The Risk Within; D. MacArthur

The national dangers are both external and internal. Externally, they are those incident to war. But this con tingency I regard as logically only a remote possibility. The almost incredible destructiveness of modern weapons upon civil communities has brought to all mankind the realization that military force is no longer an exploitable method of settling international rivalries. The victor, if any such should emerge, would suffer almost as greatly as the vanquished. General MacArthur is Chairman of the Board, Sperry Rand Cor poration. This is an excerpt from remarks to stockholders at the annual meeting, July 31, 1956. [124 ] If this nation is ever destroyed, I unhesitatingly pre dict it will not be from external force. Our own internal hazards, the spontaneous combustions arising from the accelerating complexities of modern life in an ever-mul tiplying community, are the ones which give rise to anxiety. They are too numerous for me to attempt to enumerate, but surely one of the most dangerous of these is excessive taxation and its sinister by-product and off spring-inflation. In the lexicon of government there is no more grim and pertinent aphorism than Chief Justice John Marshall's warning as early as 1819 that the power to tax includes the power to destroy. Indeed, this is the weapon that Karl Marx declared was the vital one to displace the system of free enterprise-the system on which our nation was founded-the system which has made us the most prosperous people of all history.

Reasonable taxation is, of course, an essential of gov ernment; but when taxation is used as a social regulator, it becomes a menace to freedom. When its rate is so excessive that men work month after month with all that they earn going to government, it amounts almost to forced labor. It practically reduces them for protracted periods to something akin to involuntary servitude. It is an unwarranted assumption that a handful of men, cen tered in government, largely bureaucratic rather than elected, can spend the proceeds of toil and labor to greater advantage than he who creates the money. Exces sive taxation can reduce free men to serfdom, can destroy initiative, absorb the capitalistic system, and level repre sentative government to sovietism. [125 ] Taxation has been the cause of more bloody revolu tions in the history of government than any other one provocation. It precipitated our own Revolution which resulted in the founding of the United States of Amer ica. The Boston Tea Party is still symbolic. The Biblical story of Christ's repudiation and expulsion of the tax tyrants from the temple is still a warning. Its excesses and idiosyncrasies hang like a dark cloud over the des tinies of those connected with this company and every other company in this beloved land of ours.

[126 ] WELFARE STATES AT WAR THE NEW international crises sparked in the Middle East, and the constant danger of another world war, need not surprise the student of contemporary international rela tions and economic policies. The ideology of socialism and interventionism has swayed our foreign relations, and the policies of Welfare States have destroyed inter national peace and order. While throwing the blame for the present crises on the doorsteps of "capitalist colonialism," the Welfare States are battling each other. All parties involved in the Mid-East are either socialist or interventionist nations. Israel is a large army camp crowded by people who are given to socialist ideas; Egypt is an interventionist coun try with a dictator bent upon leading his nation to social ism; France has a socialist government with controls that leave little room for competitive enterprise; and Britain is floundering between socialism and interventionism. In other words; there is little capitalism, in the sense of competitive private enterprise, in anyone of these countries.