The Issue of Statism

July 27, 1964

In the preface to his new book, The Republican Opportunity in 1964 (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 148 pages, 95 cents), my colleague Raymond Moley, after explaining how in recent years the terms conservative and liberal have both been torn from their original meaning to describe the precise opposite of what they meant to our forefathers, offers his own description of the present American “liberal” in the modern sense:

“The liberal favors a generous extension of Federal power in areas that have hitherto been the responsibility of the states, the communities, and private organized effort; he believes in and supports more intervention of governments, especially the Federal government, in economic life, even to the extent of setting up government-owned and government-operated businesses; he favors a huge expansion of federally supported personal-welfare programs; he would undertake Federal expenditures on national-resource development, urban reconstruction, and area development. And he justifies the great enlargement of Federal expenditures involved in these programs on the ground that such expenditures promote economic growth. In the face of large deficits there has been added to the liberal’s economic philosophy the concept of deliberately planned deficits in anticipation of larger revenues in future years.”

440 NEW LAWS A YEAR

It struck me how accurately this describes the philosophy and attitude of President Johnson and the Democratic “liberals” in the present Congress. This was illustrated a couple of weeks ago when it was disclosed that the President, in the belief that the passage of the Civil Rights Act had “opened the way to a new creative period” (as one news dispatch put it) in which the government can tackle new domestic problems, had convened a group of special committees, drawn largely from the academic community, to draft recommendations for future legislative and governmental action.

In other words, the President is sure we need still more laws, and if he doesn’t know exactly what they ought to be, he appoints committees to think them up. And these new laws are to be piled on the 800 or so laws that each Congress passes. It passed 4,399 public laws in the last ten years.

What are new laws? They fall into two main categories. First are those that revise previous laws. This implies that Congress made mistakes in the previous laws that the new laws supplant. If, at a moderate estimate, each new or old law contains an average of ten provisions, this means that in every hundred such new laws Congress passes in a session, it may be correcting as many as a thousand previous mistakes. It also implies that it is constantly changing the rules under which people act, so that they cannot launch on new businesses or other long-term enterprises with any assurance that the rules are not going to be changed on them.

A CLEAR CHOICE

The second category of new laws are those that deal with activities not previously covered by law. This means that the government is compelling people to do something or refrain from doing something that they were not previously compelled to do or refrain from doing. In other words, the individual’s liberties are restricted in still another direction.

Congress has become a mass-production factory for legislation, turning out an average of 440 new laws every year. And yet it is continually being prodded by Presidents and in the press for “do-nothingism.” “Progress” and a “creative period,” we are given to understand, consist in the passage of still more hundreds of new laws, or the appropriation of still greater sums to be taken from A and handed to B.

Raymond Moley defines “conservatism” in his book as meaning “a halt in the expansion of government in domestic life and, above all, a reduction in size and scope of the Federal establishment.”

This is what Barry Goldwater stands for, and it is, in the main (with some exceptions), the philosophy that the new Republican platform expounds. For the first time in many years we may witness a Presidential election offering the voters a clear choice of contrasting governmental philosophies.