THE GIANT ECONOMY SIZE

...After the train was in motion again the Elks discovered that what they had bought was cold tea...

...If we could get rid of them—just these three evils—nothing serious would stand in the way of our being a successful and benevolent democracy...

...they never do...

...It was an America that needed social legislation in those areas where the mature individual could not possibly protect himself without a Doctorate of Biochemistry, or of Fine-Type Reading of Insurance Policies...

...And when the plausible stranger in the non-stop collar passed off a fifth ace on him, he smacked his thigh and said, "It does beat the devil," and once in a while it did...

...Let the defendant take the stand and plead that time is money and the giant jar saves the housewife a trip or two to the store...

...Nor is it one to be resolved by the book, and I should not be allowed to disguise its difficulty by discussing it in terms of 5,400 jars of pulverized coffee...

...Let the Food and Drug Administration persuade us that we haven't the intelligence to cope even with Madison Avenue and the FBI will swarm into Greenwich Village...

...namely, that Government, which is useless (except as a clerk) when men are civilized, is dangerous when men are uncivilized and useful when they want to civilize themselves...

...Would you want to throw the wilderness open to rape by the timber barons and the mineral monopolies...

...Now it may be assumed that the British people, like the American, can not stop smoking...

...And yet the powers of Government in England (and in Scandinavia and Holland and Switzerland) are incalculably vaster than ours...

...And they were good and great things like those my admirer writes me about above...

...Why should we torture ourselves with choosing men when we can not choose among jars...

...A principle, then, begins to emerge...

...But to the extent that people are civilized they rid themselves of their own vices without calling upon Government to compel them to do it...

...Wherever she turns there are pitfalls awaiting her along the primrose path of free enterprise—and the hot possibility of gulling the gulls herself...

...But once in a while the sucker got his own back in the big bazaar...

...Would we be cribb'd, cabin'd, and confined by regulations put forward (as all regulations always are) under the "general welfare" clause which, in every country's constitution that has fallen under totalitarianism, is so solemnly invoked to swaddle grown men...

...We felt -that the situation was so desperate that we were willing even to let the Leader have a try at the first cousin of the corporative state...

...But as for Government's doing anything more for us—at the price it now charges—I bespeak your attention to the belated discovery of Baron von Weizsaecker...

...Is her intelligence too tiny for the big, buzzing confusion of the marketplace...

...Maybe it would be possible for the consumers through cooperatives to destroy it...

...But let us be careful what we call it, and consider its instrumental character rather than cry it up for political democracy...

...The characteristic development of our time, as of Rome's, is simply this, that the more Government "does for the people," the more independent of them and insolent toward them, the more remote from them, the less accessible to them, it becomes...

...My admirers let out a howl here: Am I comparing our Government with the hideous autocracy of Hitler...

...As John Milton observed a while back, the Government we call upon to fend every evil from us will end by fending every virtue from us too: "If it comes to prohibiting, there is aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself...

...If there is anything that we can do by some other means than Government, let's get cracking...

...In permitting the Food and Drug Administration to seize these jars of coffee in, of course, the public interest, we are beefing up Big Brother...

...The offense consisted entirely in her being offered an uneconomical article labeled "economical...

...Without' this experiential maturation the form of democracy, as we see in the new "democracies," is unsupportable...

...The FDA was established, you will remember, by the Pure Food and Drug Act of Congress in 1906...

...Two immediate reactions (or non-reactions) are seen at once in England...

...You have been warned...

...Is there any doubt—forget about Russia—of this here...

...Or, indeed, whether any man does...

...or, "Live and learn," unless the sugar-water he took for his cancer killed him...

...Don't I know that there are different kinds of Government...

...Turn the Marines loose on Mississippi—where there is less liberty than in Czechoslovakia—and you will have turned them loose on a Marine-prone America...

...They were long overdue...

...Economy size" (when the net weight is specified) is a matter of one's doing just a little commonplace thinking for himself...

...Weak-willed and perfidious as he is, he is that civilized that he need not be afraid to instruct Government to take an inch lest it take a mile...

...I say rather be hooked in the supermarket like men—benighted men, I grant you—than let Government wheel us through in the cart...

...This was America, where a judicious amalgamation of furniture polish and licorice root was sold the yokels for what ailed them, from falling hair to fallen arches...

...The answer is inescapable: The impurity is the moral impurity of calling the uneconomical economical...

...The Communists, too, undertake to protect their people from moral impurity...

...Now, in this small incident of the coffee jars, Government proposes to take us back to the most undemocratic institution of them all, the company store, where the slave and the immigrant were deprived of the economic experience of buying for themselves...

...And I know that my admirers do not agree with me...

...A few months ago the Royal College of Surgeons urged measures to discourage cigaret-smoking, and the British Government at once issued public posters inscribed with statistically graduated black coffins and the words, "The more cigarets you smoke the greater the risk...

...This was a wicked, wicked America, but the housewife who picked up the cutest little bolero for next to nothing was a girl again...

...In 1933 we liberals wanted more Government...

...But I insist that the issue is real...

...He "can't believe" (he goes on to say) "that this is what you mean, and if it is, I think you have gone stark mad and need to be protected from yourself...

...The Communists believe that grown men and women can not think for themselves in great matters of state...

...It is not this Government or that one, but Government itself that seems to get more irresponsible the more responsive it becomes to people's needs...

...that is, he must want to learn...

...The Government programmed all these complexities into its Giant Economy Size Computer and discovered that the Economy jar was costing the American housewife 1.9 cents per ounce more than the little old MILTON MAYER, author and lecturer, contributes frequently to The Progressive and has appeared in many other American publications, including Life, Harper's, Fellowship, liberation, and The Reporter...

...They are the most awful because they are the most popular...

...True, people who couldn't afford a doctor died of quackery...

...I submit that the more civilized men are—that is, the less Government they need—the more they can safely invoke...

...Freedom was—and is—risky business...

...His devotion to liberty permits him to establish a Government-owned broadcasting system, knowing that its programs will be the fairest in the world...

...But the alternative now presented is the subsidy of the racket by the Government...

...Like the man who held no brief for the buffalo, I do not care whether the House of Maxwell stands or falls...

...The point is what the lawyers call a nice one...

...Say it not in Gath...

...It depends, I say, on when and where...

...Outside those areas the individual needed to be smart and was smartened- up by progressive exposure to the evils of this melancholy life...

...In our Eighteenth Century colonial prejudice, we had always had too weak a Government...

...So let there be no moaning at the coffee-bar that the housewife can not protect herself without carrying a portable laboratory in her shopping bag...

...And one of them does me the courtesy of putting his anguish in writing: "Would you," he says, "want to go back to the 60-hour week, child labor, and the sweatshop...

...And even at that point there were liberals who thought that that was all right, too—not in Germany or in Italy or in Russia, of course, but only among a truly self-governing people like ourselves...

...The Englishman can do with a little more Government, if he thinks he needs it...

...This was America, where the Court held for the defendants in the celebrated Prohibition case of the two laddies who ran through the Elks Convention train at a quick stop selling "cold tea" at $5 a pint...

...We, like the Russians, can not, or it will gobble up everything in sight...

...I am scared to death, these days, of Government...

...Government here already deprives us of the political experience of military and foreign policy decisions...

...if he isn't, he will toddle to an old, old age...

...they admire my good looks...

...A law which forces its lessons down men's throats—near-beer, for instance—is a law which must either fall or, forcing its lesson, pull freedom down and establish a tyranny...

...Would you want to abandon Federal subsidy of public housing, public health, education, the indigent aged, the blind, and dependent children...

...Or for the Government's seizure of anything...

...But it is not an exclusive concomitant of democracy...

...Or that (as Einstein demonstrates) an erg of energy is worth an ohm of money and toting one ten-ounce jar is more economical of energy than toting one-and-two-thirds six-ounce jars...

...Let them stew in their own brew...

...the Holy Doctor Aquinas himself says so...

...And when the Court said No to his corporative state, the Leader was miffed and tried to convert the judiciary into a People's Court...

...I shall be told that I sound like Senator Goldwater, and I shall reply that if I sound like Senator Gold-water, Thomas Jefferson, H. D. Thoreau, and Hugo Black, so much the worse for all of them to be seen in each other's company and mine...

...Is government to spare him the rigors of elementary arithmetic...

...True, the law is a teacher...

...The issue here is, on its face, so slight as to have escaped the attention of most of the press, which has a soft spot in its advertising department for Maxwell House anyway...

...The Maxwell House seizure is "the first such action ever undertaken by the Food and Drug Administration...

...Does she need the colossus of modern Government to see her to the store, with a stop-and-go light over every item on the shelves...

...Now where is the impurity here...

...At some point the toddler is released from his father's hand to cross the street on his own...

...Would you want to relinquish workmen's compensation, unemployment insurance, and social security because 'anything that ahe American people can not do for themselves is better left undone than done by Government...

...Nor, secondly, is there any indication, in or out of Parliament, that any disinterested watchdog of British liberty sees it threatened by this much more Government...

...They are the most popular because they are the most profitable, the first two emotionally, the third economically...

...Right next to it—here lay the offense—was the little old ordinary six-ounce jar at seventy-five cents...

...To say that not enough of us find it in our self-interest to do so is only to say that we are to that degree uncivilized...

...Look you to the instant situation here...

...First, neither the British tobacco industry nor the advertising media raise a voice against this intrusion of Government upon private enterprise and the still more private right (outside of Canon Law) to kill oneself as one pleases...

...Meanwhile (back at the split-level ranchhouse) five years have passed since the American Cancer Society reported that its study of 800,000 cases "demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that cigaret-smoking is the major cause of lung cancer...

...It is a fine scheme, nonetheless fine because the Communists are for it...

...Or that at current garbage-disposal rates it is cheaper to throw away three big jars than five little ones...

...Is there no one around except me who is persuaded that we've got about all we can handle and maybe a little more...

...We do not need to go all the way back to Rome to learn that he who wants more Government, rather than take time and trouble himself, will wind up with nothing else...

...Why wait until 1944...

...Let's finish off Jim Crow, if we want to...

...ordinary...

...If we would be spared the trial of judgment in coffee, we will yet be spared the trial of judgment in doctrine...

...If the consumer is too imbecile to figure out the price of coffee, how much more needful is he of having his hand held by Government as he shops for politics and confronts such involved phenomena as radiation fallout, military needs, and civil liberties...

...But the same Doctor says of teaching that the pupil, to be taught, must be docile...

...This is 1962, and in 1962 I protest that Government everywhere is too big for its breeches, and that anything more that people can not do for themselves is better left undone than done by Government...

...Well, the New Deal got things done in a hurry, a hundred things in a hundred days, and that was the beginning...

...I turn aside to dab my eyes and then put it to you, gentlemen and ladies of the jury.' Is the buyer no longer to beware— that is, to be aware—of anything...

...But what is asked here is why people should not invoke Government if, instead of being uncivilized, they are civilized...

...I am writing these words in Czechoslovakia, where every last citizen is fully insured against every first and last illness...

...I exaggerate here, as he does...

...There is always a principle buried somewhere, and, as principle is the only rational starting-point of attitude or action, we ought to unearth it...

...We needed a stronger one, and, brethren, we got it...

...The Food and Drug Administration does not believe that people can think for themselves even in matters of common commercial hokum...

...Mind you, the hapless housewife, bellowing for help from Washington, was not being sold a ten-ounce jar containing nine ounces, or powdered barnyard for powdered coffee...

...Let us leave off, at once and for all, pointing to somebody else's Government which is so much worse than ours and, instead, consider Government as such, and consider whether any Government gets much better as it gets much bigger...

...Medical insurance is preeminently sensible, and if there is no other way to attack the private insurance racket than by the equitable device of taxation, so be it...

...Democracy is first of all the experience of the individual—and not of his grandfather, who has taken his experience with him...

...Maybe it would be necessary to invoke—and, to be sure, enhance—the negative power of Government to break it open...

...Here is the Governmental sentiment in a nutshell...

...Would you want to fly in uninspected planes, eat in uninspected restaurants, ride in uninspected elevators, drive on privately built highways at any speed or on any side of the road you choose...

...Why not call upon Government to get rid of them...

...he was a good fellow, and he would not do anything that wasn't good for us...

...Why is liberty—civil and political—so much greater in these Big Government countries than in the United States...

...My assembled admirers (in a telephone booth) protest with Lincoln in 1862 that it is Government's business to do for people what they can not do for themselves...

...At the end of 1944 he saw the light, and then it was too late: "The only possibility now," he said, "is to resist, resist, resist...

...I advert, instead, to his view that I may need to be protected, not from the timber barons, but from myself...

...The offending coffee was being sold by the National Tea Company (which apparently sells coffee) at $1.44 for a ten-ounce jar...

...Weizsaecker had gone along with the Nazi Government as it got bigger and bigger and worse and worse...

...My friend is so exercised by my madness that he wonders if—in my own interest, mind you—I should not be laid away in protective custody...

...There was no false bottom, no chemical impurity (at least none charged), no artery-hardening ingredient in the giant jar that wasn't present in the dwarf...

...The way is beset by con men, sharpies, and sleight-of-hand artists displaying the gadgets—by, in a word, adulterers—and it is high adventure...

...What unravels me—and convulses the gods—-is the brand new blessing of Government come upon us in the Maxwell House matter...

...Neither is there any possibility that anyone will get a job in the Government-owned railways of Switzerland because his uncle is an official of the party in power...

...But knowing that they are weak-willed—itself a mark of civilization—they call upon Government to bully them into doing what they can not do for themselves...

...I am so scared of it that, rather than be at its mercy, I would abide the merci-lessness of Maxwell House...

...The public interest, which Government undertakes to protect there and here, is taken to be the interest of fools...

...The most awful evils of our society just now are Jim Crow-ism, Know-Nothingism, and militarism...

...The Government thereupon reached for its gun...

...Is it really too much to ask the American housewife, who has time to kill, to calculate the price of a household staple...

...Consider the perfidious Albionese...

...The plight of the helpless little widows and still littler orphans who own its stock, preferred and common, leaves me frigid...

...Now they just die...

...Indeed I do, and I know that Germany's was once another kind than it became...

...We are now to be saved the trouble of having to divide by ten and six...

...This is not 1862...

...No sooner do we start digging for this one than, I say, we discover that central to it is the question of when and where...

...I should be made to say how much Government is too much, how much is too little, and how much is just enough...

...And where that is the case, there's a fatal joker—apart from the money it costs—in the Giant Economy Size Government...

...a unanimous Congress rubber-stamps the first and the CIA takes care of the second (which we ultimately hear about from Khrushchev...

...We are agreed, but are we agreed that people can not divide by ten and six...

...I pass over his rhetorical questions (observing, once more, only that I am reading his words in Czechoslovakia, where the Government has eliminated all the evils and provided all the blessings he cites, and much more thoroughly than ours has, and that, even so, the arrangement seems to leave a little something to be desired...

...I think not...

...The Englishman neither cries "tyranny" where we do nor assaults liberty where we do...

...I put it to you in 1962: How do we like our great big blue-eyed baby now...

...The unending drudgery of the American housewife is beguiled by bargain-hunting...

...Men may be scared to death of Government for different reasons, and the issue is not the man but the issue...

...He hated it, but he could not see how men could get anything good done in any other way...

...I know that in our country the old—and most of the young—are victimized by the inhuman conspiracy of the doctors, druggists, and hospitals...