‘You Never Had It So Good’

August 4, 1952

A couple of weeks ago I risked here the prediction that for those who believe in economy and free enterprise, the Republican platform would probably prove incomparably preferable to the Democratic platform. The prophecy proved to be quite safe.

The Democratic platform opens with the same theme song it has sung for twenty years. It is still fighting the campaign of 1932, still blaming the world depression on Herbert Hoover, still claiming credit for every advance in position or production that anybody has made in the last twenty years through his own efforts.

In its offers to hand out the taxpayer’s money to every imaginable pressure group, the Democratic platform reaches new heights of vicarious generosity. It demands bigger unemployment benefits, bigger public-assistance programs, bigger old-age benefits, more Federal spending for medical care, school lunches, housing of every kind, including that for “middle-income families,” and more handouts to veterans. In fact, America, out of the fullness of your, the taxpayer’s, bottomless income, is going to pour out money to “lift the living standards” of practically everybody on earth, including specifically the Arabs and “the people of the Middle East.” Presumably a Democratic Administration will give Iran still more money as a suitable reward for seizing oil wells and refineries vital to the security of the Atlantic Pact nations and for stirring up anti-Americanism.

The farm handout program deserves special mention. The platform specifically “applauds” Congress’s recent action “in setting aside the ‘sliding scale’ for price support through 1954” and endorses a “mandatory price support program at not less than 90 percent of parity.” Even leading farm organizations have shrunk from such Federal lavishness, fearing its ultimate consequences. But in the Democratic platform this is only a beginning. Undeterred by the potato fiasco, the platform demands the extension of price supports “to the producers of perishable commodities, which account for three-fourths of all farm income.” Everybody is going to subsidize everybody else.

In flagrant contradiction to all this, the platform “solemnly” pledges “the preservation of the financial strength of the government.” It believes “in keeping government expenditures to the lowest practicable level.”

Doubtless the money for all these spending schemes is to come out of some invisible fourth dimension. We cannot expect any serious discussion of the inflation problem in such a platform, and we get none. There is no recognition of the fact that inflation is caused primarily and overwhelmingly by the increase in money and bank credit, and there is no proposal to check this increase. Even the endorsement of price control blandly cancels itself out: “We pledge continuance of workable controls so long as the emergency requires them . . . and their removal as quickly as economic conditions allow.”

The platform’s attack on the Taft-Hartley Act, however, is outstanding for its lack of candor and disregard of facts. It calls for the “repeal” of the Taft-Hartley Act. Nothing, however, would be more calculated to appall the New Deal Democrats and the labor leaders who direct them than the simple repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. What they want (though they do not admit it) is the restoration of the completely one-sided Wagner Act. In their absurd charges, the drafters of the Democratic platform seem to have forgotten that the Taft-Hartley law was passed in 1947 not merely by a majority of Republicans but by a majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress.

For the platform to say that the Taft-Hartley Act “has been proved to be inadequate, unworkable, and unfair” is a piece of brazen impudence. In the crippling 54-day steel strike the President did not even try to apply or to work the injunction provisions of the law. Instead he allowed the strike to run until he and Phil Murray had in effect succeeded in forcing the union terms on industry.