And Now, the Double-Deal?

October 6, 1952

“Doublethink,” according to the late George Orwell, who coined the word, means “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” It seems to me that “doubletalk,” now used with a vague range of meanings, would be most useful if it were employed only as the strict parallel of “doublethink”—to mean saying two contradictory things at the same time, and professing to believe both.

Doubletalk and doublethink are certainly not new in politics, but Governor Stevenson seems to have raised them to a systematic art. He is either as undecided as Hamlet, or emphatically in favor of both alternatives, like the impetuous young man who jumped on his horse and rode off furiously in every direction.

In his Labor Day speech, as I pointed out here in the Newsweek of Sept. 15, the governor at the same time proposed (1) government “recommendation of [strike] settlement terms,” “arbitration,” and “seizure” of the companies that hesitate to accept the government’s terms, and declared (2) that such governmental interference would “keep these cases out of the White House” and leave the settlement of labor disputes “where it belongs—and that’s with the parties.”

In his speech in Baltimore on inflation Stevenson was simultaneously for huge spending and drastic economy—and got rousing applause for both views. In the same speech he was simultaneously for “a free economy . . . free men . . . free markets,” and “if it has to come, tighter wage controls as well as tighter price controls.”

One trouble is that Stevenson would rather fondle a phrase than wrestle with a fact. He prefers the sound to the meaning of words. He is in favor of “the government’s cutting its non-essential expenditures to the bare bones of safety”—forgetting that if expenditures are “nonessential” they need not be made at all.

Many of his rhetorical pronouncements have a boomerang quality. How can he expect to impress taxpayers, one is tempted to ask, by declaring that the government “must spend every penny as though it were a $5 bill,” when the Truman government is already spending $5 bills as though they were pennies?

But the basic reason why Stevenson cannot talk realistically about inflation lies beyond his own limitations as a thinker and as an economist. He cannot tell the truth about inflation without, like General Eisenhower, putting the responsibility for it squarely where it belongs—on the spending and “cheap money” policies of the Truman Administration. Stevenson’s phrase about $5 bills was unfortunate because it reminds us that it is a literal fact, and not a joke, that the Truman Administration this year is spending more than $5 for every quarter spent by President Hoover in 1930. The $80,000,000,000 we are spending this year is twenty-seven times as much as we spent in 1929. And Stevenson has to pretend that all this has to be spent, and that if the government is now spending $53,000,000,000 for defense, for example, it must be buying us $53,000,000,000 of defense and not, say, only $20,000,000,000 worth.

Stevenson assumes that defense expenditures necessarily raise the average level of prices. But of course they would not do so if the government took just as much away from civilian income in added taxes as it used for added defense expenditures, and if it did not print more money.

It is the increase in the money supply, brought about by governmental policy, that is the basic cause of inflation. The money supply has been increased from $64,000,000,000 at the end of 1939 to $193,000,000,000 today. This is not even mentioned by Stevenson. Nor does he tell us that the Federal Reserve is once more buying government securities and adding to inflation. Instead, like Mr. Truman, he ignores all this, and comes out for the fraudulent remedy of price control “until prices stop going up”—in other words, until the government itself stops pushing them up by printing more money.