Karl Hess: Presidential Speechwriter Turned Homesteader

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HESS: The point is that bigness just doesn't work in business, government, or any other kind of organization. Capitalist or communist. Bureaucracy always screws the little guy it always makes his life worse instead of better. And it always gets in its own way.

Look at our own armed forces if you want a textbook example of how much better decentralization can be than central planning. We used to win wars, you know back when John Wayne, chief petty officers, and sergeants ran our Army and Navy from the bottom up. That's the way we did it in World War Two-the one I was in-and we could have beaten Mars if its team had shown up. We hung loose, we had a lot of fun, we were tough, and we won.

By the time we got mired down in Vietnam, though, the American military establishment no longer expected its troops to think for themselves out in the field. Everything was directed by bookkeepers back in the Pentagon somewhere. The Defense Department had become a gigantic blundering bureaucracy. And our armed forces had gone to pot:

Unfortunately for us, however, the Viet Cong were still doing things the way we had done them thirty years before. They were organized from the bottom up. Their guys-who each only carried something like sixteen rounds of ammunition and a little bag of rice-could get in and out of a tight situation a dozen times while our soldiers were still waiting for an air strike or a hot meal to come up from behind. And you can't beat people like that the way we were fighting. You can't beat that kind of small-scale organization. We could have fought the V.C. with our bloated bureaucracy for a hundred years and still never won.

PLOWBOY: I know. You presented that argument quite well IN Dear America. Just as you showed that our government and business establishments-which currently emphasize size over everything else-are, for this very reason, failing miserably in most of the endeavors they undertake.

HESS: Sure. Take food production, if you want another example. There simply is no real efficiency in the ULTRA- LARGE production of most foodstuffs. It appears to be more efficient to squeeze twenty little farmers off the land, lump their small spreads into one big corporate farm, and then work it with giant machines and heavy applications of fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation water. But, in real terms, it's not more efficient at all. Quite the contrary. That whole collective agribusiness approach to farming is extremely wasteful especially of the fossil fuels which go into the manufacture, distribution, and maintenance of all the equipment, fertilizer, and chemicals that it needs. And, as we know, those fossil fuels are now getting very scarce and increasingly expensive. What will agribusiness do when they're gone?

PLOWBOY: But Earl Butz says

HESS: Well (chuckle), Earl Butz is an idiot, so we don't count him. He says things such as, "We should have big collective farms like the Soviet Union."

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