The Total Welfare State

August 1, 1960

The Democratic platform reads, at times, more like a parody than a serious document. It states mere wishes or problems as if it were stating solutions. It favors “an enduring peace . . . ending nuclear tests under workable safeguards . . . preventing surprise attack.” If you ask how it proposes to achieve these goals, why, it will set up “a national peace agency”!

When it comes to economic policy the platform drops all pretense to consistency or responsibility. It promises to “unshackle” American enterprise apparently by imposing new controls in every direction. We are told that “our economy can and must grow at an average rate of 5 percent annually.” Why stop at 5 percent? Why not 6 percent? Or if we are only talking about “goals” why not 50 percent? The platform framers should recall Shakespeare: “If to do were easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.”

The Democrats “pledge” themselves “to policies that will achieve this goal without inflation.” However, “as the first step in speeding economic growth,” they demand an inflationary cheap-money policy. They would try to offset their own monetary inflation, they strongly imply, by the reimposition of price controls.

‘THE RIGHT TO A JOB’

The platform presents an “economic bill of rights.” This includes the “right” not only to a job but to a “remunerative” job. Nothing whatever is said about the diligence or qualifications of the worker, or about who is to be forced to supply the job, if it doesn’t exist. A new WPA?

“Full employment,” which has become a synonym for a policy of inflation, is made “a paramount objective.” “The right to a job,” we are told, “requires the restoration of full support for collective bargaining.” But it does not require state right-to-work laws. These are to be forbidden.

“Every farmer” (Why just the farmer? Why not everybody in every line?) is guaranteed “the right . . . to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.” Nothing is said about the need for his particular crop. Nor are we told who is to be forced to buy his crop at a profit above his cost, however high that happens to be. There is to be “positive action to raise farm income to full parity levels.” As more surpluses pile up in our warehouses they are to be treated “not as a liability but as a national asset.”

Everyone has the “right” not only to a home but to a “decent” home, even to “recreation”; and, of course, “the right to adequate medical care.” For the cities, a new Democratic Administration will help “clear their slums, dispose of their sewage, educate their children, transport suburban commuters . . . and combat juvenile delinquency.” No family or city will need to do anything for itself. As the French economist Bastiat put it more than a century ago: “The state is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody.”

ALL SUBSIDIZE ALL

After the Democratic platform pledges new and bigger expenditures in every direction, it declares with bland effrontery that “these needs can be met with a balanced budget, with no increase in present tax rates, and with some surplus for the gradual reduction of our national debt.” However, “if . . . the unfolding demands of the new decade . . . cannot be fulfilled without higher taxes,” the Democrats promise to impose them.

What we have, in sum, is a pledge to impose a total welfare state.

The Democratic Presidential candidate, after ordering and accepting all these sweeping promises of security, with no mention of any return by the individual in effort or obligation, then declared, in baffling contradiction, that he was appealing to the American people’s “pride, not their pocketbook,” and promising “more sacrifice, instead of more security.” More sacrifice just for taxpayers?

But he has yet to reveal the details of his personal platform. So far, its chief plank might be summed up by paraphrasing the Lord Chancellor in “Iolanthe”:

Youth is the sole embodiment

Of everything that’s excellent.

It alone discerns the truth,

And I, my friends, embody Youth.