Technocracy -> Periodicals -> Technocracy Digest -> Q2, 97 #324 -> The Cleveland Radio Address

Search

The Cleveland Radio Address

Howard Scott

1938

Published in:

• Broadcast on station WGAR on April 17, on His Spring Tour, 1938.
• Technocracy Digest, 2nd quarter 1997, No. 324

Technocracy presents to the radio audience of WGAR the dilemma of this country and of this Continent.

The United States and the Continent are endowed with natural resources sufficient to meet the raw material needs of our citizens for centuries to come. The United States and Canada possess more installed horsepower and more machinery than all the rest of the world. The United States and Canada have more trained men and women capable of efficient operation of the technological equipment for the production and distribution of the social needs of their people than any like area on earth.

Re-stated simply, this country has the men, the materials, and the machines. It has the brains to devise greater technology for greater social needs; and yet the United States and Canada today, while possessing all the necessary elements for social well-being, are stymied by our antiquated political and economic structures.

The social institutions that sufficed in the United States in the days of the ox cart and the horse and buggy are today simply junk, blocking the road to our progress.

The recession has deepened into a depression. Our government admits that eighteen million Americans are on the various relief rolls of the country. It admits further that the United States employment service has over six million applications for employment in its files; and at the same time it is generally admitted that unemployment is approaching the precarious total of fourteen millions. Technocracy asks, `Where is the prosperity of yesteryear, and what has happened to our promised ``abundant life''!' And, in answer to these questions comes the magnanimous declaration of our federal government that it is going to spend its way out of this depression with the slight sum of four billion five hundred and twelve million dollars; merely a sweetening of the national jack-pot!

The federal administration in Washington and the Dominion administration in Ottawa both proclaim that the national policies which they have formulated are the best and only possible methods of procuring national well-being under the existing conditions. The national governments of both the United States and Canada promise many things. They promise higher prices for the farmer, more business for the business man, higher wages for the worker, better banking for the banker, and a higher national income for everyone. Their promises are so many that they are all things to all people and nothing to any one.

Technocracy states frankly that in view of the technological factors of this country today, such a policy on the part of our national administration is the rankest hypocrisy that could possibly be perpetrated upon a sorely suffering people. Technocracy points out that national business supports our national administrations in this great hypocrisy; that both are guilty of collusion and misrepresentation of the facts of our national operations. Such hypocrisy in these times is as deadly and dangerous and even despicable as that of distributing chocolate-covered arsenic to high school students.

National business and national governments contend that they both, singly or together, can rectify the national dilemma facing this country and this Continent today. National business contends that it can solve the dilemma of unemployment, insufficient purchasing power, and want in the midst of plenty, if it is permitted to indulge in more business with less government interference. National governments contend that they could obtain the solution if they were permitted to have more government and more business.

These claims on the part of both government and business are the rankest of barefaced assertions. Neither government nor business, regardless of what they do, can possibly rectify the critical situation in which the United States and Canada find themselves today, for the United States and Canada are engaged in the greatest social conflict in human history, and a conflict which, at this time, does not exist anywhere else. It is the conflict between two systems of producing physical wealth. For seven thousand years of social history Man has produced his physical wealth by human toil, and now in this country and on this Continent the technological process of producing physical wealth is shoving the old process onto the scrap heap. Business and government are shrieking loudly for North Americans to obtain a higher standard of living. We must increase our national production of living. We must increase our national production of physical wealth, we are told.

This statement sounds fine to the uninformed public, but the facts of the case are these: the technological production of physical wealth in the United States and Canada requires an ever- smaller total of man-hours per year to produce an ever greater volume of physical goods and services. When greater physical wealth is produced, North America will produce it, but the more physical wealth North America produces the less human effort we will consume in its production.

These facts are obvious to any student of our national situation; and yet our national leaders have the barefaced effrontery to claim that more wages and salaries will be distributed when America produces more physical wealth.

From now on, the United States and Canada will produce more and more with less and less human effort. And why not? Toil is the morality of slaves. Gears never tire, machines never sit down, and technological machinery will do the work of America's tomorrow.

In the face of this, Technocracy states that it is physically impossible to pay out sufficient purchasing power in salaries and wages to the American public to buy back the increasing productivity of our national machinery; and if an ever smaller number of Americans are going to work fewer hours per year, can you possibly conceive how either government or business can raise the purchasing power of our citizenry to where relief and unemployment will be totally eliminated?!

Technocracy wishes to make quite clear that the national problems of the United States and Canada are technological problems and that they therefore cannot be solved by any process of political democracy or chicanery of financial economics.

As relief lines lengthen, foreclosures increase, and retail sales fall, business begins to scream at federal governments for its own salvation. Business and government are sick; they are sick from the obsolescence and antiquity of seven thousand years of scarcity. But their cure would cost more than their demise, for in this conflict there can be no compromise. Either the people of this country and Continent must destroy their technological equipment and expurgate their science, and return to the human toil of hand tools, with its accompanying shibboleths of democracy, or they must face the stark realization that there is more and greater technology to come than America has ever known; and Technocracy asks again, why not?!

Why should this country and the Continent be condemned by the political machinations of democracy and the ineptitude of national business to the national anarchy of more relief, more unemployment, and more crime?! If national business and our political government cannot solve the dilemma of America, then it is high time that they step aside and make way for those who can.

As the millions of Americans who have been liquidated by the oscillations of the Price System are increased by more millions in the greater oscillations that will occur in the near future, there will arise a mass demand, Continent-wide, for a new leadership capable of directing America to her rendezvous with destiny. National business is going to insist on its pound of flesh, and Technocracy predicts that America will be compelled to liquidate national business, once and for all. National politics is going to insist on the privilege of continuing its national bungling, and it will join national business in the coming liquidation. It is high time that the citizens of the United States and Canada realize that politics and business stand in the road, blocking the pathway to North America's future.

This country and the Continent have the men, the machines, and the materials to provide every person on the Continent with the decency of the highest standard of living in the world, from birth to death, with the minimum of human effort and the maximum of leisure. It is high time that we North Americans enroll in the Technological Army which will make the U.S. and Canada safe for their citizens!

America has no war off the Continent. Americans have nothing to gain and everything to lose by participating in any warfare abroad. North America has only one war, a war to be fought here and now, on this Continent, alone. It is the war of plenty versus poverty, of leisure versus toil, of abundance versus scarcity. It is a cause not to die for, but one to live for. Technocracy contends that it is high time we enlisted in this greatest of all wars, for this war will have to be fought and won if civilization on this Continent is going to avert the chaos of national anarchy. Enlist now, before you are conscripted by the march of events.