Whose Welfare State?

February 29, 1960

Former President Hoover has pointed out that Marxist thinking infects us and has even “got frozen” into the Eisenhower Administration. Senator Goldwater pleads with his Republican colleagues, in Human Events, to offer the American voter a clear-cut alternative to “the paternalistic superstate with its ever-increasing spending and its ever-increasing taxation and its ever- increasing interference in the life of the individual.” But Arthur Krock points out in the New York Times that the President’s sympathetic “consideration” of proposals for free hospital and nursing care of elderly citizens, to be paid for out of Federal revenues, is another Republican step toward the welfare state. The voters, he concludes, “will find it difficult to detect a basic ideological distinction between the two major parties.”

At present there is hardly a major field in which the voter can detect a significant party difference. Let us run through a list.

Social Security: All the social-security increases of the last seven years have been bipartisan. The President himself has insisted on bigger and longer unemployment benefits. True, there is a small party difference regarding the Senate’s $1.8 billion aid-to-education bill, providing funds for both school construction and teachers’ salaries.

Farm Subsidies: The farm price support fiasco has become a national disgrace. In his message to Congress of Feb. 9, the President pointed out that $3.5 billion of Federal funds are tied up in wheat alone (a crop which provides only 6 percent of cash receipts from sales of farm products). It is costing the government $1.5 million a day, or more than $1,000 a minute, just to store the wheat surpluses created by its own price policies. But the President does not dare to suggest termination of the program. He expresses a mild hope that price supports will be more “realistic” and controls fewer. He advocates an even greater “soil bank”—60 million acres.

Foreign Aid: Though this program was Democratic and Trumanic in origin, Mr. Eisenhower now pleads for more “economic” foreign aid than even Democrats seem willing to give. Most of this will go to subsidize socialistic programs (as in India) which can only slow down rather than accelerate economic progress in the receiving countries.

Spending: Average annual Federal nondefense expenditures, seven Truman years (1947–53), $23.7 billion; average seven Eisenhower years (1954–60), $27.3 billion. The President has asked for repeal of the legislative ceiling of 4¼ percent on long-term bonds, a ceiling which can now have dangerous inflationary consequences. A Democratic Congress has refused to act. But Mr. Eisenhower has certainly been less insistent than the situation warrants.

Labor: The Administration admonished the steel companies not to grant an inflationary wage increase; encouraged them to hold out during a costly 116-day strike; finally intervened in behalf of an inflationary wage settlement; yet did nothing and is doing nothing to revise laws that empower industrywide unions to choke off production until their demands are met.

Hostility to Business: The Administration charged 29 big oil companies with conspiracy to fix prices. A Federal District judge has now acquitted the companies, declaring that the evidence submitted by the government did not “rise above the level of suspicion.”

Communism: To the ideological warfare daily conducted against a free economic and political system by Communistic propaganda, the Administration has made feeble, sporadic, and apologetic replies. Even when, at our doorstep, Cuba expropriates American property and insults us, our government makes only a weak-kneed and perfunctory protest, and continues to subsidize Cuban sugar imports.

True zealots for the welfare state will prefer to have it run by original New Dealers. Unless traditional Republicans are made aware between now and November of a real party difference, they will do what so many did in 1948—sit on their hands.