Brief for the Jury

Before the International Chamber of Commerce in Lisbon this week, Paul G. Hoffman threw down a challenge to businessmen everywhere in the global fight of capitalism v. Communism. The challenge: it is the great task and duty of businessmen to "convince the jury of people all over the world that the economic system of which we are a part will do more for them than any other system."

The job of educating the 800,000,000 people behind the Iron Curtain to this idea is enormously difficult. "After all," said Hoffman, "there is no word in Russian for 'businessman.'" Then the onetime president of Studebaker Corp. and ECAdministrator, now head of the Ford Foundation, filed his own brief for "the jury of people" in behalf of American capitalism. His chief argument: "Capitalism as practiced in the U.S. has demonstrated a continuing and expanding capacity to produce wealth and [distribute it] with reasonable fairness . . . American capitalism has taken on a new quality . . . the 'social consciousness of business.' "

Whose Wealth? This new social consciousness, in effect, means that U.S. businessmen are keenly aware that the new wealth the U.S. is creating must be shared more & more with the workers who are helping to create it. Important strides have already been made. Said Hoffman: "In 1949, for instance, 26% of all U.S. wage earners received $3,000 or more, whereas ten years before only 15% had an income of equal purchasing power.

"After World War I there was scarcely a worker at the Studebaker factory who earned enough to buy one of our products . . . But after World War II one of the most serious problems I faced as president was that of convincing 10,000 of our 13,000 employees that they had to stand in line with a great many other car-hungry Americans . . ." Class distinctions in the U.S. now mean little. "We are all middle-class people and proud of it. When anyone suggests there should be a redistribution of wealth, almost all of us respond by saying, 'Whose wealth?' because almost all of America's 40 million families have private property of one form or another."

The New Word. The key to the big advance of the American worker, said Hoffman, is his high productivity. Fifty years ago the U.S. worker was no more productive than the European. But now, thanks to more electric power, better tools and machines, "U.S. output per capita is about two and a half times European output per capita." In Western Europe and elsewhere, the U.S. must continue to help increase productivity, but not by the "imposition of an American pattern on European institutions."

EGA has already proved that U.S. methods can be adapted, rather than imposed. One "French foundryman went to the U.S. as a member of an ECA-sponsored expedition, reorganized his foundry when he returned. Said Hoffman: "Man-hours per ton of output dropped from 222 to 83, prices were cut 25%, wages went up 20% . . ." In Paris "the new word 'productivitee is an exciting and popular topic in conversation, newspapers and magazines."

The U.S. looks on its job, said Hoffman, as "permanently unfinished business . . . Getting after it means a willingness to cut loose from tradition and custom." Everywhere in the free world, barriers between people must be knocked down, cartels, monopolies, protectionism avoided. "If the free peoples of the world perform as I know they can perform, they will be able to reverse the classic Marxist slogan and say to the distressed and enslaved workers behind the Curtains: 'Arise, you have nothing to lose but your chains.'"

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