied to all the disasters and all the
malingering of the globe? to work - and whenever any men failed anywhere, it's
you who would have to make up for it. To work - with no chance to rise, with
your meals and your clothes and your home and your pleasure depending on any
swindle, any famine, any pestilence anywhere on earth. To work - with no
chance for an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the
Patagonians have been sent through college. To work - on a blank check held
by every creature born, by men whom you'll never see, whose needs you'll
never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way
to learn and no right to question - just to work and work and work - and
leave it up to the Ivys and the Geralds of the world to decide whose stomach
will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is
the moral law to accept? This - a moral ideal?

"Well, we tried it - and we learned. Our agony took four years, from our
first meeting to our last, and it ended the only way it could end: in
bankruptcy. At our last meeting, Ivy Starnes was the one who tried to brazen
it out. She made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she said that
the plan had failed because the rest of the country had not accepted it,
that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a selfish, greedy
world - and that the plan was a noble ideal, but human nature was not good
enough for it. A young boy - the one who had been punished for giving us a
useful idea in our first year - got up, as we all sat silent, and walked
straight to Ivy Starnes on the platform. He said nothing. He spat in her
face. That was the end of the noble plan and of the Twentieth Century.

"Charles Momsen" wrote in message
...
"Well, there was something that happened at that plant where I worked for
twenty years. It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. There
were three of them, two sons and a daughter, and they brought a new plan
to run the factory. They let us vote on it, too, and everybody - almost
everybody - voted for it. We didn't know. We thought it was good. No,
that's not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was
good. The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to
his ability, but would be paid according to his need.

"We voted for that plan at a big meeting, with all of us present, six
thousand of us, everybody that worked in the factory. The Starnes heirs
made long speeches about it, and it wasn't too clear, but nobody asked any
questions. None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of
us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he
felt guilty and kept his mouth shut - because they made it sound like
anyone who'd oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a
human being. They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal.
Well, how were we to know otherwise? Hadn't we heard it all our lives -
from our parents and our schoolteachers and our ministers, and in every
newspaper we ever read and every movie and every public speech? Hadn't we
always been told that this was righteous and just? Well, maybe there's
some excuse for what we did at that meeting. Still, we voted for the
plan - and what we got, we had it coming to us. You know, ma'am, we are
marked men, in a way, those of us who lived through the four years of that
plan in the Twentieth Century factory. What is it that hell is supposed to
be? Evil - plain, naked, smirking evil, isn't it? Well, that's what we saw
and helped to make - and I think we're damned, every one of us, and maybe
we'll never be forgiven .

"Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try
pouring water into a tank where there's a pipe at the bottom draining it
out faster than you pour it, and each bucket you bring breaks that pipe an
inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you
stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forthy-eight, then
fifty-six - for your neighbor's supper - for his wife's operation - for
his child's measles - for his mother's wheel chair - for his uncle's
shirt - for his nephew's schooling - for the baby next door - for the baby
to be born - for anyone anywhere around you - it's theirs to receive, from
diapers to dentures - and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month
after month, year after year, with nothing to show for it but your sweat,
with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your
life, without rest, without hope, without end . From each according to his
ability, to each according to his need .

"We're all one big family, they told us, we're all in this together. But
you don't all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day - together,
and you don't all get a bellyache - together. What's whose ability and
which of whose needs comes first? When it's all one pot, you can't let any
man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim
that he needs a yacht - and if his feelings are all you have to go by, he
might prove it, too. Why not? If it's not right for me to own a car until
I've worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer
and every naked savage on earth - why can't he demand a yacht from me,
too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed? No? He can't? Then
why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he's
replastered his living room? . Oh well . Well, anyway, it was decided that
nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it.
Yes, ma'am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else
could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a
meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become
beggars - rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man
could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no
earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to 'the family', and
they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his
'need' - so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any
lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched
drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that 'the family' would throw
him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it's miseries, not work,
that had become the coin of the realm - so it turned into a contest
between six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse
than his brother's. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what
happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got
away with the jackpot?

"But that wasn't all. There was something else that we discovered at the
same meeting. The factory's production had fallen by forty percent, in
that first half year, so it was decided that somebody hadn't delivered
'according to his ability.' Who? How would you tell it? 'The family' voted
on that, too. We voted which men were the best, and these men were
sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime
without pay - because you weren't paid by time and you weren't paid by
work, only by need.

"Do I have to tell you what happened after that - and into what sort of
creatures we all started turning, we who had once been humans? We began to
hide whatever ability we had, to slow down and watch like hawks that we
never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we
do, when we knew that if we did our best for 'the family,' it's not thanks
or rewards that we'd get, but punishment? We knew that for every stinker
who'd ruin a batch of motors and cost the company money - either through
his sloppiness, because he didn't have to care, or through plain
incompetence - it's we who'd have to pay with our nights and our Sundays.
So we did our best to be no good.

"There was one young boy who started out, full of fire for the noble
ideal, a bright kid without any schooling, but with a wonderful head on
his shoulders. The first year, he figured out a work process that saved us
thousands of man-hours. He gave it to 'the family,' didn't ask anything
for it, either, couldn't ask, but that was all right with him. It was for
the ideal, he said. But when he found himself voted as one of our ablest
and sentenced to night work, because we hadn't gotten enough from him, he
shut his mouth and his brain. You can bet he didn't come up with any
ideas, the second year.

"What was it they'd always told us about the vicious competition of the
profit system, where men had to compete for who'd do a better job than his
fellows? Vicious, wasn't it? Well, they should have seen what it was like
when we all had to compete with one another for who'd do the worst job
possible. There's no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a
spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle
to do a bad job, day after day. That will finish him quicker than drink or
idleness or pulling stick-ups for a living. But there was nothing else for
us to do except to fake unfitness. The one accusation we feared was to be
suspected of ability. Ability was like a mortgage on you that you could
never pay off. And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic
pittance would be given to you anyway, whether you worked or not - your
'housing and feeding allowance,' it was called - and above that pittance,
you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you tried. You
couldn't count on buying a new suit of clothes next year - they might give
you a 'clothing allowance' or they might not, according to whether nobody
broke a leg, needed an operation or gave birth to more babies. And if
there wasn't enough money for new suits for everybody, then you couldn't
get yours, either.

"There was one man who'd worked hard all his life, because he'd always
wanted to send his son through college. Well, the boy graduated from high
school in the second year of the plan - but 'the family' wouldn't give the
father any 'allowance' for the college. They said his son couldn't go to
college, until we had enough to send everybody's sons to college - and
that we first had to send everybody's children through high school, and we
didn't even have enough for that. The father died the following year, in a
knife fight with somebody in a saloon, a fight over nothing in
particular - such fights were beginning to happen among us all the time.

"Then there was an old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby:
phonograph records. I guess that was all he ever got out of life. In the
old days, he used to skip lunch just to buy himself some new recording of
classical music. Well, they didn't give him any 'allowance' for records -
'personal luxury' they called it. But at the same meeting, Millie Bush,
somebody's daughter, a mean, ugly little eight year old, was voted a pair
of gold braces for her buck teeth - this was 'medical need' because the
staff psychologist had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority
complex if her teeth weren't straightened out. The old guy who loved
music, turned to drink, instead. He got so you never saw him fully
conscious any more. But it seems like there was one thing he couldn't
forget. One night, he came staggering down the street, saw Millie Bush,
swung his fist and knocked all her teeth out. Every one of them.

"Drink, of course, was what we all turned to, some more, some less. Don't
ask how we got the money for it. When all the decent pleasures are
forbidden, there's always ways to get the rotten ones. You don't break
into grocery stores after dark and you don't pick your fellow's pockets to
buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it's to get stinking
drunk and forget - you do. Fishing tackle? Hunting guns? Snapshot cameras?
Hobbies? There wasn't any 'amusement allowance' for anybody. 'Amusement'
was the first thing they dropped. Aren't you supposed to be ashamed to
object when anybody asks you to give up anything, if it's something that
gave you pleasure? Even our 'tobacco allowance' was cut to where we got
two packs of cigarettes a month - and this, they told us, was because the
money had to go into the babies' milk fund. Babies was the only item of
production that didn't fall, but rose and kept on rising - because people
had nothing else to do, I guess, and because they didn't have to care, the
baby wasn't their burden, it was 'the family's.' In fact, the best chance
you had of getting a raise and breathing easier for a while was a 'baby
allowance.' Either that or a major disease.

"It didn't take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to
play straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any
pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel's worth of tobacco or chew a stick of
gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that nickel. He felt
ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary
nights of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by
right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a
sucker, but not a blood-sucker. He wouldn't marry, he wouldn't help his
folks back home, he wouldn't put an extra burden on 'the family.' Besides,
if he still had some sort of sense of responsibility, he couldn't marry or
bring children into the world, when he could plan nothing, promise
nothing, count on nothing. But the shiftless and irresponsible had a field
day of it. The bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in
every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every
unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra 'disability allowance,' they got
more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their
clothing, their furniture, their homes - what the hell, 'the family' was
paying for it! They found more ways of getting in 'need' than the rest of
us could ever imagine - they developed a special skill for it, which was
the only ability they showed.

"God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a
law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who
observed it - for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the
more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got.
Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's
dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest
lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a
law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started.
There weren't many chiselers among us. We knew our jobs and we were proud
of it and we worked for the best factory in the country, where old man
Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country's labor. Within one year
under the new plan, there wasn't an honest man left among us. That was the
evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with,
but you never thought to see alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few
*******s, but that it turned decent people into *******s, and there was
nothing else that it could do - and it was called a moral ideal!

"What was it we were supposed to work for? For the love of our brothers?
What brothers? For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around
us? And whether they were cheating or plain incompetent, whether they were
unwilling or unable - what difference did that make to us? If we were tied
for life to the level of their unfitness, faked or real, how long could we
care to go on? We had no way of knowing their ability, we had no way of
controlling their needs - all we knew was that we were beasts of burden
struggling blindly in some sort of place that was half-hospital,
half-stockyards - a place geared to nothing but disability, disaster,
disease - beasts put there for the relief of whatever whoever chose to say
was whichever's need.

"Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the
first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they
swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt,
for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family, for a paint job
on their house - it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations,
our denials, our hunger. We began to spy on one another, each hoping to
catch the others lying about their needs, so as to cut their 'allowance'
at the next meeting. We began to have stool pigeons who informed on
people, who reported that somebody had bootlegged a turkey to his family
on some Sunday - which he'd paid for by gambling, most likely. We began to
meddle into one another's lives. We provoked family quarrels, to get
somebody's relatives thrown out. Any time we saw a man starting to go
steady with a girl, we made life miserable for him. We broke up many
engagements. We didn't want anyone to marry, we didn't want any more
dependents to feed.

"In the old days, we used to celebrate if somebody had a baby, we used to
chip in and help him out with the hospital bills, if he happened to be
hard-pressed for the moment. Now, if a baby was born, we didn't speak to
the parents for weeks. Babies, to us, had become what locusts were to
farmers. In the old days, we used to help a man out if he had a bad
illness in the family. Now - well, I'll tell you about just one case. It
was the mother of a man who had been with us for fifteen years. She was a
kindly old lady, cheerful and wise, she knew us all by our first names and
we all liked her - we used to like her. One day, she slipped on the cellar
stairs and fell and broke her hip. We knew what that meant at her age. The
staff doctor said that she'd have to be sent to a hospital in town, for
expensive treatments that would take a long time. The old lady died the
night before she was to leave for town. They never established the cause
of death. No, I don't know whether she was murdered. Nobody said that.
Nobody would talk about it at all. All I know is that I - and that's what
I can't forget! - I, too, had caught myself wishing that she would die.
This - may God forgive us! - was the brotherhood, the security, the
abundance that the plan was supposed to achieve for us!

"Was there any reason why this sort of horror would ever be preached by
anybody? Was there anybody who got any profit from it? There was. The
Starnes heirs. I hope you're not going to remind me that they'd sacrificed
a fortune and turned the factory over to us as a gift. We were fooled by
that one, too. Yes, they gave up the factory. But profit, ma'am, depends
on what it is that you're after. And what the Starnes heirs were after, no
money on earth could buy. Money is too clean and innocent for that.

"Eric Starnes, the youngest - he was a jellyfish that didn't have the guts
to be after anything in particular. He got himself voted as the Director
of our Public Relations Department, which didn't do anything, except that
he had a staff for the not doing of anything, so he didn't have to bother
sticking around the office. The pay he got - well, I shouldn't call it
'pay,' none of us was 'paid' - the alms voted to him was fairly modest,
about ten times what I got, but that wasn't riches, Eric didn't care for
money - he wouldn't have known what to do with it. He spent his time
hanging around among us, showing how chummy he was and democratic. He
wanted to be loved, it seems. The way he went about it was to keep
reminding us that he had given us the factory. We couldn't stand him.

"Gerald Starnes was our Director of Production. We never learned just what
the size of his rake-off - his alms - had been. It would have taken a
staff of accountants to figure that out, and a staff of engineers to trace
the way it was piped, directly or indirectly, into his office. None of it
was supposed to be for him - it was all for company expenses. Gerald had
three cars, four secretaries, five telephones, and he used to throw
champagne and caviar parties that no tax-paying tycoon in the country
could have afforded. He spent more money in one year than his father had
earned in profits in the last two years of his life. We saw a hundred
pound stack - a hundred pounds, we weighed them - of magazines in Gerald's
office, full of stories about our factory and our noble plan, with big
pictures of Gerald Starnes, calling him a great social crusader. Gerald
liked to come into the shops at night, dressed in his formal clothes,
flashing diamond cuff links the size of a nickel and shaking cigar ashes
all over. Any cheap show-off who's got nothing to parade but his cash, is
bad enough - except that he makes no bones about the cash being his, and
you're free to gape at him or not, as you wish, and mostly you don't. But
when a ******* like Gerald Starnes puts on an act and keeps spouting that
he doesn't care for material wealth, that he's only serving 'the family,'
that all the lushness is not for himself, but for our sake and for the
common good, because it's necessary to keep up the prestige of the company
and of the noble plan in the eyes of the public - then that's when you
learn to hate the creature as you've never hated anything human.

"But his sister Ivy was worse. She really did not care for material
wealth. The alms she got was no bigger than ours, and she went about in
scuffed, flat-heeled shoes and shirtwaists - just to show how selfless she
was. She was our Director of Distribution. She was the lady in charge of
our needs. She was the one who held us by the throat. Of course,
distribution was supposed to be decided by voting - by the voice of the
people. But when the people are six thousand howling voices, trying to
decide without yardstick, rhyme or reason, when there are no rules to the
game and each can demand anything, but has a right to nothing, when
everybody holds power over everybody's life except his own - then it turns
out, as it did, that the voice of the people is Ivy Starnes. By the end of
the second year, we dropped the pretense of the 'family meetings' - in the
name of 'production efficiency and time economy,' one meeting used to take
ten days - and all the petitions of need were simply sent to Miss Starnes'
office. No, not sent. They had to be recited to her in person by every
petitioner. Then she made up a distribution list, which she read to us for
our vote of approval at a meeting that lasted three-quarters of an hour.
We voted approval. There was a ten-minute period on the agenda for
discussion and objections. We made no objections. We knew better by that
time. Nobody can divide a factory's income among thousands of people,
without some sort of a gauge to measure people's value. Her gauge was
bootlicking. Selfless? In her father's time, all of his money wouldn't
have given him a chance to speak to his lousiest wiper and get away with
it, as she spoke to our best skilled workers and their wives. She had pale
eyes that looked fishy, cold and dead. And if you ever want to see pure
evil, you should have seen the way her eyes glinted when she watched some
man who'd talked back to her once and who'd just heard his name on the
list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it,
you saw the real motive of any person who's ever preached the slogan:
'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.'

"This was the whole secret of it. At first, I kept wondering how it could
be possible that the educated, the cultured, the famous men of the world
could make a mistake of this size and preach, as righteousness, this sort
of abomination - when five minutes of thought should have told them what
would happen if somebody tried to practice what they preached. Now I know
they didn't do it by any kind of mistake. Mistakes of this size are never
made innocently. If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they
have no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their
choice - it's because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell.
And we weren't so innocent, either, when we voted for that plan at the end
of the first meeting. We didn't do it just because we believed that the
drippy, old guff they spewed was good. We had another reason, but the guff
helped us to hide it from our neighbors and from ourselves. The guff gave
us a chance to pass off as virtue something that we'd be ashamed to admit
otherwise. There wasn't a man voting for it who didn't think that under a
setup of this kind he'd muscle in on the profits of the men abler than
himself. There wasn't a man rich and smart enough but that he didn't think
that somebody was richer and smarter, and this plan would give him a share
of his better's wealth and brain. But while he was thinking that he'd get
unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who'd
get unearned benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who'd rush
to drain him just as he hoped to drain his superiors. The worker who liked
the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss's, forgot
that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need
entitled them to an icebox like his own. That was our real motive when we
voted - that was the truth of it - but we didn't like to think it, so the
less we liked it, the louder we yelled about our love for the common good.

"Well, we got what we asked for. By the time we saw what it was that we'd
asked for, it was too late. We were trapped, with no place to go. The best
men among us left the factory in the first week of the plan. We lost our
best engineers, superintendents, foremen and highest-skilled workers. A
man of self-respect doesn't turn into a milch cow for anybody. Some able
fellows tried to stick it out, but they couldn't take it for long. We kept
losing our men, they kept escaping from the factory like from a pesthole -
till we had nothing left except the men of need, but none of the men of
ability.

"And the few of us who were still any good, but stayed on, were only those
who had been there too long. In the old days, nobody ever quit the
Twentieth Century - and, somehow, we couldn't make ourselves believe it
was gone. After a while, we couldn't quit, because no other employer would
have us - for which I can't blame him. Nobody would deal with us in any
way, no respectable person or firm. All the small shops, where we traded,
started moving out of Starnesville fast - till we had nothing left but
saloons, gambling joints and crooks who sold us trash at gouging prices.
The alms we got kept falling, but the cost of our living went up. The list
of the factory's needy kept stretching, but the list of its customers
shrank. There was less and less income to divide among more and more
people. In the old days, it used to be said that the Twentieth Century
Motor trademark was as good as the karat mark on gold. I don't know what
it was that the Starnes heirs thought, if they thought at all, but I
suppose that like all social planners and like savages, they thought that
this trademark was a magic stamp which did the trick by some sort of
voodoo power and that it would keep them rich, as it had kept their
father. Well, when our customers began to see that we never delivered an
order on time and never put out a motor that didn't have something wrong
with it - the magic stamp began to work the other way around: people
wouldn't take a motor as a gift, if it was marked Twentieth Century. And
it came to where our only customers were men who never paid and never
meant to pay their bills. But Gerald Starnes, doped by his own publicity,
got huffy and went around, with an air of moral superiority, demanding
that businessmen place orders with us, not because our motors were good,
but because we needed the orders so badly.

"By that time a village half-wit could see what generations of professors
had pretended not to notice. What good would our need do to a power plant
when its generators stopped because of our defective engines? What good
would it do to a man caught on an operating table when the electric light
went out? What good would it do to the passengers of a plane when its
motor failed in mid-air? And if they bought our product, not because of
its merit, but because of our need, would that be the good, the right, the
moral thing to do for the owner of that power plant, the surgeon in that
hospital, the maker of that plane?

"Yet this was the moral law that the professors and leaders and thinkers
had wanted to establish all over the earth. If this is what it did in a
single small town where we all knew one another, do you care to think what
it would do on a world scale? Do you care to imagine what it would be
like, if you had to live and to work, when you're tied to all the
disasters and all the malingering of the globe? to work - and whenever any
men failed anywhere, it's you who would have to make up for it. To work -
with no chance to rise, with your meals and your clothes and your home and
your pleasure depending on any swindle, any famine, any pestilence
anywhere on earth. To work - with no chance for an extra ration, till the
Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent through
college. To work - on a blank check held by every creature born, by men
whom you'll never see, whose needs you'll never know, whose ability or
laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to
question - just to work and work and work - and leave it up to the Ivys
and the Geralds of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the
effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is the moral law to
accept? This - a moral ideal?

"Well, we tried it - and we learned. Our agony took four years, from our
first meeting to our last, and it ended the only way it could end: in
bankruptcy. At our last meeting, Ivy Starnes was the one who tried to
brazen it out. She made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she
said that the plan had failed because the rest of the country had not
accepted it, that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a
selfish, greedy world - and that the plan was a noble ideal, but human
nature was not good enough for it. A young boy - the one who had been
punished for giving us a useful idea in our first year - got up, as we all
sat silent, and walked straight to Ivy Starnes on the platform. He said
nothing. He spat in her face. That was the end of the noble plan and of
the Twentieth Century.



Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater should have married and had about two dozen
children and home schooled every one of them. The country would not now be
off on such a destructive, Marxist path had they. Instead we got a country
half-full of idiot, self-serving, unproductive automatons the likes of
Jonanthan Gaynz - people who are too stupid to even understand what gender
implies.

Wilbur Hubbard