436
PARTISAN REVIEW
tain lines, it's no good if there are too many businesses. You ought to
kinda keep the other fellow's business in mind. The little businessman
wants to become big, not by directly eating up the other fellow's busi–
ness in competition, but by the indirect ways and means practiced by
his own particular heroes- those already big. In the dream life of
the little businessman, the sure fix is replacing the open market.
But if the little businessman is going back on his liberal spokes–
men, he cannot really be blamed, for the liberal spokesmen, without
knowing it, have also been going back on their little business hero.
Only government, these spokesmen say, can save little business; they
would
guarantee
by law the chances of the small business stratum.
And if you guarantee a chance, it is no longer a chance; it is a sinecure.
What this means is that all the private and public virtues that self–
help, manly competition, and cupidity are supposed to foster would
be denied the little businessman. The government would expropriate
the very basis of political freedom and the flourishing of the free per–
sonality.
If,
as the chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation
has said, "Democracy can only exist in a capitalistic system in which
the life of the individual is controlled by supply and demand," then
it is all over with democracy. However, the chairman adds, that to
save capitalism, the government "must prevent small business from
being shattered and destroyed." In the new way of salvation, in–
herited from the Progressive Era, the old faith in supply and demand
is replaced by the hope of governmental aid and legalized comfort.
Big business doesn't have to compete and doesn't; little business
sometimes has to and always hates it; and all the while, liberal gov–
ernment is trying to ration out the main chance, thus helping to destroy
the old meaning of competition as a style of life.
III
In the old style of life, the way up, according to the classic pat–
tern of liberalism, was to establish a small business enterprise and to
expand it by competition with other such enterprises. That was the
economic cradle of the free personality and, given the equality of op–
po'rtunity and of power that it assumed, the guarantee of political
democracy. The new way up is the white collar way: to get a job
within a governmental or a business bureaucracy and to rise, accord–
ing to the rules that prevail, from one prearranged step to another.
For some 75 per cent of the urban middle class, the salaried employee
component, this fate replaces heroic tactics on the open market.
Before each rung of the fixed ladders, the salaried employees
