Monster Government

April 26, 1965

If any two government programs have proved themselves to be enormously expensive failures, they are the price-support program in agriculture and the foreign-aid program. Both were adopted ostensibly as “emergency” schemes. Both were originally supposed to serve their purpose in four years at most. Yet both are still in existence, and look as if they will be with us forever. No one any longer talks of a termination date.

The crop-subsidy program began some 30 years ago. It now costs $4.6 billion a year. This is what the whole Federal government and all its programs cost to run in 1933. The purpose of the program is to reward farmers for producing less. Its effect has been to raise the cost of food to our own poor, to pile up huge unsold farm surpluses in government warehouses, and to stimulate food giveaways or cut-rate “sales” to foreign (including Communist) countries.

President Johnson has nothing to propose but a continuation of the program with slight modifications. The government will spend a little less, but in compensation Americans will pay more for wheat and rice.

FARM BUREAUCRACY

Why does the farm program, in spite of its absurdities, go on? Partly, no doubt, because of pressure groups among farmers. But farmers are deeply divided about the wisdom of the program. Perhaps a more direct cause can be found in the 110,000 employees in the Department of Agriculture, most of whose jobs depend on the continuance of the program, and in whose interest it is to find arguments for that continuance.

Let us turn to foreign aid. From the end of the fiscal year 1945 this has come to the staggering total of $110 billion. Congressman Passman tells us that during the current fiscal year our government will be disbursing some type of foreign aid in 99 foreign nations and nine territories; that there are now 22 Federal agencies dispensing some type of foreign aid, and that the total for the fiscal year 1966 will probably exceed $7 billion.

Has this enormous expenditure accomplished its purposes? The evidence shows that it has promoted dependence and government “planning” and socialism abroad, discouraged sound international private investment, and on net balance retarded world economic development.

AID BUREAUCRACY

Has it halted Communism? Has it even won friends and allies? The truth seems to be precisely the opposite. A shrewd Latin American commentator, Rodolpho Katz, in his weekly economic survey published in Buenos Aires, wrote recently: “There is no more pitiful role on the world stage than that of the savior. Help and aid are everywhere received grudgingly and resentfully. The United States is increasingly experiencing the truth of this, but without apprehending it. Having intervened in many countries in the supposed interest of its nationals, having extended generous aid, political and financial, the United States today is the most vilified nation of the globe, simply because it has proffered aid.” And he illustrates this by recent developments in Indonesia, Latin America, and Europe.

Why does foreign aid continue and even expand? Again, a major part of the answer is the bureaucracy that has been built up under it. As Congressman Passman points out: “There are 71,416 individuals, including participants, on its payrolls. . . . No program in the history of mankind has had as many paid lobbyists as the foreign-aid program. . . . [It] is not in reality a Presidential program. . . . It is a bureaucratic program. The President has too much to do to be able to familiarize himself with the many ramifications, misrepresentations, and claims of accomplishment by the paid bureaucrats, government lobbyists, spenders, and recipients.”

May this not also be part of the explanation for the growth of the programs of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, with its 85,000 employees? Everywhere the full-time experts on these programs are also the people with the greatest interest in expanding the programs. Congress is forced to depend on their figures and arguments, and the programs become self-perpetuating and self-accelerating.