The Giveaway Mania Grows

May 22, 1950

Both houses of Congress have not only voted to continue the ERP program for another year, but in addition—the Senate by the narrow margin of a single vote—to underwrite the indefinite commitment of Point Four. This raises the global giveaway program to a new dimension. In the starry eyes of its proponents there is no discernible limit to this program. When it was first proposed to give billions to Europe, a few tried to point out that most of the arguments for the proposal—such as curing an alleged “dollar famine,” boosting foreign living standards, “combating” Communism, or buying peace—could be just as well used as pretexts for throwing billions of the American taxpayers’ funds all around the world. ERP proponents eventually conceded the logic of this corollary. But instead of reexamining their European policy, they merely demanded its worldwide expansion under the name of Point Four.

The majority in Congress now seems seriously to believe that the real issue is whether the first-year authorization for Point Four should be $25,000,000, as voted by the House, or $45,000,000 as voted by the Senate. This point is, of course, of negligible importance. It is as if the buyer of a $500 television set were to raise a fuss about making a down payment of 45 cents instead of a quarter, when the real object of the seller is to get his name on the contract. The television buyer, at least, is getting definite value for his money, and he knows that there is a definite limit to what he will have to pay. But the taxpayers who will be forced to finance Point Four all over the world know neither what it is that they are buying nor what it will eventually cost them. As the global giveaway expands, the arguments for it become constantly vaguer and more rhetorical. Its advocates talk as if you could buy peace the way you buy potatoes. Isn’t it cheaper, they ask, to spend $20,000,000,000 for peace than $103,000,000,000 a year for another war? If anyone asks whether the global giveaway program in fact provides any assurance of peace, the usual answer is that of course it doesn’t, but isn’t it worth a calculated gamble? And if anyone goes on to ask whether this particular gamble has been or could in fact be calculated, or whether the whole program doesn’t simply divert attention from the bankruptcy of our talk-tough-but-act-soft, call-names-but-appease policy toward Russia, he is simply dismissed as an “isolationist.”

The economic arguments for ERP as at present set up, and still more for Point Four, cannot stand analysis. But when one points out, for example, that the so-called “dollar gap,” whether in Europe, India, or Argentina, is brought about solely by exchange control and is otherwise pure humbug, the argument, even if understood and accepted, is dismissed as unimportant. The real reasons for the Marshall plan and Point Four, one is told, are not economic but political.

But when we stop to scrutinize these alleged political reasons, we find them even less convincing than the alleged economic reasons. We are fighting socialism and collectivist controls in Europe by subsidizing their continuance (so that the head of Britain’s Board of Trade can now announce, for example, that Britain’s foreign-exchange control will be kept as a “permanent instrument”). We are fighting Communism by financing it in Yugoslavia. Mr. Truman proposes to fight Communism in China by sending food there—though this would directly or indirectly make more food and other supplies available to the Chinese Communist armies and to the Soviet Union. And he proposes to fight Fascism in the Argentine by relieving the financial difficulties of Perón. Those who are proposing to toss the American taxpayers’ money so recklessly to foreign governments are of course in no position to recommend withholding anything from pressure groups or special interests at home. So foreign and domestic extravagance are turned into arguments for each other, and the spending mania grows by what it feeds on.