Paradise on a Platter

January 17, 1949

If there is anything any of us ever dreamed of having that Mr. Truman did not demand in his message to Congress it must have been an oversight. He called for more highways, more electric power, more reclamation, an increase of 87½ percent in minimum wages, “parity” income for farmers, more farm storage space, more rural electrification, more TVA’s, more irrigation, bigger social-security benefits, prepaid-medical insurance, more doctors, more hospitals, more nurses, more teachers, more schools, more low-rent public housing, more slum clearance, more farm housing, and also more foreign aid.

What is astonishing, given his premises, is that he stopped where he did. If we are regularly to make a present to millions of people of all or part of their housing and food, why not also their furniture and clothing, stoves and refrigerators, shoes and overcoats, books and musical instruments?

“The number of low-rent public housing units provided for in the legislation should be increased to 1,000,000 units in the next seven years,” declares Mr. Truman. But then he adds: “Even this number of units will not begin to meet our need for new housing.” If it won’t, why not increase it to the number that will? Isn’t it simply a matter of raising a figure in a law? And won’t the only opponents of this increase be the “selfish interests” and “the privileged few”?

And why increase the minimum wage only to a niggardly 75 cents an hour? Why not $1, $2, $5 an hour? Or why not simply pass a law that people must be paid enough to buy whatever they happen to need? Then we could skip all the rest of Mr. Truman’s giveaway program.

Once upon a time, when programs of this sort were proposed (though on a far less grandiose and imaginative scale), a few men of little faith used to inquire timidly where the money was coming from. Such questions are now laughingly waved aside with the simple answer that we will put more taxes on the big corporations or on the rich, or with the still simpler answer that the government can print the money.

We cannot, in fact, understand what the catch is in all such glittering handout programs unless we pass beyond the monetary veil to the underlying realities. And the chief underlying reality is that we cannot distribute more than we produce. Total production, even American production, is limited. Even Mr. Truman pointed out correctly that “our production is still not large enough to satisfy our demands.” Now it is private enterprise, not government, that produces. The government cannot give anything to A without first or ultimately taking it from B. And this is the elementary truth that Mr. Truman’s supersonic New Dealism blandly ignores.

Mr. Truman asks, for example, for “prompt Federal financial aid to the states.” The Federal government, of course, has nothing to give to the states that it doesn’t first of all take from the people of the states. Mr. Truman insists on artificial price supports for farm products. This means that city workers will be forced to pay higher prices for their food. He insists on higher minimum wages. This means higher production costs. It means that workers will be forced to pay higher prices for industrial products. It means eventual unemployment.

Mr. Truman does not see that all his demands compete with each other. We cannot have more of everything unless we produce more of everything. Other things being equal, we can have more hospitals only at the cost of fewer highways, or more foreign aid only at the cost of fewer farm houses.

The government can pile benefits on A only by taking them from B. In doing this it will further undermine the production incentives of both A and B. For A will get something without working for it and B will have more taken from him no matter how hard he works.

Mr. Truman’s program, in short, will mean not more for all of us but less for all of us.