How to Combat Communism

June 21, 1948

Candidate Truman, in the course of his barnstorming campaign for the Democratic nomination, adopted and elaborated one of the favorite clichés of the Wallace-ites and muddleheaded “liberals”:

“As far as the United States is concerned, the menace of Communism is not the activities of a few foreign agents or the political activities of a few isolated individuals. The menace of Communism lies primarily in those areas of American life where the promise of democracy remains unfulfilled.

“If some of our people are living in slum housing and nothing is done about it, that is an invitation to Communism. If some of our people are forced to work at substandard wages and nothing is done about it, that is an invitation to Communism. If some of our people are arbitrarily denied the right to vote or deprived of other basic rights and nothing is done about it, that is an invitation to Communism. . . . And finally, if high prices are depriving some of our people of the necessities of life and nothing is done about it, that is an invitation to Communism. . . . Let us adopt legislation that will provide our citizens with the homes they need.”

If it is bad economic conditions that are primarily responsible for the spread of the Communist ideology, how does it happen that this ideology has reached its highest influence in the United States precisely at a time when its people enjoy the highest standard of living ever reached by any nation in the history of mankind?

Let us compare living standards in America, which Mr. Truman still seems to find so deplorable, and living standards in Communist Russia. Has Mr. Truman ever read the report of the Department of Labor, showing that the average worker in Russia is about one-tenth as well off as the American worker in terms of what his wages will buy? Will we be inviting Communism until we produce a living standard here eleven times as high as Russia’s instead of only ten times as high?

No doubt our housing conditions are not all they might be. But shouldn’t someone tell Mr. Truman that in Moscow, even before the Nazi invasion, only one family in seventeen occupied more than a single room?

In America nearly three out of every four families has an automobile. Will we be inviting Communism until three out of every four families also has a yacht and an airplane?

As for political liberty, what sort of mentality is it that, because full political rights may in a few sections and cases be abridged here, prefers the sort of completely terrorized “elections” which were recently held in Czechoslovakia, and longs for the horrors of the Russian slave camps? Must everything be absolutely perfect here, must we produce a paradise on earth, to keep people from clamoring for the Communist hell?

Let us continue to improve economic conditions by all means. That, in fact, is what capitalism has been steadily doing for years, for generations. It has done it so well that its miraculous achievement is taken for granted, as if it were something that would occur automatically under any system. So Mr. Truman wants more houses, not through free enterprise, but through legislation and government subsidies. He wants higher wages, not through increased production, but through more coercion on employers. He wants to control inflation, not by reforming the government’s own monetary and fiscal policies, but by the power to dictate prices—though the choking of production by price control abroad is one of the main reasons why capitalist America now supports planned and socialized Europe.

The way to combat Communism is to teach our people, and especially our political leaders, how infinitely superior capitalism has already shown itself to be. Certainly we are never going to win the struggle with Communism if we begin by accepting its basic principles and deserting our own, if we abandon our faith in personal liberty and free enterprise to embrace the Communist faith in government planning and government ownership, in bureaucratic omniscience and complete domination by the state.