Collectivism Marches On

November 7, 1949

One of the strange perversions that have crept into our political life is the habit of praising Congress for the amount of legislation it has passed or denouncing it for “dawdling” when it passes little. One would think that the more new laws a Congress put on the books, the more things it meddled in, the more new restrictions and compulsions it put on the citizens, and the more it took from the taxpayers to hand to some special interest, the better.

President Truman called the 80th “the worst Congress ever” because he considered it a “do-nothing” Congress. He was wrong. The 80th Congress put no fewer than 1,363 new laws on the books. True, this was 263 less than the 79th; but it beat the 78th by 206. To catch up with the 80th, Mr. Truman’s more favored 81st will have to enact at least 526 laws more. In the nine-month session just closed it passed 837 bills.

Is it really possible for any President (who must approve or veto each of them) to decide within a few months on the individual merits of more than 800 separate bills? Is it possible for any congressman to do so—though he too is called upon to vote on all? And if no single human mind whatever is capable of judging the individual consequences of each of these hundreds of new laws, not to speak of their composite interaction, how can the net result be called intelligent, coherent, or responsible lawmaking?

So far from denouncing a do-nothing Congress, we might better pray for one. What the country needs is an undo-something Congress.

In trying to judge the record of the last session, we are compelled to center arbitrarily on a handful of items. On the credit side, Congress ratified the Atlantic Pact, extended the reciprocal-trade agreements, and adopted some of the Hoover recommendations for reorganizing the government. It commendably refused to throw out the Taft-Hartley Act in order to substitute something much worse, and it fortunately failed to plunge ahead with Point Four, or to enact a new grab-bag social-security program, or to rush through compulsory health insurance. On the debit side, the cumulative record was alarming. The session adopted a housing bill that was both collectivistic in concept and inflationary in effect. It boosted the legal minimum wage from 40 cents to at least 75 cents an hour. This must either create unemployment for the very people it is intended to benefit, or force further inflation to prevent such a result. The session adopted a “compromise” price-support bill for farm commodities which constituted the most openly cynical and recklessly expensive bid for the farm vote ever made. It provided for additional storage facilities to withhold more foodstuffs from the American public, create artificial scarcities, and force consumers to pay higher prices.

It authorized $5,600,000,000 more Marshall-Plan money without even requiring in return policies to promote freedom and recovery instead of collectivism and crises. It appropriated $1,314,000,000 for arms aid on the false assumption that the recipient governments couldn’t afford to pay for arms themselves. It spent more than $46,000,000,000 and headed toward another deficit of $5,000,000,000 to $10,000,000,000.

In brief, the last session of Congress drove the country still farther toward collectivism and inflation. It assumed that every domestic and foreign problem could be solved simply by seizing still more from the American taxpayer and handing it over to someone else. The mere fact that the last session refused to drive even faster into collectivism should not blind us to how far it actually went.

Yet this Congress, which was so busy thinking of how many better uses it could make of the taxpayer’s money than the taxpayer could, didn’t find time to do anything to curb the power of the industrywide unions that Congress itself has built up. The private power of a handful of union bosses to paralyze the nation’s entire economic life unless their demands are met seemed a matter too trivial for Congressional notice. It considered 700 other things more important.