Who Is Mislabeling What?

November 19, 1951

In her column in The World-Telegram of Nov. 1, under the heading “Mislabeled Facts,” Eleanor Roosevelt quoted from a pamphlet published by the Foundation for Economic Education (of which the present writer happens to be a trustee). The quotation was: “The welfare state is a name that has been substituted as a more acceptable one for Communism-Socialism wherever, as in the United States, these names are in general disrepute.”

“It seems to me that much that appears in this pamphlet,” says Mrs. Roosevelt, “is dishonest in its thinking. In the first place, the mere tying together of Communism and Socialism is dishonest. They are two quite different things. . . . We can have opinions as to whether all the things that have been done . . . under the name of ‘welfare state’ are wise. . . . However, that does not make us Communist or Socialist.”

Mrs. Roosevelt frequently affects to deplore the “smear” technique. Yet she begins her criticism of a statement with which she disagrees by calling it dishonest. This is an argumentum ad hominem—an attack, not on the merits of an idea, but on the character and motives of those who advance it. Such an attack not only lowers the level of debate, but is irrelevant to the real question, which is whether or not the idea is true.

If there is any charge of dishonesty or deliberate mislabeling to be brought, indeed, it might much more justifiably be lodged against those who deny any connection between the welfare state and Socialism, or between Socialism and Communism. But I prefer to believe that this denial stems in most cases from mere lack of knowledge and confusion of thought.

The Wohlfahrtstaat concept had its origin in Germany, shortly after Bismarck, in 1881, introduced his first social-security bill for “the welfare of all.” If we leap to Feb. 19, 1949, we find Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, in a speech at Occidental College, lumping “laissez-faire economics” with “Communism and Fascism” and hailing “the human welfare state” as “the great political invention of the twentieth century.”

Then on March 20, 1949, in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Barbara Ward developed the thesis that “In the last four years, the most important single feature on the British scene has been the creation not of the Socialist state but of the welfare state.” “So far,” she argued, “nationalization has touched only a tiny fragment of the economy.” Tiny, indeed. All that had been nationalized was coal, the railroads, civil aviation, telephone, telegraph, gas and electricity service, the Bank of England, and new housing! To contend that nationalization is unimportant in England because it exists only in the key industries is like arguing that Stalin is unimportant in Russia because he constitutes so small a percentage of the total population.

The “welfare state,” in short, has come to mean in practice the Socialist state plus the handout state plus the controllist state.

I must go on to point out, finally, that Socialism and Communism are fundamentally the same. Karl Marx, the fountainhead, used the terms interchangeably. The Russian Communists constantly boast of the achievement of their “Socialism.” They call their country, in fact, the U.S.S.R.—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Russia is the ghastly symbol of what happens to human liberty when Socialism becomes complete, instead of merely partial as in England, France, or Sweden. The results shock naïve “democratic” Socialists and ex-Communists like Arthur Koestler, who deny that the Russian brand is Socialism at all. They call it “state capitalism,” forgetting that, by their own definitions, this is a contradiction in terms, like speaking of a triangular circle. “Capitalism” means private ownership of the means of production, and Socialism means government ownership of the means of production. What has taken place in Russia, China, and Yugoslavia is not some hideous betrayal of Socialism, but its consummation and inevitable end product.