GOP Platform Economics

July 21, 1952

The purpose of the typical party platform is to attract as many and to alienate as few votes as possible. It must try to reconcile or compromise conflicting views within the party. It seeks to find verbal formulas that can mean all things to all men. For these reasons nearly all platforms are full of glittering but vague generalities, and often embody outright contradictions. This year’s Republican platform contains its share.

The platform favors “reduction of expenditures.” But it also asks for more aid for veterans, “amendment of the Old Age and Survivors’ Insurance System to provide coverage for those justly entitled to it but who are now excluded,” and aid to farmers apparently as lavish as any being provided by the Democrats.

The platform deplores the encroachments of Federal jurisdiction. But it believes in “enacting Federal legislation to further just and equitable treatment in the area of discriminatory employment practices.”

The platform favors “the expansion of mutually advantageous world trade.” It promises to “press for the elimination of discriminatory practices against our exports.” It supports our reciprocal-trade agreements “on a basis of true reciprocity.” But then it promises to “safeguard our domestic enterprises and the payrolls of our workers against unfair import competition.” It does not tell us what kind of import competition is “unfair,” One gathers, however, that we may not extend the same cordial welcome to imports from other countries as we expect them to extend toward ours.

Contradictory virtues, too, are claimed for the Taft- Hartley Act. We are told that it guarantees “the right to a job without first joining a union.” But we are also told that it guarantees “the right to establish ‘union-shop’ contracts by agreement with management.” Now, obviously, wherever the majority of a union or a group of union leaders establishes a union-shop contract, the individual loses his right to hold a job without joining a union.

The platform is ambiguous on important points. It promises, for example, to “remove . . . injurious price and wage controls.” Each reader must decide for himself whether this means that the Republican Party will remove all price and wage controls because such controls are necessarily injurious, or whether it will remove only those particular price and wage controls that in its opinion happen to be injurious.

The platform is eloquent in defense of economy and free enterprise. Yet it favors “a farm program aimed at full parity prices for all farm products . . . commodity loans on all nonperishable products . . . expanded soil conservation . . . [and] further development of rural electrification.” Only the Brannan plan could top this for expensiveness.

Yet when all this has been said, the Republican platform, for those who believe in economy and free enterprise, will probably prove incomparably preferable to the Democratic platform; just as the Republican record will probably prove incomparably preferable in this respect either to the past or the prospective Democratic record. On every economic ground this is a far better Republican platform than that of 1948. The monetary policies are courageous and in themselves sound, and would more than justify a change of Administrations:

“1—A Federal Reserve System exercising its functions in the money and credit system without pressure for political purposes from the Treasury or the White House.

“2—To restore a domestic economy, and to use our influence for a world economy, of such stability as will permit the realization of our aim of a dollar on a fully convertible gold basis.”

I am sorry that space does not permit me to point out more fully how much courage, understanding, and good sense are embodied in each of those two declarations. Faithful adherence to them could bring an immediate end to the threat of further inflation.

The platform neatly sums up the New Deal tendency: “For 20 years the Administration has praised free enterprise while actually wrecking it.”