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the management of its multitudinous enterprises just like any otherowner. Indeed it cannot escape this because, as the price and profitregulator is not there to determine the movement of goods, thishas to be done by deliberate fiat of the government entrepreneur.But the United States Government is not a holding company, doesnot own the producing units of the country. Planning for the economicsystem by the United States Government would involve a verydifferent problem. It would have to plan for factories, farms, stores,utilities which it does not own, which are owned by private individuals,which private individuals must finance, and in which they mustrisk their funds in the hope of profits. Such plans would ultimatelytake the direction of coercion of investors, producers, and distributors,which is unthinkable in a free society. A communist dictatorshipcan do this. A fascist dictatorship may for a limited time. Buta free democratic society cannot do it. Such a society might attemptto tell the laborer where he would work. In a grave enoughemergency it may take a worker by the neck and set him down inan arms plant or behind a store counter. But it could never succeedin compelling a man to go into business or to expand a business withhis own funds. Only dictators can do this, and then only for alimited time.The Planners got a good deal of support from unthinking peopleon the simple score of common sense in the idea of planning as awise course for all human beings. But the promoters of the ideaof planning were thinking of something quite different. They werethinking of a change in our form of society in which the governmentwould insert itself into the structure of business, not merelyas a policeman, but as a partner, collaborator, and banker. But thegeneral idea was first to reorder the society by making it a plannedand coerced economy instead of a free one, in which business wouldbe brought together into great guilds or an immense corporativestructure, combining the elements of self-rule and governmentsupervision with a national economic policing system to enforcethese decrees.This, after all, is not so very far from what business had beentalking about. Business wanted the anti-trust laws suspended toenable it to organize into effective trade groups to plan its common193