YOU PAYS YOUR MONEY
Mayer, Milton
You Pays Your Money By MILTON MAYER AT times I fancy myself as a crazy Utopian, because I insist that the world can be made a fit place to live in; at others, as a hopeless pessimist, because I...
...This ideal could once be realized in the Congo, in India, and in Mexico, but it can not now be realized in Asia and in Europe for the main and simple reason (as Penrod would put it) that you can not get blood out of a turnip...
...MacArthur's statesmanlike struggle to get the country on its feet...
...The other story, from Washington, reports that the current turkey crop in the United States will be twice as big as it was before the war, and that the Government is going to have to support the falling prices on turkeys and chickens...
...The more I think about Mr...
...Paul Pioneer Press, I fancy myself as the only sane man left alive...
...the more I think...
...The American Way is capitalism, sometimes known as the free market, but there is nothing free about a market supported by Government parity, and Government curtailment of production, in the interest of maintaining prices, is nothing short of socialism, though the Socialists would point out in a hurry that it is socialism in reverse...
...In Germany, for two centuries, the American Way has been supported by the imprisonment of a freezing man who took so much as a fallen twig out of another man's forest...
...Truman's peacetime conscription—the "Prussianism" we went to war against twenty-five years ago—the readier I am to offer myself as candidate for the office of Prophet without Portfolio...
...Either we feed them through UNRRA or they die...
...Since their starvation is socialized, and they have nothing to exchange for eggs, their relief must be socialized...
...Plough me under, daddy, eight to the bar...
...But today, as I glim a couple of front-page stories in the St...
...Worse yet, the cost of war to the victor must be measured in the determination to take from somebody else sufficient goods to compensate for those expended...
...HERE it is, then, a few weeks after our biggest and best war to support the American Way, and the American Way is beginning to collapse again...
...If Europe and Asia freeze and starve—such people grow so desperate that they will fight anybody anywhere, including each other—while we return to Mr...
...Thus the American Way—and our morality is, I hope, American, too—is caught between two socialisms— socialized greed and socialized charity...
...Hoover's free, but empty, market, there will be war everywhere, and it won't be the atom bomb that started it...
...Wallace's reverse socialism of ploughing under, or to Mr...
...The cost of war must be measured not merely in the expenditure of goods, but also, and much more so, in the increased determination to hold on to the- decreased goods that are left...
...One of the stories, from Tokyo, asserts that mass starvation—already a fact in bombed-out Europe —will occur in Japan this Winter in spite of Gen...
...And so the "hard peace" boys, who are only crazy with the heat, play into the hands of the national lust for somebody else's goods...
...the more I think about Russia's acquisition of Manchuria and half of Korea as its share in the divvy for its eight-day participation in the hi'st...
...I am the only sane man alive...
...Haying sunk a hundred billion a year to the bottom of the seven seas, we find ourselves approaching...
...Relief, in the form of food, has got to come from the United States...
...The more I think about all this—this total failure of the total war, even in terms of our own greed—the more my private suspicion is confirmed that I am the only sane man alive...
...slowly but surely, the condition of the two nations first involved in this war, Germany and Poland...
...The Utopian ideal is to fight two-billion-dollar-a-week wars without paying a cent for them...
...In Poland 'Mass hunger has been the rule for seven centuries, in order to support the American Way...
...The more I think about our red-handed policy toward Puerto Rico, which we don't even need in order to be rich...
...We grow poorer in goods—we, the only rich people left on earth—and we grow more arrogant in spirit...
...And, while the American Way, so recently vindicated by the atom bomb, moves rapidly toward a header, with the spectre again of poverty in the midst of plenty and the very means of life being ploughed under in order to support an inedible dollar, the people of two continents approach starvation and freezing...
...WE pay our money—and the blood of our young men—but apparently we don't take our choice...
...at others, as a hopeless pessimist, because I insist it can not be made a fit place to live in by next Thursday...
...and, horribile dictu, the egg situation is so good, and the price going down so fast, that the Department of Agriculture will have to curtail egg production...
...And all this a few weeks after a war that was fought, at a cost of two billion dollars a week, to bring freedom from want to the world...
...Some vermiform vestige of morality whispers to us, "Thy brother is hungry," but an equally vermiform vestige of the American Way whispers, "Plough it under, cork up the hens, support the prices...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 44
