Democratic Platform Economics

July 26, 1948

The ideal that emerges from the Democratic platform is the complete paternalistic state. Less and less are the people to do anything for themselves. More and more are the bureaucrats to do everything for them—insure their health, federalize their education, build their homes, boost their wages, raise the prices at which they sell and lower the prices at which they buy. Everybody is expected to owe everything to the officeholders in Washington. Everybody is expected to forget that the officeholders can give nothing to B and C and D unless they have first taken it from A. A is the taxpayer, the forgotten man. The effect of confiscatory taxation on his incentives and on the national production is ignored. Spend and spend, tax and tax, and—elect and elect?

The sheer effrontery of some of the economic planks in the Democratic platform makes them read like intentional humor. “The Republican 80th Congress is directly responsible for the existing and ever-increasing cost of living.” Why? Because it refused to give Mr. Truman power to dictate prices. Mr. Truman thinks that the cause of inflation is the absence of price control. Nowhere in the Democratic platform are the real causes of inflation so much as whispered. Nothing is

said about the threefold increase since 1939, brought about by Democratic fiscal and monetary policies, in the volume of money and credit. No connection is pointed out between all the foodstuffs being shipped abroad under the Marshall Plan and the consequent rise of food prices here.

The platform, in fact, demands still higher Federal spending on everything—social security, education, housing, veterans, public works, TVA’s, school lunches. Though the American taxpayers stagger under the greatest absolute peacetime burden of expenditures that the taxpayers of this or any nation have ever been asked to bear, they are calmly informed that their expenditures are still “inadequate.”

Affecting to deplore high prices on one hand, the platform boasts of them on the other. It is stuffed with figures on the increase of wage income, farm income, business and professional income. It never once seems to have occurred to those who inserted these figures that they are simply high prices looked at from the other side. If the Republican Congress is responsible for the high prices that consumers pay, then it should also get credit for the high prices that producers receive. They are precisely the same prices. But the Democrats blame the first on the Republicans and grab credit for the second themselves.

Indeed, they want to boost prices and costs still higher. They insist on jacking up minimum wages from 40 to 75 cents an hour—an increase of 87½ percent. This would, of course, push up wages all along the line, for skilled workers would insist on the maintenance of existing differentials. Pushing up costs further would push up prices further.

The platform insists on still more direct ways of increasing prices. Though in one section it complains that food is becoming too expensive for the average wage earner “and the prospects are more frightening each day,” it demands at another point “a permanent system of flexible price supports for agricultural products”—to make the prospect still more frightening. If a permanent system of price supports for agricultural commodities, why not a permanent system of price supports for all commodities? Why the discrimination? Could a shabby and unprincipled scramble for votes have anything to do with the matter? Yet while demanding that the prices of unionists and farmers be pushed up by law, and that the prices of nearly everybody else be pushed down by law, the platform blandly declares itself in favor of “free enterprise” and opposed to any “arbitrary and discriminatory restrictions.”

On labor relations the platform is even more inconsistent, if that is possible. It demands “the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act.” This is a direct repudiation of the party’s own Congressional record. Only 81 Democrats in Congress voted against the Taft-Hartley law, while 120 voted for its enactment. In fact, 126 Democrats in Congress voted to override the Truman veto, compared with only 93 who voted to sustain it. What a plank for that record!