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The masses would be shorn of their power by this political elite justas the army of businessmen would be shorn of their power by theintellectual bureaucracy that would relieve them of the drudgeryof making decisions about their affairs.Wherever these new socialist-capitalist intellectuals bobbed upwith their remedies, these took the form of what they called planning.The very word "planning" is blown full with double meanings.No intelligent mind can suggest a reasonable objection to planningfor any human institution, including the capitalist system. Toone this will mean that the reasonable man will look over that system,locate its faults, ask what are the special factors of life in the system,where and what are the glands which supply it with its vitality,what exhausts and enervates them at one time and surcharges themwith unhealthy energy at another. Having answered these questions,he will ask what arrangements ought to be made to make this systemfunction at its highest possible capacity for human good. But thisis not the meaning in the idea of "planning" as the word is used bythe new school of national socialist planners. With them planning isa continuous function of government. It means blueprinting thestructure of every man's business, charting the course of every industry,centering in great government bureaucracies the initiationand direction of every economic mechanism, making decisions aboutthe behavior of every businessman and every business group flowacross a desk in the capital.Bruck, in his Social and Economic History of Germany, expressesthe opinion that the first step toward the final disaster was made by"Walter Rathenau. Rathenau was head of the AJlgemeine-Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft,the leading electrical company of Germany, andwas given to philosophical rumination on the economic condition ofhis country. When the war began he was put in charge of the organizationof Germany's industrial front. He began his work in a smallroom in the War Office where he and his colleagues began to group thevarious economic categories essential to the war effort. They beganwith iron and steel, and little by little almost every importantbranch of industry was formed into organized bodies under thesupervision of the government. Complete compulsory cartels werecreated. The organization, beginning in a little office, quickly pro-II2