The Freeman 1972 - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

596 THE FREEMAN OctoberNo Instant AnswersA lot of good conservatives havebeen quite overwhelmed by developmentsin the last few decades.If they are ancient enough to rememberthe election twenty yearsago - the strong feeling on thepart of many that now we coulddrastically reduce the vast Federalbureaucracy, liquidate the farmprogram, reduce welfare expendituresto a reasonable figure andget people back to work again,trim the national budget so thatno one would recognize it, all thisand Heaven too, if we just electedthe right president come November- well, such a voter may havegiven up on the political processsome while ago. If the frustrationsof the 'Fifties didn't do it,surely the conservative debacle of1964 did. But such a political dropoutfails to understand the historicalprocess. There are no instantproblems or instant solutions.As Walter Lippmann 2 wroteduring the Second World War,"the movement of history is massive,and the mills of the godsgrind slowly. . . ." We need tolearn to look far in the past to see'the beginnings of the present, andto peer down into the tomorrowsto try to see where we are going.Free enterprise did not spring full,blown from the mind of AdamSmith in 1776, nor did the "NewDeal" arise by spontaneous generationin the spring of 1933: bothhad their roots far in the past. IfSocialism has been creeping up onus as far back as any of us canremember, this is the way Capitalismcame into being in the earlydecades of the last century. Theseeds of tomorrow are sproutingtoday, but it isn't easy to guesswhat the flowers and fruit will belike afterward. We human beingsare notoriously poor prophets.One reason why the best laidplans of mice and men go awry isthat history has a way of doinga dramatic about-face every oncein a while and often even a doubleswitch, like the surprise endingsof O. Henry's short stories. Fewpeople could see the threat thatHitIer posed even years after hecam~ to power in 1933; and whenthe Nazi blitz was overwhelmingEurope a little later, few couldsee the possibility of stemmingthe tide. In the .postwar treasontrials in France Pierre Lavalasked the court how anyone in1940 could have guessed that Hitlerwould not win the war. Menlike Winston Churchill and Generalde Gaulle walked by faith,while the quislings and other appeaserswalked by sight. If onecannot outguess history, ,at leasthe can try to be on the side ofright and leave the outcome tothe One who inhabits Eternity.