WASHINGTON REPORT: How To Whip inflation New
Getlein, Frank
WAHHIHGTON REPORT HOW TO WHIP INFLATION NOW The President has rallied us, as did his predecessor, to whip inflation now, although happily Carter has' not scattered broadcast the crates of old...
...On the question of pay, why not demand much from those to whom much has been given...
...At any rate, the war on inflation is proclaimed again and by universal agreement the President did the right thing in deciding to start by trimming the expenditures of government itself...
...FRAHK GETLEIN Commonweal: 293...
...It is high time we looked at War Spending from the point of view of good old-fashioned Capitalism, which, we are regularly assured, is what we have to defend against the onslaughts of Communism, Socialism, a National Health Program and anything else to make life 12 May 1978:292 more...
...More in sorrow than anger, it must be recorded that what we find is closer to socialism as described by capitalism than it is to capitalism as described by itself...
...The smarties may just have seized upon the anti-inflation sermon as a pretext to start it all up, shove it to a good high and get out fast with the durables' money in their pockets before the collapse...
...In the form now getting attention, that check is called Inflation, but it has also appeared as Unemployment...
...reaction apparently was positive, the hitherto indifferent traders climbing on one another's bandwagons to whoosh up prices considerably in two fast days of record trading...
...for socialism or pharoahism, granted that the proper authorities agree that arms or pyramids are what will do the people the most good...
...Now this is O.K...
...WAHHIHGTON REPORT HOW TO WHIP INFLATION NOW The President has rallied us, as did his predecessor, to whip inflation now, although happily Carter has' not scattered broadcast the crates of old WIN buttons that must be somewhere in the cellars of the White House...
...This is why, according to capitalist theory, Russian and East German towns are so drab, the clothing so stark, the food so forgettable...
...But I'm not at all sure that shaving off a tad of the catch-up money of janitors and file clerks is the best way into that start...
...Government apparatchiks hand out money to past and future government apparatchiks momentarily in "private" industry, unavoidably influenced by the knowledge that in a few short years the roles of buyers and sellers will be reversed, the "privates" become public, the "publics" gone private...
...With Wall St., of course, you never can tell...
...In capitalism, however, there is a check and it has been knocking for our attention for some years now...
...The first thing we note is the all but total absence of any kind of market at all...
...easeful for people who are not on expense accounts...
...In form it is a kind of socialism for managers, certainly not a socialism for the general welfare, still less capitalism for free enterprise...
...The bottom third, arguably the bottom half of government workers are not on easy street by any means...
...Arms make no economic sense at aH if you don't plan to use them to steal other people's capital-labor...
...Carter has no Kissinger and thus may be able to grasp thaf, from a purely capitalist point of view, it's time to bomb out...
...President Carter has, in fact, promised to "hold the line" on military spending, but there are no details on what the line is that will be held...
...With those two contending theories os economic life firmly in mind, we turn to War Spending in the United States...
...That surplus is called profit and if prudently used to finance further enterprise and not frittered away on chorus girls and Dom Perignon, said profit can grow and grow and grow leading to a world of happy workers, even happier proprietors and managers, a plentiful supply of all things necessary for a rich, full life for all and even many things that are not necessary, such as television and plastic hamburgers...
...If you plan to use them to destroy other people's economic product and to accept, in return, the destructioa of your own, arms are economic insanity for everyone except the arms merchants in or out of uniform and for them sensible only on the shortest of short-term bases...
...Far from the marriage of capital and labor producing something worth more than the sum of their original investment, that marriage produces nothing at all in marketplace terms...
...Give what is needed to those whose need is demonstrably acute...
...Ford, while good at passing out WIN buttons, was impossible at doing anything about arms spending because his best and brightest Nixonian holdover was Kissinger, who was crazy about bombs of all kinds...
...In simplified form, the theory of capitalism is that capital in the form of raw materials, a workplace, tools or machinery and a distribution system, is operated upon by labor in such wise and to such effect that the product of this union is worth more than both the original capital and the labor expended added up together...
...When you examine the capital-labor input-output, as we say in fashionable circles, things are even worse...
...they make sense today for the Russians for the same reasons: if properly and ruthlessly deployed, they can bring a very large return indeed, as can the small arms of the highwayman or mugger...
...It is true the War Bureaucracy has made some attempt to get added value through the sale of arms to anyone who can be cajoled into buying them, especially to military dictators who want them to bolster their security feelings, but the basic economics of arms is the same as that of the pyramids: an enormous amount of capital and labor going into a product which can be seen, all right, but which cannot be marketed, cannot remotely be recycled through the system to produce greater returns...
...There is no bidding for contracts, there is merely the handout...
...Arms made economic sense to us when we were stealing the country from the Indians: the returns were like winning the daily double every day...
...What both of them mean is that you can't just keep on pouring capital and labor into a bottomless pit of some kind, arms or pyramids, with no return...
...The crux of the capitalist argument here is that production and distribution for human need rather than for capitalist profit simply does not provide for that economic growth which, managed by invisible hands, really does lead to the general welfare consciously but impossibly aimed at by socialism...
...The next cost-of-living raise that is supposed to be automatic for federal workers would be trimmed one half of one per cent, from an expected six to five-and-a-half...
...What do we find...
...It's zilchville...
...Under socialism, decisions about production and capital expenditure and wages are not made from a market, or reality, base, but from the base of someone's idea about what is good for the community...
...Socialism, on the other hand, according to capitalist theory, presents quite a different prospect...
...This is, of course, what we euphemistically call Defense, but what actually is payments for war past, present, future and vaguely imaginable, with that last category the really big spender...
...If the line is what it has been, that line is what has contributed enormously to inflation as we know it...
...It is true there are revisionists ~ who claim the towns, clothing and food in East Germany and Russia were always unfortunate, regardless of how the dominant social-economic theory was described, but they may be put aside for the moment...
...While the general European and Japanese reaction was So what, which promptly expressed itself in the price of the dollar declining, the Wall St...
...Steel and General Motors, more immediately perceptibly your neighborhood landlord and supermarket, pouring it on at a good clip, do we really get a hand on inflation by driving the bottom more bottomward...
...In such systems, the proper authorities could put it all into scarab amulets or annotated editions of Marx-Leninism and there wouldn't be any check because starving to death could be argued as what the gods or dialectical materialism really calls for at any given moment...
...Well, I agree with the President that it's a good idea to start with the federal government, since that's the only thing he has any kind of direct control over...
...As it happens, there is one great funnel of government expenditure that can readily be crimped in a little, conceivably down to half its flow, in theory even more...
...Arms made economic sense for the Greeks, the Romans, the Spanish, the French, the Germans and the English...
...With U.S...
...Granted all this and I must say it seems to me selfevident, the first, largest and most important government step toward whipping inflation now, as Gerald Ford used to say, must be to whip arms spending into line...
Vol. 105 • May 1978 • No. 10
