STRENGTHENING THE UNITED NATIONS

XV.

Basic Subsistence

Cloth, shelter, food staples, medical services: the United States alone can capitalize, build, operate and then turn over complexes for producing these goods for a billion people in five years. This is indisputable, among other reasons because in effect the U.S. Government has done the equivalent during wars and its companies have done the equivalent in peacetime. The chief difference is in the qualitative character of the new demands upon the American people. That they will rise to the occasion, if it is courageously explained to them, is probable.

The doubt is neither in the provisioning nor in the will; it is in the hostility of degenerate local elites and in the failure to buttress the implanted services by severe demopolicies and imaginative and just financing arrangements. The plants must be rapidly transferred to local management, and to local and worker ownership.

In the case of subsistence guarantees -- the guarantee to every person of the right to draw at will from public stores a decent minimum quantity of clothing, shelter, food, and medical supplies without payment or question --these sums would be paid as transfers from the richer to the poorer countries, as well as within the richer and poorer countries by internal production. The Russian Government, for example, should even now as a prelude to the New World System, stock subsistence stores for its whole population: flour, dried milk, sugar, canned meat, tea, cloth, plastic boots, building boards, bus tickets, and give over the rest of consumer production to the largely free market.

Once people get used to the idea that a sufficiency of basic necessities is available to every person without question, they will not crowd the facilities, they will not riot, they will not resent free enterprise, they will cultivate their gardens, they will exercise their own initiatives, even if they must forego some money in doing so; the socialist ideal would begin to be realized, alongside and depending upon a large free market. The United States needs a similar system; it confronts a huge waste in the bureaus that attempt to help the poor and working classes, whereas all that is needed is the free provision of basic necessities.

Self-help labor and personal production for one's immediate use should be highly valued and promoted, the real value of all of which could reach $6 trillions worldwide. The world government should employ all means to continue and enhance the self-help processes within all nations, in "capitalistic " countries where bureaucracies tend to abound in governments and corporations, in the "socialist" countries where self-help skills and initiatives have been stunted by statism, and in the poor countries where self-help processes have been shriveled by the stripping of local natural resources such as forestland and the grazing commons, by urbanization, and by mass industry at home and a dependence upon mass-produced goods from abroad.