THE BIG ISSUE
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr.
The Big Issue by ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR. This analysis of the basic issue confronting the United States was originally prepared by Mr. Schlesinger as a memorandum for private circulation among...
...There is nothing wrong about wanting to do things for consumers...
...While consumer goods heap up in our attics and basements, while our advertising system knocks itself out trying to create new wants which will require more and more private goods and services, while more and more of our resources are absorbed in the "style racket" and "designed obsolescence" and the consumer-spending merry-go-round, the public framework of society, on which everything else rests, is overstrained by population growth and undercut by neglect...
...Under the Eisenhower-Nixon theory, in short, our society is geared to producing television sets and rumpus rooms but not scientists or scholars...
...More slum clearance and urban renewal and suburban planning and housing and aid to depressed areas...
...One reason presumably is that the Administration approves of the allocation of resources that results from this thesis...
...In saying this, Eisenhower and Nixon imply that responsibility for any subsequent trouble lies with the individual consumer...
...Even more alarming, in certain decisive categories of national strength—in new weapons, in the contest for space, in technical education, and in the rate of economic growth—the Soviet Union appears already (in Prime Minister Khrushchev's favorite phrase) to have "overtaken and surpassed" us...
...There are unexplored possibilities in taxation—not only plugging loopholes, such as percentage depletion on oil, but taxing things to help people, such as, for example, a tax on advertising...
...No one likes taxes...
...But we can't "afford" to do this sort of thing...
...Why is it that our fantastic abundance cannot enable us to provide decently for the education, health, and welfare of our own population and the quality of our national existence...
...But in each case those who saw America as a bold, generous, and imaginative nation won...
...What it is essential to understand is that these gaps are not separate and unrelated questions...
...There has been a good deal of talk in recent months about the need for a recovery of a sense of national purpose...
...Consumer goods as the underpinning of life are one thing: as the main object of life, quite another...
...We will have to abandon the illusion that the free choices of millions of individual consumers can solve all our problems...
...The ultimate point of American life is not the choking of people with material luxury...
...More public support to improve the quality of our national existence...
...At each of these moments, the battle was for a time grim and precarious...
...The editor, the professor, the writer, the intellectual, the community leader all have to till the ground...
...Do we need to put more resources in our missile program and in our conventional warfare capability and in the contest for space...
...Unless we take swift action to reverse the policy of drift, unless we recover a sense of affirmative national purpose which will automatically generate a feeling that some things are more important than others, a future Gibbon will regard the Eisenhower-Nixon era as the downward turning point when he comes to write about the Decline and Fall of the American Republic...
...To imitate them here would be to destroy our freedom and thus to lose the whole point of resistance to Communism...
...Not to produce better people or better schools or better health or better communities or better opportunities for cultural and spiritual development...
...The continuation of the Truman growth rate through the Fifties would have given us in the year 1959 alone more than $70 billion more of production and about $13 billion more of Federal revenues for public disposal...
...We have evaded for seven years the challenge of a wise allocation of our resources...
...He is wrong...
...It is precisely this theory which has produced the contemporary American paradox of public poverty in the midst of private plenty...
...Vice President Nixon reaffirmed this position in his address January 27, 1960, in Chicago...
...One of the first consequences was the Revenue Act of 1954, which resulted in the transfer of some $7 billion ($10 billion in current dollars) from public to private spending...
...Between 1946 and 1953 our annual rate of growth was 4.5 per cent...
...There are two main objections to the Eisenhower-Nixon thesis that the overriding purpose of our national life ought to be to increase consumer spending...
...We are in trouble purely and simply because of the way we have chosen to employ our talents and resources...
...It is the development of the character of man and of the quality of the life he lives...
...The Ten Commandments do not require us to do this...
...It is precisely the job of men outside politics to prepare the way for the politician—to make it possible for him to advance new issues without inviting certain defeat...
...At each of these moments, the United States came up against a situation when it could not run its affairs in a style demanded by a doctrinaire minority and hope to make sense in the world...
...This will happen again today...
...In choosing a new President, they will choose the direction in which they want the United States to move in the next four years...
...Under the Eisenhower dispensation, where private interests have priority over public interest and everyone's making a fast buck is supposed to insure the common good, the public sector takes second place...
...The egghead runs interference for the political leader, because the egghead, who has no precincts to carry, can afford to take up issues when they are politically unpopular...
...or, to put it in another way, that the production of goods and services for sale to consumers properly enjoys first claim on the great bulk of our national wealth and talent...
...The reason our wealth, staggering as it is, does not give us security in the world or welfare and opportunity at home or hope for our future is to be found in the priorities according to which we allocate that wealth...
...One trouble today is perhaps that the outsiders haven't agitated the allocation issue nearly enough—which means that particular credit is due to those who have, especially to J. K. Galbraith, whose Affluent Society placed the question squarely before the national attention, and to Walter Lippmann, who has presented the question in a series of brilliant and penetrating columns...
...It is precisely these new boys and girls who have been most forgotten during this decade...
...The professional politicians seem to feel that the issue itself is too explosive...
...As fast as we continue to move, the Communists seem to be moving even faster...
...The deeper American tradition has never been one of concern with things...
...A diligent search of the records discloses no one wicked enough to be against a sense of national purpose...
...While our population billows, our national leadership has made only the most feeble effort to enlarge our social overhead—education, medical care, housing, slum clearance, urban and suburban planning, social security, provision for the sick and the aging, roads, recreation, water, assistance to distressed classes and areas, resources and energy development—to assure decent opportunities for these new children...
...Naturally a Republican Administration adopts its view that everything should be sacrificed to the sale of goods on the consumer market...
...It has been the result of premeditated, settled, avowed, and defiant policy...
...He then said, after outlining his view of national objectives, "We Republicans have unshakable faith that the way to achieve these goals is by the free choice of millions of individual consumers...
...The painless way to assure a larger allocation of resources to public purposes and to the forgotten areas of the private economy is to enlarge the total quantity of available resources —which means to pursue a policy of stimulating economic growth...
...f Do we need better provisions for a decent community life...
...The sense of bafflement over these slippages at home and abroad is compounded by the fact, constantly reaffirmed to us by our leaders as if it should silence all our doubts, that we remain the richest country known to human history...
...These have been times when drift has given way to direction in our national affairs—when wise and vigorous leadership has enabled us to put our resources to intelligent use...
...The Soviet Union spends two to three times as large a share of annual GNP on defense and on education as we do in the United States...
...Our future will depend on their knowledge, their education, their health, their strength, on the opportunities open to them to develop their abilities...
...The time for a national revival is at hand...
...And free consumer choice is fine...
...The determining motive of our national policy should be our own ideals and objectives...
...Quite the contrary: it has moved in the opposite direction...
...The responsibility of making the American people take seriously the life-and-death questions of our time is one that might reasonably be shared...
...Why are we increasingly tormented as a nation by a series of "gaps"—the missile gap, the educational gap, the health gap, the housing gap, the poverty gap, the gap between our community life and our national hopes...
...in the years since, we have grown at an average rate of about 2.3 per cent...
...i.e., that it considers our greatest national need today, not more public services, but more things for businessmen to sell to consumers, and consequently favors steering most of our talent and our resources into devising things for consumers and means to persuade consumers to accept them...
...Let us not deceive ourselves: the existence of this cyclical rhythm doesn't guarantee safe entry into the new epoch...
...That phrase is the allocation of resources...
...Schlesinger as a memorandum for private circulation among leading liberals in the nation...
...It refers to the uses to which we put our national income...
...Why is it that our fantastic abundance cannot enable us to remain safely ahead of the Communist world in national power...
...The answer to the Soviet success is as plain as day...
...Recollect for a moment that the total population of the United States in 1860 was only about thirty-one million...
...The result during these seven golden Republican years has been a shocking decline of the United States both as a world power and as a national community offering education, hope, and opportunity to its own rapidly growing population...
...Our cities rot away, our suburbs grow more chaotic, our schools more overcrowded, our teachers more underpaid, our roads more dangerous, our national parks more unkept, our air and our streams more polluted, our law enforcement more harried and unsatisfactory, a sixth of the nation lingers in scandalous poverty, our weapons development and foreign aid grow more tragically inadequate...
...The problem is not one of our economic capabilities...
...This represents one of the massive triumphs of history...
...Such a shift in resources can easily be achieved within the framework of our present economic and political order...
...If you take our country and make it an armed camp and regiment it, why, for a while you can—you might do it with great morale, too, if you could get people steamed up like you did in wars...
...The position of the Democratic Party is better...
...We have grown in the last decade by an amount nearly equal to our entire population one hundred years ago...
...He has been faithful to this pledge...
...How can anyone suppose that they could send a rocket to the moon...
...misconstrues the situation...
...It means national leadership to enlarge their opportunities and guarantee their equal liberties and rights...
...It is precisely this theory which has given the Eisenhower-Nixon Administration the weird and intolerable conviction that the richest nation in human history cannot "afford" to do what must be done to maintain national strength and opportunity...
...The second reason is that the Administration evidently feels that any deviation from the policy of maximizing private consumption would mean the end of a free economy and the destruction of the American way of life...
...The choice in 1960 is whether we are going to continue our present rush toward that classical condition of private opulence and public squalor which has always marked the decay of empires—this or whether we are going to recover control over our national life and national destiny and resume the movement to fulfill the real promise of American life, a promise to be identified not by the glitter of our wealth but by the splendor of our ideals...
...We are still ahead in many ways, but this is mainly because we had an earlier start...
...And yet, while we cannot "afford" to do these things, we exult in a consumer luxury never before known in the history of mankind...
...we will see a continued failure to make adequate provision for our children and our future...
...If his position is right, it should only be a matter of time before he can convince enough people to make the issue politically feasible...
...Which party is more likely to offer the nation leadership on this underlying issue...
...Emerson summed up the consumer spending philosophy a century ago when he wrote, "Things are in the saddle/And ride mankind...
...But investment in people is the only foundation on which we can build our national future...
...but he cannot be expected to impale himself on them...
...All that is involved is a marginal shift of resources—say, some $10-12 billion a year more to be employed for public purposes...
...We cannot dodge this challenge much longer...
...The basic premise of the consumer spending philosophy is that the needs of life are to be fulfilled through material opulence—that the way ,to achieve the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution is to guarantee to every American producer and advertiser, before anything else, the sacred right to stampede consumers into buying their products...
...f We have used our wealth as much as possible for private purposes and as little as possible for community purposes...
...They say that the American people don't want to be stirred up, that they are lazy and somnolent, that they fear government and hate taxes, that all they want is to have their taxes reduced and to be left alone...
...It is hard for people reared in the consumer spending ethos to understand the priorities of Soviet society...
...If this statement means anything, it means that the President of the United States seriously thinks that it is more "intelligent" and "useful" for the individual consumer to spend money for luxuries and frills, for a second car and a third television set, than for his government to spend it for education, for the fight against poverty, for national defense...
...Oh, no— we can't afford it...
...Do we need more public investment to fight the shame of private poverty...
...The return to this tradition is long overdue...
...Schlesinger, professor of history at Harvard, is the author of a number of notable works on American history and politics...
...In 1954 he laid down as a major goal of his Administration: "We will reduce the share of the national income which is spent by the government...
...This decade of American decline has equally been the decade of Soviet rise...
...Democratic leaders have addressed themselves to one after another of the many facets of the allocation question...
...We degrade ourselves when we permit the Communist challenge to drive us to do things which we ought to be doing anyway for our own sake...
...This surely is the second source of our anxiety—the spreading awareness that we are even falling behind in making adequate provision for the welfare and opportunity of our own people and for the future of our children and thus of our nation...
...Let us be clear about our situation...
...The second objection to the Administration thesis is the policy objection...
...It is not even— despite President Eisenhower—a necessary condition for the safe functioning of free society...
...Khrushchev operates under no such illusion...
...The Eisenhower-Nixon Administration tells us that we can't "afford" to invest more of our resources in schools...
...President Eisenhower has lost few opportunities to reiterate this belief...
...Plainly we can afford everything as a nation—except the things we desperately need...
...We shall have to begin purposefully to focus our national energies in ways which will give us the things a great nation must have— defense, foreign assistance, education, medical care, scientific research, resources and energy development, elimination of personal poverty, and so on—even if these things don't make profits for private business in the market...
...We possess it in the leadership of the President, in the instrumentality of the Federal budget, and in the Congressional powers of taxation, authorization, and appropriation...
...It can be most conveniently tagged by a useful but forbidding phrase cherished by economists...
...Same answer...
...What is most depressing is the contrast between the heat of the Presidential reaction and the relatively small changes required in the allocation of resources...
...We are not in trouble because of forces beyond our control...
...Indeed, the main Democratic effort in recent years has been to try and repair the various "gaps" in our national situation created by Republican policy...
...They are all aspects of the underlying issue on which the nation must make its decision in November...
...It is a problem of national priorities, of national policy and national values...
...The true question is not how much we have, but the uses to which we put it...
...We can change this situation any day we want to...
...We have had epochs of national purpose in our past when we were able to direct our energies to national ends...
...The whole quality of our national life is threatened by deterioration...
...We are approaching an annual gross national product of an unimaginable $500 billion a year...
...Yet an increasing number of thoughtful Americans are not satisfied with this cheery statement of our national situation...
...Already one sees abundant signs of disquietude and anxiety in our national life...
...Raymond J. Saulnier, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, recently told the Joint Economic Committee his theory of the American economy...
...The gross national product of the Soviet Union is still only about forty-five per cent of our own...
...Goldsmith On November 8, the American people will choose a new President...
...He innocently supposes that service to the consumer is the ultimate test of economic and administrative efficiency...
...Even without tax increases, this would still give the national government $4-5 billion a year more for its disposal...
...f Do we need an educational system worthy of our children...
...Is this really what the Founding Fathers fought the American Revolution for...
...We cannot even "afford," to take a minimum public service, to deliver mail to most homes more than once a day...
...During the decade of the Fifties, Americans spent three times as much money on advertising as they did on higher education...
...Now it is widely said that there are no real issues between the two parties —that Democrats and Republicans are in substantial agreement on national policies—that, so far as the main thrust of our national development goes, it really won't make much difference which party is in power after 1960...
...it should be the pursuit of excellence in our own way of life...
...These are methods we unreservedly condemn...
...The Soviet Union achieves its system of national priorities through the mechanism of dictatorship and physical control...
...What does investment in people mean...
...but the Eisenhower-Nixon answer is that the United States can't "afford" to do more than it is doing...
...But I do not suggest that the politician should wait until the men of ideas have done all the work of forcing urgent national issues into public discussion...
...If a quarter of the talent and resources now devoted in the United States to fabricating and titillating consumer wants were devoted instead to building the power and skill of the nation, we would have nothing to fear from Soviet competition...
...No one would propose to end all that...
...For Americans, surely it must mean the belief in the dignity of people...
...We must decide whether we really want consumer spending to dictate our national priorities...
...It is irrevocably committed as a party to the view that private spending for business profit is always better than public spending for the general welfare...
...A reading of our history suggests the existence of an inherent cyclical rhythm in our national affairs—a regular swing from periods of positive government to periods of negative government and back again: a shift from periods of intense activity which accomplish a lot but finally wear the people out, to periods of listlessness and drift which go on until the national energy is replenished and new problems accumulate, at which point comes a breakthrough into a new political epoch...
...We will also fall farther and farther behind the Soviet Union in ICBMs and the fight for space...
...Today all can aspire to decencies and amenities of life which were once reserved for aristocratic and wealthy elites...
...This is the goal...
...He served for a time as co-chairman of Americans for Democratic Action.— /// fares the land To hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates And men decay...
...We are told, of course, that we have prosperity and that we have peace and that America is the richest and most powerful nation in the world and that, in the words of the Vice President, these have been "the best seven years" of our lives...
...Its ultimate purpose is to produce more consumer goods...
...The central issue of the world struggle," Walter Lippmann has well said, "is whether the Soviet system or a liberal system can deal best with the problems that beset mankind...
...The Soviet leadership thinks it important to send a rocket to the moon and not very important to supply tourists with tickets to Odessa, so they apportion their talent and resources accordingly...
...This includes one-fifth of our children...
...They cannot by themselves change the intellectual atmosphere of a nation...
...More and more people have forebodings about the position and prospects of the United States in the decade ahead...
...It is that the allocation of our resources should be determined by the way the consumer chooses to spend his money...
...Now, I think our people ought to have greater faith in their own system, go ahead on their own...
...We possess the machinery for setting national priorities voluntarily and democratically...
...The first is the moral objection...
...The Eisenhower Administration has made no systematic effort to enlarge our public services and facilities to keep pace with population growth...
...This has not been the result of inattention or accident...
...and the discussion still takes place in terms of the facets of the issue rather than of the issue itself...
...But plainly, if national purpose is to mean anything, it must mean the subordination of private purposes to an overriding public purpose...
...We seem to be dismayingly poor where it counts...
...The tough question comes when one considers what the idea of national purpose concretely involves...
...But there is no reason to suppose that either our present living standards or our present taxes or tax rates are sacred...
...It would entail no interference with the existing freedom of investment or of entrepreneurial decision or of consumer choice...
...Such a view surely represents a debasement of the American tradition, which is essentially a spiritual tradition...
...But is this enough...
...The first political leader who talks clearly and boldly about the real character of the problems of the Sixties may be astonished by the response...
...The Eisenhower Administration has again and again stated its conception of our proper national priorities...
...the relentless expansion is straining our facilities to the utmost...
...We are growing increasingly weary of drift and stagnation...
...The Communist competition is a hard fact of life, but it should not by itself be the determining motive of our national policy...
...It is this alliance which finances and controls the Republican Party...
...The Soviet Union, a much poorer nation, has three times as many intercontinental missiles and three times as large an army and is outstripping us in the stratosphere...
...The Eisenhower-Nixon thesis leads us to overinvest in things, to underinvest in people...
...More assistance to museums, art galleries, music, theater...
...Under the consumer spending infatuation, we have almost worked ourselves into the state of mind that what cannot pay for itself in the market is hardly worth doing at all...
...It is not one of the character of our society...
...The Eisenhower-Nixon thesis is definite and explicit...
...What is this underlying issue...
...The three-to-one ratio in favor of advertising against higher education is exactly the kind of expenditure of our national wealth which President Eisenhower believes we can afford...
...There need be no question about the theory which has governed the allocation of resources during most of the last decade...
...What is the overriding public purpose...
...We did precisely that, of course, during the two great world wars...
...Moreover, when professional politicians report the American people as complacent and apathetic, they may be reporting the mood of 1952 or 1956 rather than the mood of 1960...
...It lies in the power of the Soviet Union to focus its national energies...
...The Eisenhower Administration seems to have two other reasons for adopting the consumer-spending thesis...
...It is not a provision of the Federal Constitution...
...What are the community's aims...
...The American people, moreover, are not a collection of idiots, and they are increasingly tired of being underestimated by their leaders...
...Our own beloved country, it need hardly be said, spends a much larger share of its GNP on such things as automobiles, cosmetics, and tobacco...
...And these new boys and girls constitute our most valuable natural resource...
...One cannot demand too much of politicians...
...The moving force behind the Administration thesis is the alliance between the big producers, who live by the creation of consumer wants, and the big advertisers, who have mastered the technology of creating wants where none existed before...
...As a result of deliberate policy, the national government is spending a smaller share of our gross national product on public services and facilities today than it was a decade ago...
...Our national population has increased by nearly thirty million since 1950...
...And we have done it in peacetime too— most notably during the Progressive era and during the New Deal...
...A return now to a four per cent growth rate would mean an annual increment of some $20 billion to the gross national product...
...Is this what the promise of American life is all about...
...Even if such talk may not bring immediate political returns, there is a certain long-run value, as Winston Churchill discovered, in being right...
...The ideal society would surely be one based on the greatest possible amount of unfettered individual choice...
...The question is rather whether these should be the dominating objectives of our society in the next decade as they have been in the last—whether at this moment in history the United States is wise in acting as if the production and consumption of things for sale to consumers should be the central and all-absorbing end of our national existence, to which everything else is to be subordinated...
...If we are planning to stay in the ring as a great nation, we have no choice but to use this machinery in a bold and purposeful way...
...The American tourist who cries out in the lobby of a Moscow hotel, "These people can't even get me a ticket to Odessa...
...This implication is characteristically unfair: the individual consumer is the victim, not the cause, of the situation...
...We are not in trouble because we can't afford the talent and the resources to maintain national power...
...There is reason to suppose that we are approaching another such breakthrough today...
...The annual appearance of three million new boys and girls automatically creates needs for new houses, new schools, new hospitals, new communities...
...We are told we can't afford to steer more of our resources into medicine...
...not even to produce better guided missiles—but to produce more things to be sold at a profit—more gadgets and gimmicks to overwhelm our bodies and distract our minds...
...It includes eight million men and women over sixty-five...
...It means putting an adequate share of resources into improving their education, their medical care, their communities, their economic status, their defense...
...The choice is stark and imperative: either a continuation of self-indulgence along these lines of least resistance, until we drift into minor-power status and oblivion...
...It means a recognition of the absolute importance of giving every young man or woman in America a chance in our national life proportionate to talent and character, whatever may be their race, their religion, their color, their social or economic origin...
...or a recovery of national purpose and an exercise of national leadership...
...The challenge we face is that of obtaining a wiser allocation of resources within the framework of democracy and freedom...
...If we accept their view of what America is all about, we will find ourselves in the condition feared by Walt Whitman—"It is as if we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul...
...As a result, they are steadily narrowing the gap between us...
...It is not obligatory, for example, to spend three times as much each year on advertising as on higher education...
...It has always resisted the idea of public investment on principle...
...we will witness the deterioration of American education and of the quality of American life...
...It is not an immutable law of nature...
...For some, it is a rhetorical genuflection which does not in the slightest hinder subsequent embrace of the consumer spending priority...
...These objectives are not at issue...
...The President of the United States has repeatedly identified himself with this position...
...f More than 32 million Americans are trying to live on less than $50 a week for a family of four...
...From the viewpoint not just of humanity but of national power, these children should be a major object of national investment...
...In that struggle we shall surely lose if we tell the world that, though we have the richest economy in all history, our liberal system is such that we cannot afford a sure defense and adequate provision for the civil needs of our people...
...They could not be more wrong...
...Confronted by the choice between improving our standard of living and doing what must be done for survival, then obviously the nation must forget its standard of living: if we fail to survive as a free nation, then television and tail-fins will provide inadequate consolation...
...The phrase "national purpose" is one of the pieties of our politics...
...For one thing, the American people are growing restlessly aware that the United States is losing ground in the great world competition with the Soviet Union...
...As he put it last year: "Our federal money will never be spent so intelligently and in so useful a fashion for the economy as will the expenditures that would be made by the private taxpayer, if he hadn't had so much of it funneled off into the federal government...
...As a consequence of this investment of our wealth, every American today knows he can get a television set for his rumpus room, but few can be certain, even if they have the money, that they can get a college education for their son or daughter...
...Yet out of this we are apparently unable to meet elementary national needs in either our foreign or our domestic policy...
...that is why the consumer-spending philosophy is so aberrant...
...We are indeed stupe-fyingly rich...
...If we don't grow more, then we must tax more—unless we are content to end up as the second-best nation...
...What accounts for the extraordinary progress made by the Soviet Union in the Fifties...
...We are the wealthiest nation in the world...
...What have been the practical consequences of letting, in Vice President Nixon's words, "the free choice of millions of individual consumers" determine the allocation of our resources and talent...
...f We have dedicated a major share of our national energy to inventing and satisfying consumer "wants" and expect to build national health, intelligence, and power out of what is left over...
...Austerity as an end in itself is economic puritanism and to be avoided in all sensible nations...
...We are beginning to rebel against the materialistic goals held out by leaders to us—against the interpretation of the promise of American life in terms of physical comfort and moral complacency...
...Even if they are reporting a mood which still lingers into 1960, there is no reason to suppose that this mood is here for the rest of the century...
...When our President and Vice President tell us that money is spent more "intelligently" and "usefully" for things rather than for people, for private indulgence than for public need, and when one hears those same leaders go on to denounce the godless materialism of the Communists, it makes one wonder whether they are not doing so in the name of a godly materialism of our own...
...It is instructive to compare the things on which the Soviet Union spends a larger share of its gross national product with the things on which the United States spends a large share of its GNP...
...This is the great tradition of American society...
...With wise expansionist policies and with sufficient social discipline to avoid inflation, we can begin to do what must be done in the public sector and have continuing improvement in the standard of living at the same time...
...The fight for an intelligent use of our national abundance will be as hard as the other great policy battles of our age—as the fight in 1950-54 against McCarthyism, or the fight in 1937-41 against isolationism, or the fight in 1929-33 against laissez-faire...
...Yet it has been making faster relative progress than we have in nearly every critical field of national power...
...To sum up, under the Eisenhower-Nixon philosophy— f We have used our wealth as much as possible for individual purposes and as little as possible for national purposes...
...Our concern has been not with things but with people—their identity, welfare, opportunity, and dignity...
...We are growing increasingly bored by self-righteous piety...
...One great pride of the industrial age is the democratization of comfort...
...It is a man-made condition, and man can alter it...
...The position of the Republican Party—or rather its non-position—on the allocation question is clear...
...The visitor to Soviet Russia finds it frightening to see what energy a great nation can generate when it allocates its talent and resources according to an intelligent system of priorities...
...President Eisenhower has suggested that we cannot do this without abandoning our freedom...
...But, so long as we continue in the United States to prefer private indulgence to public need, so long as we allow consumer spending to determine how we use our national wealth, so long as we do not face up to the problem of a wise allocation of our national resources—so long the Soviet Union will continue to gain on us and eventually will overtake and surpass us...
...Yet suppose that we lack the wit to induce a sufficiently high, rate of economic growth to provide for growth both in public investment and private consumption: what then...
...The brave and intelligent politician will seek to grasp new issues...
...f Do we need more doctors and nurses and hospital beds...
...When President Eisenhower suggests that the only alternatives open to us are to let things slide or to become a regimented state, he shows his ignorance of our history as well as his low view of the capabilities of a free society...
...What have been the consequences in these "best seven years" of our lives...
...President Eisenhower, in a recent press conference, seemed to say that there was no alternative to the present theory of resources allocation except totalitarianism...
...and some people think that this is enough to insure our strength and our survival...
...It has been a tradition of concern for people...
...f How about a proper resources and energy policy...
...In short, we will simply not devote enough of our talent and resources to a number of things—from schools to space—which are absolutely essential to our power and influence, even perhaps to our survival, as a nation...
...The able men work on rockets, the dopes on tickets...
...There is here no "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...
...The Republican Party has never shown any interest in expenditures for the public welfare...
...It is the contention of this memorandum that there is a profound issue between the parties—an issue of national policy as clear-cut, as far-reaching, and as urgent as the one the nation faced in 1932—and that the electorate's decision in 1960 will therefore be of fateful import to our national future...
...If we keep on according to the Eisenhower-Nixon theory, we will have more and more talent and resources swept up in advertising, salesmanship, gadgets, and gimmicks...
...you might do this thing most —well, in very greater tempo than we now are doing it...
...And one cannot but feel that, if they ever thought tickets to Odessa important, a shift in talent and resources would make Intourist the best travel service in the world...
...Yet that effort has not been so powerful and determined as it should have been...
...This is the object of everything that we are working at: to produce things for consumers...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 9
