Short Fiction by Mack Reynolds (ready to read books .TXT) 📕

care what happens to their product once they make their profit from it. Business is business. We’ll be at least as good a customer as any of the others have ever been. Eventually, better, since we’ll be getting electric razors into the hands of people who never felt they could afford one before.”

He shook a finger at Tracy. “Manufacturers have been doing this for a long time. I imagine it was the old mail-order houses that started it. They’d get in touch with a manufacturer of, say, typewriters, or outboard motors, or whatever, and order tens of thousands of these, not an iota different from the manufacturer’s standard product except for the nameplate. They’d then sell these for as little as half the ordinary retail price.”

Tracy seemed to think it over for a long moment. Eventually he said, “Even then you’re not going to break any records making money. Your distribution costs might be pared to the bone, but you still have some. There’ll be darn little profit left on each razor you sell.”

Flowers was triumphant again. “We’re not going to stop at razors, once under way. How about automobiles? Have you any idea of the disparity between the cost of production of a car and what they retail for?”

“Well, no.”

“Here’s an example. As far back as about 1930 a barge company transporting some brand-new cars across Lake Erie from Detroit had an accident and lost a couple of hundred. The auto manufacturers sued, trying to get the retail price of each car. Instead, the court awarded them the cost of manufacture. You know what it came to, labor, materials, depreciation on machinery⁠—everything? Seventy-five dollars per car. And that was around 1930. Since then, automation has swept the industry and manufacturing costs per unit have dropped drastically.”

The Freer Enterprises executive was now in full voice. “But even that’s not the ultimate. After all, cars were selling for as cheaply as $425 then. Let’s take some items such as aspirin. You can, of course, buy small neatly packaged tins of twelve for twenty-five cents but supposedly more intelligent buyers will buy bottles for forty or fifty cents. If the druggist puts out a special for fifteen cents a bottle it will largely be refused since the advertising conditioned customer doesn’t want an inferior product. Actually, of course, aspirin is aspirin and you can buy it, in one hundred pound lots in polyethylene film bags, at about fourteen cents a pound, or in carload lots under the chemical name of acetylsalicylic acid, for eleven cents a pound. And any big chemical corporation will sell you U.S.P. grade Milk of Magnesia at about six dollars a ton. Its chemical name, of course, is magnesium hydroxide, or Mg(OH)2, and you’d have one thousand quarts in that ton. Buying it beautifully packaged and fully advertised, you’d pay up to a dollar twenty-five a pint in the druggist section of a modern ultra-market.”

Tracy had heard enough. He said crisply, “All right, Mr. Flowers, of Freer Enterprises, now let me ask you something: Do you consider this country prosperous?”

Flowers blinked. Of a sudden, the man across from him seemed to have changed character, added considerable dynamic to his makeup. He flustered, “Yes, I suppose so. But it could be considerably more prosperous if⁠—”

Tracy was sneering. “If consumer prices were brought down drastically, eh? Mr. Flowers, you’re incredibly naive when it comes to modern economics. Do you realize that one of the most significant developments, economically speaking, took place in the 1950s; something perhaps more significant than the development of atomic power?”

Flowers blinked again, mesmerized by the other’s new domineering personality. “I⁠ ⁠… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The majority of employees in the United States turned from blue collars to white.”

Flowers looked pained. “I don’t⁠—”

“No, of course you don’t or you wouldn’t be participating in a subversive attack upon our economy, which, if successful, would lead to the collapse of Western prosperity and eventually to the success of the Soviet Complex.”

Mr. Flowers gobbled a bit, then gulped.

“I’ll spell it out for you,” Tracy pursued. “In the early days of capitalism, back when Marx and Engels were writing such works as Capital, the overwhelming majority of the working class were employed directly in production. For a long time it was quite accurate when the political cartoonists depicted a working man as wearing overalls and carrying a hammer or wrench. In short, employees who got their hands dirty, outnumbered those who didn’t.

“But with the coming of increased mechanization and eventually automation and the second industrial revolution, more and more employees went into sales, the so-called service industries, advertising and entertainment which has become largely a branch of advertising, distribution, and, above all, government which in this bureaucratic age is largely a matter of regulation of business and property relationships. As automation continued, fewer and fewer of our people were needed to produce all the commodities that the country could assimilate under our present socioeconomic system. And I need only point out that the average American still enjoys more material things than any other nation, though admittedly the European countries, and I don’t exclude the Soviet Complex, are coming up fast.”

Flowers said indignantly, “But what’s this charge that I’m participating in a subversive⁠—”

“Mr. Flowers,” Tracy overrode him, “let’s not descend to pure maize in our denials of the obvious. If this outfit of yours, Freer Enterprises, was successful in its fondest dreams, what would happen?”

“Why, the consumers would be able to buy commodities at a fraction of the present cost!”

Tracy half came to his feet and pounded the table with fierce emphasis. “What would they buy them with? They’d all be out of jobs!”

Frederic Flowers bug-eyed him.

Tracy sat down again and seemingly regained control of himself. His voice was softer now. “Our social system may have its strains and tensions, Mr. Flowers, but it works and we don’t want anybody throwing wrenches in its admittedly delicate machinery. Advertising is currently one of the biggest industries of the country. The entertainment industry, admittedly now