58
PRELIMINARIES TO NATIONALIZATION
YOU now see that nationalization and municipalization are so desirable as a means of cheapening the things we all need that the most violently anti-Socialist Parliaments and municipal corporations have established nationalized and municipalized industries in the past, and are quite likely to do so in future under electoral pressure from Conservative voters. You see also that the alleged enormous expense of buying out private owners, which has been alleged by a Coal Commission as an insuperable objection to the nationalization of our coal mines, is a bogey, because, though the coalowners (of whom, by the way, I am one) will be fully compensated, the proprietary class as a whole will pay the bill out of their unearned incomes, leaving the nation richer instead of poorer by the transaction. So far so good. Theoretically, nationalization is perfectly sound.
Practically, it takes, as the people very accurately put it, a lot of doing. A mere proclamation that such and such an industry is nationalized can do nothing but just put a stop to it. Before any industry or service can be effectively nationalized a new department of the Civil Service must be created to carry it on. Unless we had a War Office we could not have an army, because no soldier could get his pay, or his uniform, or his weapons. Without an Admiralty, no navy. Without a General Post Office and a Postmaster-General, no letters in the morning. Without a Royal Mint and a Master of the Mint, no money. Without Scotland Yard in London, and Watch Committees in the country, no police. And as in the present so in the future. Without a great extension of the Treasury, banking cannot be nationalized, nor coal without the creation of a Department of Mines much bigger than our existing Department of Woods and Forests, nor railways without a Railway Board and a Railroadmaster-General as important as the Post Office and the Postmaster-General.
Such institutions can be set up by stable and highly organized States only, which means—and here is the political moral of it—that they cannot be done by revolutions, or by improvised dictatorships, or even by permanent States in which, as in America, where in some cases the civil services are still regarded as the spoils of office, a new set of officials oust the old ones whenever the Opposition ousts the Government. What a revolution can do towards nationalization is to destroy the political power of the class which opposes nationalization. But such a revolution by itself cannot nationalize; and the new Government it sets up may be unable even to carry on the nationalized services it finds in existence, and be obliged to abandon them to private enterprise.
A nationalizing Government must also be financially honest, and determined to make the nationalization a success, and neither plunder it to eke out the general revenue, nor discredit and wreck it so to have an excuse for giving the nationalized service back to the private profiteers. State railways have sometimes been standing examples of what State management can be at its worst. The Governments, instead of keeping the railways in proper repair, grabbed all the money paid by the public in fares and freightage; applied it to the relief of general taxation; and let the stations and rolling stock decay until their railways were the worst in the world, and there was a general clamor for their denationalization. Private profiteering enterprises have gone to pieces in the same way and worse; but, as they have been responsible to themselves only, their failures and frauds have passed unnoted, whilst the failures and frauds of Governments have raised great popular agitations and even provoked revolutions. The misdeeds of Governments are public and conspicuous: the misdeeds of private traders are practically invisible; and thus an illusion is created that Governments are less honest and efficient than private traders. It is only an illusion; but all the same, honesty and good faith are as necessary in nationalized businesses as in private ones. Our British nationalized services are held up as models of integrity; yet the Postmaster-General overcharges us a little for our letters, and puts the profit into the pockets of the propertied class in the form of reduced income tax; and the Admiralty is continually fighting against the tendency to keep down taxation by starving the navy. These depredations do not amount to much; but they illustrate what may be done when voters are not vigilant and well instructed.