SOCIALISM AND COLD WAR
719
the oligopolists, the "all-powerful" State behaves very differently,
negotiating agreements instead of issuing edicts. The ordinary citi–
zen
must
pay his taxes or go to priwn; the oligopolist
negotiates
an
annual tax agreement, in which he can often set his own terms.
A hundred years ago, when the scale of industry was small, it
was at least rational to argue that, by reducing the power of the
State over the economy and substituting the working of free com–
petition for governmental decision, a society might develop more
healthily and achieve more human happiness than under a paternal
and interfering government. But in our age, with its tendency for
ever greater concentrations of economic power and ever more cen–
tralized control of commercial mass communications, the relation–
ship between free enterprise and individual freedom or consumer's
choice has, as Galbraith shows, become exceedingly remote. Demo–
cratic constitu.tions, therefore, which were traditionally evolved in
order to check the power of the Executive and prevent central des–
potism, are now employed mainly to preserve the irresponsible
power of oligopoly from any kind of popular control.
In his Fabian Lecture/ Professor Richard Titmuss carried Gal–
braith's analysis of modern oligopoly one stage further by applying
it to a single and apparently relatively harmless segment of the
British economy. He showed how, since 1945, an immense new
jungle of irresponsible power has been created by the growth of
pension schemes, stimulated by lavish tax concessions and financed
partly by insurance companies and partly by trustee funds. Professor
Titmuss declared that the creation of these huge pension funds
constitutes
a major shift in economic power in our society. It is a power, a po–
tential power, to affect many important aspects of our economic life
and our social values in the 1960's.
It
is power concentrated in rela–
tively few hands, working at the apex of a handful of giant bureau–
cracies, technically supported by a group of professional experts, and
accountable, in practice, to virtually no one.
He showed how these private pension schemes did something to fill
the vacuum created by the failure of the State to provide an ade–
quate subsistence pension. But he also showed how this mushroom
development has created gross inequalities as between those inside
