Point Four Is Growing Up

March 26, 1951

The global giveaway mania seems to grow by feeding on itself. The latest illustration is the report to the President by the International Development Advisory Board headed by Nelson Rockefeller. It proposes nothing less than a new $4,500,000,000 foreign lending-and-giving program to the so-called underdeveloped areas of the world.

The Administration made Point Four look very modest and innocent at the beginning, you will remember, by asking for only $45,000,000 for the first year, Now this sum was ridiculously small when compared with the grandiose objective of a new world flowing with milk and honey that Point Four was to bring about. It did not take much shrewdness to calculate that if there were 1,075,000,000 people in the “underdeveloped areas,” then the $35,000,000 actually appropriated meant only about 3 cents per ward per year—hardly enough to assure the economic millennium.

Some of us were so cynical as to ask whether the requested appropriation had not purposely been made ridiculously small compared with the tremendous pretensions of the program in order to lure Congress into accepting the principle that the American taxpayer somehow owed all the rest of the world a living. Even Democratic Chairman Connally of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee publicly expressed his apprehensions: “As time goes on I can feel the pressure coming in the window for big projects.”

His prophetic soul did not have to wait long. Here, only one year later, is a program involving altogether 100 times as much as that modest little entry fee of $45,000,000. And as I need hardly point out, we are not going to raise foreign living standards very much by lending or giving out only $2 to $5 per beneficiary per year. Will we be offered next year, perhaps, a really “adequate” program, bearing the same 100-to-1 ratio to this year’s, say, as this year’s does to last?

The stated purpose of this new proposal is to “unify” and “centralize” “all major United States foreign economic operations.” The board finds 23 American agencies already engaging in such operations in addition to 33 different foreign agencies. Its report admits, with masterly understatement, that “in some cases there is duplication.” But it does not specifically recommend the abolition of any one of these overlapping and duplicating agencies. It simply proposes to absorb them in a supercolossal U.S. Overseas Economic Administration.

Moreover, the report not only leaves some foreign hand-out agencies outside even this proposed consolidation; it suggests the creation of several new ones. One of them would be a new affiliate of the International Bank. With the ominous political record of the Reconstruction Finance Corp. before it, the board nonetheless proposes the creation of an “International Finance Corp. . . . to make loans . . . to private enterprise without the requirements of government guarantees.” And finally, though the new overall agency is of course put forward as “a vital part of our own defense mobilization,” it is nevertheless to be a “permanent governmental agency.”

As one who, in vain, wrote a 48 page pamphlet called Illusions of Point Four, it seems to me a rather futile exercise to call attention once more to all the false assumptions of theory and fact that underlie these Point Four proposals. Americans should be indebted, however, to Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar, the Indian representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (who demands that the U.S. provide bigger and better giveaway programs), for admitting so frankly that Point Four “may have to be at the expense of developed countries.” “The choice,” he says, “may be between a comfortable motorcar for an average American family or a motor truck for carrying passengers or goods in remote parts of the East.” At least Sir Ramaswami recognizes clearly that we in America must do with less if we give part of our goods away, whereas most of our own Point Four champions seem to argue that the more we give away the richer we will get.