ROBERT LEKACH MAN
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rich and poor nations will require the former to swap larger and larger
quantities of finished goods, technology, military equipment, and
managerial services to the raw-material producers . As an arithmetic
result, economic growth in Europe, Japan, and North America, now
practically halted by the current mini-depression, will at best resume
at sharply diminished rates and at worst prove accurate the Club of
Rome's prophecies of zero growth.
Hence the third crisis of redistribution is located within the rich
nations . When growth slows or stops, politics and economic policy
center upon the redistribution of a static national product. The
British economist Rudolf Klein analyzed the resulting social struggle
this way :
Immediately the competition for resources becomes a zero-sum
game . One man 's prize is another man 's loss. If the blacks want
to improve their share of desirable goods , it can only be at the
expense of whites . If the over-65s are
to
be given higher pensions ,
or improved medical services, it can only be at the expense of the
working population or the young .
At least for the moment, Dr. Klein may be a touch pessimistic, for
in the United States the real income of average workers has for
several years steadily declined without evoking any strong political
response . Still, if by mischance the electorate installs Gerald Ford
or Ronald Reagan in the White House for a four-year term, the
probability is that the current drift toward still greater inequality
will accelerate enough to stimulate rebellion on the part of the losers .
Secretary Simon, owner of one of the better eighteenth-century
minds, has agitated persistently for tax relief for stockholders and
corporations . Should such pleas win Congressional hearts, this third
crisis of redistribution will be "resolved" temporarily by preserving
property at the expense of work incomes. The resolution could be no
more than transitory for reasons that Marx identified over a century
ago, when he isolated as capitalism's fatal contradiction the system's
capacity to flood the market with merchandise and yet divide
incomes so unequally that repetitive shortages of customers threaten
to bring on crises of glut and mass unemployment .
The peculiarities of English politics have led to the opposite
mode of redistributing a national product which in Great Britain
