Letters.

• Position: Letter to the Editor

To the Editor,

Steve Welzer offers medieval serfdom as an example of "Community-Based Economics," noting that the serf had Sundays off and had "over 100 holy days during the year when work was proscribed." One must point out that these holy days were unpaid, and that these benefits were extended not by "the community" but by that vast international empire, the church. The slim margin of survival for the serf was provided by the extramanorial market.

Tom Smith justly takes issue with Paul Hawken's imaginative--not to say imaginary--history of the early American economy. He might have added that even publicly owned corporations, a category that included 21 of the 22 antebellum canal companies and the first two railroads, acted to maximize profit as though they had been in private hands, as in more recent times the TVA invested in nuclear reactors like any other power company.

But he dismisses this Disneyish fantasy of the early corporation only to arrive at a vague socialism without markets. The former, actually-existing socialist alternative to the market was what tories called the "command economy," and the most insightful of tory economists dubbed "the new serfdom." This nonmarket socialism was planned with... market simulations! At the time of the collapse of actually-existing socialism, the Wall Street Journal suggested that western computer capacity would have made the simulations work, so maybe it's potentially viable if uninspiring.

It was with some relief that I turned to Don Fitz's piece on "A Democratic Economy and a Democratic Worklife," with his proposal for referenda on basic questions of life and labor. Unfortunately, the American constitutional apparatus has no provision for referenda. In the 1970s there was an organization devoted to rectifying that but I think it's been gone for some time.

In the absence of such a device, an organization I was part of decided to try the next best thing. We commissioned a poll by the Peter Hart organization. People were asked whether they would want the economy run

1. as it is now--25%

2. by the government--8%

3. by the workers--63%

Dan Rather reported it on the evening news with his weightiest demeanor but alas the People having spoken were told to shut up. Nevertheless, it was a rare occasion when the People (well, a statistically valid sample of the People) were asked a revolutionary question, and they gave a revolutionary answer: power to the workers.

Should the workweek be 30 hours? 20? William Godwin 200 years ago thought the advance of science would bring us to a four hour week. In any event, I'm glad the discussion got around to harnessing the popular will to "the economy," which is what the Rulers...