It would have been fun to have a few drinks with this guy.I know he is saying I told you so.
Ex-America
By Garet Garrett
1951The winds that blow our billions away return burdened with themes of scorn and dispraise. There is a little brat wind that keeps saying: "But you are absurd, you Americans, like the rich, fat boy from the big house who is tolerated while he spends his money at the drugstore and then gets chased home with mud on his clothes. He is bewildered and hurt, and yet he wants so much to be liked that he does it again the next day. But this is parable and you are probably too stupid to get it. If you do you won't believe it, and so no harm is done. You will come again tomorrow."
Another wind says: "You worship success, you Americans. You have thereby ruined all your spiritual and moral values, such as they were. Your controlling idea is Babylon for the masses. Since success is your idol you are unable to understand the souls of other people or that they have souls. You are unable to comprehend the spiritual content of communism and are deluded to think you can shoot it out of the world."
How shall one answer insulting winds? You do not assert your possession of spiritual values. But as for, success, we may be sure that if it seems to be acclaimed here more than anywhere else that is only because it is magnificent here and multiplies the satisfactions of common life in a manner that is the envy of the whole world.
Having lived the most fabulous success story in the history of the human race we are rich—so rich that the next-richest country is by comparison poor. In a world where one-third of humanity barely subsists on the poverty level, this is a fact that cannot be forgiven. Yet one may be permitted to suggest that its magnitude is not the only unique fact about American wealth.
Firstly, we made it all for ourselves, the hard way, by our own free labor, and the ground of it was a life of Puritan thrift, self-discipline and austerity, while the rich in Europe, exploiting their own and their colonial labor, lived in dazzling luxury.
Secondly, American wealth has been shared with the world.
That idea is still so strange that the meaning of simple words needs to be emphasized. Never before in the history of mankind has one rich nation literally shared its wealth with others. In World War I we made very large loans to our associates, which afterward we expected them to repay only in part, but which they nevertheless repudiated, not because they couldn't pay but because it was too hard to pay and because the Americans were already too rich. And this was the beginning of capitalism's fatal leukemia in Europe, especially in Great Britain, where the movement to repudiate war debts to America originated—fatal because capitalism is founded on the inviolability of contract.
Then came World War II, and remembering the humiliation of being called Shylock for expecting to get anything back on account of Europe's war debts in the first case, we said, "This time we erase the dollar mark." That was the meaning of Lend-Lease. After the war our allies would owe us nothing. All the dollars did was to measure the quantity of things they required of us—not a debt to be repaid.
During the years of war and postwar time, what with Lend-Lease, global emergency relief, the four billion-dollar loan to Great Britain, the Marshall Plan, military aid, the North Atlantic Pact and all, the amount of American wealth distributed through the world was roughly equal to the total national wealth of the next-richest nation, namely, Great Britain.
The postwar Marshall Plan was pure giving. We said to the nations of Europe, all of them at first, including Russia: "Estimate what your deficits will be for several years, count it all up, and send us the bill." Russia and her satellites declined. All of western Europe accepted with expressions of affection and gratitude. Winston Churchill called it the most unselfish act in the history of the world. In that spirit we sent them food, fuel, raw materials, machines, and even money to pay their debts. We built new factories for them, and power houses, and restored their railroads, besides irrigation works, modern roads, and agricultural projects in their colonies. Roughly, they used two-thirds of our Marshall Plan money for restoration and the other third for expansion on lines competitive with American industry, so that they might be able to compete with us in the markets of the world to better advantage; and by the end of 1950 western Europe's productive power not only had been fully restored; it was 30 per cent greater than before the war. That was sharing. Never had such a thing happened or been imagined before in this world.
Nevertheless, a shrill Socialist wind from Great Britain says: "Now you are guilty of hypocrisy. It is not for the sake of the world you do it. It is for your own sake. You have had a surplus you could neither consume yourselves nor sell to others, and to get rid of it you were obliged to give it away, for if you did not somehow get rid of it you would drown in it. Such is the riddle of your capitalism. Therefore, instead of taking merit for giving your surplus away you should be grateful to other people for receiving it."
This hurts, coming from the British, who have been the principal beneficiaries of our sharing. And there was no surplus. It was not surplus we gave away. It was wealth; and it is nonsense to say we could not have used it ourselves, if not in the same forms in which it was distributed abroad, then in other forms, since wealth is a thing that may assume any form. It is true that our standard of living went on rising, but that is not to say it might not have advanced much more if we had employed here the wealth we gave away. Could we not use the dams and power plants we built in western Europe? Or the roads we built for Europe's colonial dependencies in places we almost never heard of before? Could we not have used our money to reduce our own public debt, instead of giving it to Great Britain to reduce her public debt on the ground that it would improve her credit? What an odd paragraph this will make in history, if it is remembered, that we increased our national debt to enable Great Britain to reduce hers.
There is a cruel wind saying: "But you are dangerous, you hair-trigger Americans. You brandish your weapons in a reckless manner. You are too ready to use the atomic bomb."
The British say that. A rift in Anglo-American policy toward Asia was so explained. While saying for themselves that they could hope for a diplomatic settlement with Red China, the British made the rash Americans appear to prefer a military solution. Soviet Russia's propaganda, aiming to fix upon us the guilt of warmongering, was thereby strengthened, and in the whole world the question began to be asked: "For all they say, are the Americans really a peace-loving people? Even though they think they mean what they say, is it not possible that their insatiable economy, to go on expanding, demands the military stimulus?"
That question may give Americans a good deal of prayerful thought. As a peace-loving people we do have a terrific war history—one world war to make the world safe for democracy, soon another one much more terrible to kill the aggressor everywhere forever, and now a defense of the whole free world, which makes it impossible for us to stay out of war anywhere, the bones of Nevada cracking under the stress of experimental atomic bomb explosions—and the economy expanding all the time.
But there is another history that belongs to us too, and it is more significant because it represents the activity of our own free will.
After World War I we had incomparably the greatest navy in the world. What any other country might have done with it need not be suggested. What did we do with it? We called the Washington Conference on naval disarmament and made there the only forthright proposal for real disarmament that was ever heard.
We said to the other naval powers of the world: "Look, ours is by far the longest sword. Measure it. This is what we propose. We will break our sword to the length of the next longest one, if everybody will agree to stop there. That will end the mad armament race, in which as you well know we have the unlimited advantage. None of you can hope to overtake us. We can build a navy twice as big, three times as big, and we will do it if necessary."
Was that the voice of a peace-loving people? The other naval powers, principally Great Britain, France, and Japan were stunned. They could hardly believe it. A treaty was signed accordingly. We towed our ships out to sea and sank enough of them to give Great Britain parity with the American navy.
The sequel was that no other signatory power absolutely kept faith. Great Britain increased the range of her guns. Ultimately Japan denounced the treaty.
But the story of America at war is perhaps too fantastic, so that a suspicious world walks round and round it saying it cannot be true as it looks; there must be something very wrong with it, a global gimmick, a secret forethought, since people are born selfish and really cannot behave like that. If in all history there is such a thing as a nation engaging in two world wars and renouncing beforehand any material gain or advantage whatever, and meaning it, where is it? We have done it twice. We have helped the other victors to divide the loot among them, taking nothing for ourselves, and then we have shared our wealth with the victors and vanquished alike to restore their lives.
Yet there is a chill sardonic wind rising in France that says: "You are imperialistic all the same, whether you realize it or not. Call it moral imperialism if you like, and so beguile yourselves. You are trying to make the kind of world you want. You are trying to impose the American way of life on other people, whether they want it or not. Suppose they don't want it. Will you oblige them to choose between two forms of coercion—one way to embrace communism and the other to accept the American way of life? Are you not saying to other people, 'You can have any kind of government you want, provided it is anticommunist'? And morally wherein does this differ from what the Russians are saying—that people can have any kind of government they want provided it is anti capitalist and anti-American?"
An Arab philosopher rises to tell us that our sin is to put our trust ". . . far more in gadgets and in the manipulation of emotions than in the truth and potency of ideas. The idea of taking a college degree, getting married and settled, rearing a family, having a dependable job, making lots of money and having a solid and ever-expanding bank account—this ideal, conceived purely in those terms, is not good enough." We are so chagrined by this description of the futility and boredom of the life we live as to forget that what the East desperately wants and thinks we should help her to achieve is a higher standard of material living.
The Arab says we shall be like that until we learn to go out of ourselves to a region of joy ". . . where it is more blessed to give than to receive."
This to a nation that has never had a chance to receive, only to give; to a nation that is, incredibly, for all the rest of the world, a charitable organization. This we forget and say instead, "Hear! Hear! It is wisdom from the East."
The Arab continues that as it contemplates the values of the West "... Asia—if I must be frank with you—is not impressed. In fact, despite all her darkness and misery, Asia can still do better."
Well, these Americans have not swallowed the sun. The Asians have exactly as much of it as we have. If they can do better, why don't they do it? Why do they demand our help? With our share of the sun we have aimed only to make the kind of life we wanted, and we did it all on our own. Why haven't the Asians made the kind of life they want? The wealth of Asia once dazzled a barbarian Western world. What became of it? What became of the genius and will that built palaces and temples that are still wonderful as relics in the pages of the National Geographic Magazine? What became of the science and technology that made the first paper, the first gunpowder, the first mariner's compass, did the first printing, and first clothed the body in silk? By now making a virtue of poverty and preferring its miseries to the boredom of good living, the Asians may have saved their souls. If they think so it is not arguable. But for them now to be saying that to receive American wealth to improve their standard of living will not hurt their souls, whereas the giving of it may save the American soul, is too much of a strain on their garment of spiritual superiority. It rips in the critical seams. As philosophy, these winds from Asia are punk; as propaganda they appeal to the softness of American character.
Since the world is people and the one universal tragedy in it is human behavior, we may know that the richest and most powerful nation will not be loved. It must expect to be feared, to be hated because it is feared, to be maligned and misjudged. Last before us it was Great Britain, whose other name was Perfidious Albion. Now it is our turn. But why should we be so tender-minded about it? Why do we suffer the censorious opinions of the world to be as sackcloth on our skin and ashes on our forehead? Why must we accept the expectations of other people as the measure of our obligation to them?
It was not always so. Since Washington—until this generation—Europe was Old World and America was New World; and even as we broke the tradition of orbital separation the feeling for it was so strong that we said our role in World War I was that of associate, not ally.
The questions we ask are new. They have arisen in our time and they have a certain history.
About 1900 began the flowering of that alien graft upon our tree of sapience called the intellectual. He was the precious product of our free, academic world—a social theorist who knew more than anybody else about everything and all about nothing, except how to subvert the traditions and invert the laws. He was neither creative nor inventive; therefore there was no profit for him in the capitalistic scheme, and his revenge was to embrace Old World socialism. As a teacher, writer of textbooks, master of the popular diatribe of discontent, he was primarily a sower of contrarious ideas. Living comfortably on the fringe of capitalistic opulence, he compared his income with that of a bond salesman or a self-made executive and was moved to scorn the profit motive and trample upon private wealth.
In the academic world this disaffected intellectual multiplied by fission. One made two, two made four, and so on. Their superior manners and university passports caused them to be received in the houses of the rich, where they dined on fine plate and denounced success. Standing on the eastern seaboard they gazed dotingly on Europe, which, they said, was twenty years ahead of America in social consciousness.
Notwithstanding our "cultural lag," Europe would have been glad at any time to trade her standard of living for ours. What did that mean? To the intellectuals it meant nothing. All they knew about the American affair—all they wanted to know—was what was wrong with it. They could see only its pimples and festers and treated these minor excrescences as symptoms of deep disease. Their influence for a while was underestimated, especially by those who thought their free enterprise world was too strong to be in danger, and said: "A little radicalism is perhaps good for us. It will make us think."
And so it was that after 1900 we began to import political ideas from Europe. This was reversal. Until then for more than one hundred years Europe had been taking ideas from us—ideas of liberty from the Declaration of Independence, ideas of limited government from our Constitution, and then, though very dimly, the idea that wages were paid not out of profits but out of production, which meant that profits and wages could rise together, provided only you went on expanding production.
But now, from the intellectual's transmission belt, we began to take ideas from Europe—ideas of social security from Germany, ideas of slow socialization from the British Fabians, and from Great Britain also the idea of political laborism, in contradiction of the American idea as expounded by Samuel Gompers that the ground of organized labor's struggle was economic, not political. Gompers had once said that he would sooner be shot than become a number on a social security card. A right division of the economic product, and then let the wage earner do as he would with his own; that was the American philosophy. The intellectuals represented socialism to be a working-class movement. That certainly was not true here, and Friedrich Hayek is probably right when he says that "socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement." In every case, historically, it has been first a movement in the minds of the intellectuals.
The first great turning was accomplished with the ease of a Pullman train passing from one track to another over a split-point switch. The landscape hardly changed at all for a while, and then gradually, and when people found themselves in a new political region, there was no turning back.
The event was the amendment of the Constitution in 1913, giving the Federal government power to impose a progressive tax on all incomes. This idea was not only European, it was Marxian, one of the cardinal points of the Communist Manifesto. President Wilson disarmed opposition by saying the Federal government would use this power, if at all, only in time of emergency and yet, as we now know, the obsequies of limited government ought then to have been performed. Only the intellectuals knew what it meant. Nobody else dreamed, least of all perhaps President Wilson, that the Federal income tax would be used not for revenue only, which was until then the only kind of taxation Americans knew, but for the purpose of redistributing the national wealth from the top downward, according to European ideas of social amelioration.
The Federal income tax was but one tool and had not its full leverage until other turnings took place. It was not until the first year of the Roosevelt era that the intellectuals achieved political power at the foot of the throne. Then the Federal government seized control of money, credit, and banking, and introduced an irredeemable paper-money currency. Next, the Federal Reserve System, which was never, never to be a political instrument, became an engine of inflation, and the New Deal Treasury perfected a method of converting public debt into dollars—a process now called "monetization of the debt."
By this chain of events a revolution was brought to pass, almost unawares. Many people are still dim about it. The revolution was that for the first time in our history the government was free. Formerly free government was understood to mean the government of a free people. But now that meaning changed. The government itself was free. Free from what? Free from the ancient limitations of money. It no longer had any money worries; it had no longer to fear a deficit because it could turn a deficit into money; the bigger the deficit the richer the government was. It had only to think billions and behold, the billions were in the Treasury.
After that it was merely nostalgic to talk any more of controlling government or limiting its powers of self-aggrandizement. What had limited it before was the public purse, which the people filled. Now, by this new magic, it could fill its own purse and scatter beneficence not only at home but throughout the world. If it had not possessed the wand that could command billions at will, the story of this country's relations to the rest of the world during the last twenty years might have been very different, and indeed one might almost say that for want of dollars World War II would have been impossible.
But if dollars made it possible, still dollars did not do it. The American mind had to be reconditioned for intervention a second time in the quarrels of the world.
After World War I American feeling soured on Europe. To President Wilson's impassioned question—“Shall we break the heart of the world?"—the American people said, "Even so," and refused to join the League of Nations. In the resolve to keep out of another world war they went so far as to scuttle the ancient tradition of neutral rights and passed a neutrality law forbidding the sale of arms and ammunition to any combatant nation, and, remembering the Lusitania, forbade American citizens to travel abroad in wartime on any but neutral vessels.
Such was the state of feeling when, in 1937, with the New Deal at low ebb, resident Roosevelt made his startling "quarantine speech" in Chicago, aimed at the German aggressor. This was a sign of release for the intellectuals, whose evangel of internationalism until then had been hindered by its unpopularity. They went to work for the second crusade. Both their convictions and their political ambitions harmonized perfectly with the new foreign policy of intervention.
In the orchestration of this policy the intellectuals had the drums, the percussion instruments and the brass; the administration played the strings and the woodwinds. To the science of propaganda a new book was added. Never before in a free country, with no actually imposed forms of thought control, had the mind of a people been so successfully conditioned. In three years isolationist became a smear word, supposed to be politically fatal, and to say or think America first was treason to mankind. Nine months before Pearl Harbor the country, actually and illegally, was at war with Hitler.
It was not always so. Since Washington—until this generation—Europe was Old World and America was New World; and even as we broke the tradition of orbital separation the feeling for it was so strong that we said our role in World War I was that of associate, not ally.
The questions we ask are new. They have arisen in our time and they have a certain history.
About 1900 began the flowering of that alien graft upon our tree of sapience called the intellectual. He was the precious product of our free, academic world—a social theorist who knew more than anybody else about everything and all about nothing, except how to subvert the traditions and invert the laws. He was neither creative nor inventive; therefore there was no profit for him in the capitalistic scheme, and his revenge was to embrace Old World socialism. As a teacher, writer of textbooks, master of the popular diatribe of discontent, he was primarily a sower of contrarious ideas. Living comfortably on the fringe of capitalistic opulence, he compared his income with that of a bond salesman or a self-made executive and was moved to scorn the profit motive and trample upon private wealth.
In the academic world this disaffected intellectual multiplied by fission. One made two, two made four, and so on. Their superior manners and university passports caused them to be received in the houses of the rich, where they dined on fine plate and denounced success. Standing on the eastern seaboard they gazed dotingly on Europe, which, they said, was twenty years ahead of America in social consciousness.
Notwithstanding our "cultural lag," Europe would have been glad at any time to trade her standard of living for ours. What did that mean? To the intellectuals it meant nothing. All they knew about the American affair—all they wanted to know—was what was wrong with it. They could see only its pimples and festers and treated these minor excrescences as symptoms of deep disease. Their influence for a while was underestimated, especially by those who thought their free enterprise world was too strong to be in danger, and said: "A little radicalism is perhaps good for us. It will make us think."
And so it was that after 1900 we began to import political ideas from Europe. This was reversal. Until then for more than one hundred years Europe had been taking ideas from us—ideas of liberty from the Declaration of Independence, ideas of limited government from our Constitution, and then, though very dimly, the idea that wages were paid not out of profits but out of production, which meant that profits and wages could rise together, provided only you went on expanding production.
But now, from the intellectual's transmission belt, we began to take ideas from Europe—ideas of social security from Germany, ideas of slow socialization from the British Fabians, and from Great Britain also the idea of political laborism, in contradiction of the American idea as expounded by Samuel Gompers that the ground of organized labor's struggle was economic, not political. Gompers had once said that he would sooner be shot than become a number on a social security card. A right division of the economic product, and then let the wage earner do as he would with his own; that was the American philosophy. The intellectuals represented socialism to be a working-class movement. That certainly was not true here, and Friedrich Hayek is probably right when he says that "socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement." In every case, historically, it has been first a movement in the minds of the intellectuals.
The first great turning was accomplished with the ease of a Pullman train passing from one track to another over a split-point switch. The landscape hardly changed at all for a while, and then gradually, and when people found themselves in a new political region, there was no turning back.
The event was the amendment of the Constitution in 1913, giving the Federal government power to impose a progressive tax on all incomes. This idea was not only European, it was Marxian, one of the cardinal points of the Communist Manifesto. President Wilson disarmed opposition by saying the Federal government would use this power, if at all, only in time of emergency and yet, as we now know, the obsequies of limited government ought then to have been performed. Only the intellectuals knew what it meant. Nobody else dreamed, least of all perhaps President Wilson, that the Federal income tax would be used not for revenue only, which was until then the only kind of taxation Americans knew, but for the purpose of redistributing the national wealth from the top downward, according to European ideas of social amelioration.
The Federal income tax was but one tool and had not its full leverage until other turnings took place. It was not until the first year of the Roosevelt era that the intellectuals achieved political power at the foot of the throne. Then the Federal government seized control of money, credit, and banking, and introduced an irredeemable paper-money currency. Next, the Federal Reserve System, which was never, never to be a political instrument, became an engine of inflation, and the New Deal Treasury perfected a method of converting public debt into dollars—a process now called "monetization of the debt."
By this chain of events a revolution was brought to pass, almost unawares. Many people are still dim about it. The revolution was that for the first time in our history the government was free. Formerly free government was understood to mean the government of a free people. But now that meaning changed. The government itself was free. Free from what? Free from the ancient limitations of money. It no longer had any money worries; it had no longer to fear a deficit because it could turn a deficit into money; the bigger the deficit the richer the government was. It had only to think billions and behold, the billions were in the Treasury.
After that it was merely nostalgic to talk any more of controlling government or limiting its powers of self-aggrandizement. What had limited it before was the public purse, which the people filled. Now, by this new magic, it could fill its own purse and scatter beneficence not only at home but throughout the world. If it had not possessed the wand that could command billions at will, the story of this country's relations to the rest of the world during the last twenty years might have been very different, and indeed one might almost say that for want of dollars World War II would have been impossible.
But if dollars made it possible, still dollars did not do it. The American mind had to be reconditioned for intervention a second time in the quarrels of the world.
After World War I American feeling soured on Europe. To President Wilson's impassioned question—“Shall we break the heart of the world?"—the American people said, "Even so," and refused to join the League of Nations. In the resolve to keep out of another world war they went so far as to scuttle the ancient tradition of neutral rights and passed a neutrality law forbidding the sale of arms and ammunition to any combatant nation, and, remembering the Lusitania, forbade American citizens to travel abroad in wartime on any but neutral vessels.
Such was the state of feeling when, in 1937, with the New Deal at low ebb, resident Roosevelt made his startling "quarantine speech" in Chicago, aimed at the German aggressor. This was a sign of release for the intellectuals, whose evangel of internationalism until then had been hindered by its unpopularity. They went to work for the second crusade. Both their convictions and their political ambitions harmonized perfectly with the new foreign policy of intervention.
In the orchestration of this policy the intellectuals had the drums, the percussion instruments and the brass; the administration played the strings and the woodwinds. To the science of propaganda a new book was added. Never before in a free country, with no actually imposed forms of thought control, had the mind of a people been so successfully conditioned. In three years isolationist became a smear word, supposed to be politically fatal, and to say or think America first was treason to mankind. Nine months before Pearl Harbor the country, actually and illegally, was at war with Hitler.
"I ask you if anyone feels that this world is better after World War I and II than it was before, when the Constitution of the United States was supreme with us and the American flag occupied first place in our hearts and minds?"—Former Senator Albert W. Hawkes of New Jersey.
"The first World War and American intervention therein marked an ominous turning point in the history of the United States and the world. Unfortunately there are relatively few persons who recall the days before 1914.... All kinds of taxes were relatively low. We had only a token national debt Inflation was unheard of here There was little or no witch-hunting and few of the symptoms and operations of the police state which has been developing so rapidly here during the last decade Enlightened citizens of the Western world were then filled with buoyant hope for a bright future of humanity.... People were confident that the amazing developments of technology would soon produce abundance, security and leisure for the multitude. In this optimism no item was more potent than the assumption that war was an outmoded nightmare. . . The great majority of Americans today have known only a world ravaged by war, depressions, international intrigue and meddling; the encroachments of the police state, vast debts and crushing taxation and the control of public opinion by ruthless propaganda."—Professor Harry Elmer Barnes.
Americans now are of three kinds, namely: those who are very unhappy about what has happened in one lifetime to their world—to its morals, principles and ways of thinking—and have intuitions of a dire sequel; those who only now begin to read the signs and are seized with premonitions of disaster; and three, those who like it. It is impossible to say what proportion any one of these three divisions bears to the total. It is impossible, furthermore, at any moment of time to say what the people want or don't want. They probably do not know. And what they say may be so like writing on the sand that a tide not of their making will wipe it out. This is riddle.
Suppose a true image of the present world had been presented to them in 1900, the future as in a crystal ball, together with the question, "Do you want it?" No one can imagine that they would have said yes—that they could have been tempted by the comforts, the gadgets, the automobiles and all the fabulous satisfactions of mid-century existence, to accept the coils of octopean government, the dim-out of the individual, the atomic bomb, a life of sickening fear, the nightmare of extinction. Their answer would have been no, terrifically. You feel very sure of that, do you? You would have said no yourself?
Then how do you account for the fact that everything that has happened to change their world from what it was to what it is has taken place with their consent? More accurately, first it happened and then they consented.
They did not vote for getting into World War I. They voted against it. The slogan that elected President Wilson in 1916 was: "He kept us out of war." Then in a little while we were in it and supporting it fanatically.
They did not vote for the New Deal. They voted against it. That is to say, they elected Mr. Roosevelt on a platform that promised less government, a balanced Federal budget, and sound money. Nevertheless, when it came, they embraced the New Deal, with all its extensions of government authority, its deficit spending and its debasement of the currency.
They did not vote for getting into World War II. So far as they could they voted against it. Annotating in 1941 the 1939 volume of his Public Papers, Mr. Roosevelt wrote: "There can be no question that the people of the United States in 1939 were determined to remain neutral in fact and deed." They believed him when he said, during the 1940 campaign, "again and again and again" that their sons would never be sent to fight in foreign wars. So he was elected a third time on his pledge to keep the country out of war.
Immediately afterward, in March 1941, came Lend-Lease. By any previous interpretation of international law, Lend-Lease was an act of war—the government of one country giving arms, ammunition, and naval vessels to a belligerent nation. Not long after that, actual shooting began in the Atlantic, but for a while its meaning was disguised. Our navy was escorting cargo trains of Lend-Lease goods across the Atlantic, under pretense of patrolling the waters, and German submarines were trying to sink the cargo vessels; the trouble was that when the protecting U.S. Navy vessels appeared the Germans would shoot only in self defense, because Hitler did not want to attack, whereas what Mr. Roosevelt needed to release him from his anti-war pledges was an attack. That went on until, in October, 1941, Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, sent a message to all fleet commanders saying: "Whether the country knows it or not we are at war."
And still there had been no attack that would release Mr. Roosevelt and unite the country for war. After a cabinet meeting on November 25,1941, Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War, writing in his diary, defined the problem that had been discussed that day. It was how to "maneuver" the Japanese "into the position of firing the first shot." Pearl Harbor solved the problem. But in fact we had already been in the war for at least nine months.
They never voted for the Welfare State, with its distortions of the public debt, its basic socialism, its endless vista of confiscatory taxation, its compulsions and its police-like meddling with their private lives. Certainly they never voted for it in the way the English voted for socialism. Yet step by step they accepted it and liked it.
They did not vote for the United Nations, nor for putting the United Nations flag above American troops in foreign countries, nor for the North Atlantic Pact, which may involve us in war automatically and thus voids the Constitutional safeguard which says that only the Congress can declare war. A report entitled "Powers of the President to send Armed Forces Outside of the United States," signed by the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, says: "The use of the Congressional power to declare war has fallen into abeyance, because wars are no longer declared in advance."
And to all of this the people have consented, not beforehand but afterward.
They have never voted on a foreign policy that steered the ship from the American main at the top of the world to the international shoals of extreme danger. Whereas in 1945 the American word was law in the world and the Chief of Staff could report to the President that "the security of the United States now is in our own hands," five years later the government was telling the people they would have to fight for survival against the aggressor for whom we had swapped Hitler; and that we could save ourselves only with the aid of subsidized allies in Europe. Never having voted for it, having had in fact nothing to say about it, people nevertheless accepted it as if it had been inevitable in the pattern of American destiny.
They never voted for whittling away the restraints imposed by the Constitution on the power of executive government. They were deeply alarmed when, in a letter to the chairman of a House Committee, President Roosevelt asked why the Constitution should be permitted to stand in the way of a desirable law; and their feeling for the sanctity of the Constitution was so strong that when Mr. Roosevelt proposed to enlarge the Supreme Court in order to pack it with New Deal minds he was defeated by a spontaneous protest of extraordinary intensity.
Nevertheless, since then the mind of the Supreme Court has changed. What Mr. Roosevelt had been unable to do by onslaught was done by death and old age. As the conservative judges fell out, their seats were filled by men whose sympathies inclined to the Welfare State. By a series of reinterpretations of the Constitution, the reformed Supreme Court has so relaxed the austerities of the supreme law as to give government a new freedom. In this process it has cast itself in a social role. Formerly its business was to say what the law was, according to the Constitution; if people did not like the law they could change it, only provided they changed it in a lawful manner by amending the Constitution. Now the Supreme Court undertakes to say what is justice, what is public welfare, what is good for the people and to make suitable inflections of the Constitution. Thus law is made subordinate to the discretions and judgments of men, whereas the cornerstone of freedom was that the government should be a government of law, not of men.
They did not vote to debase the dollar. Everything that has happened to money was done to it by government, beginning with the deceptive separation of people from their own gold, then a confiscation of the gold, then making it a crime for a private citizen to own gold, together with a law forbidding contracts to be made in any kind of money but irredeemable paper currency, and finally the dishonorable repudiation of the promissory words engraved on its bonds. All of this with an air of leave-these-things-to-the-wisdom-of-government, as if people could not understand the mysteries of money. That was absurd. The controlling facts about money are not mysterious. By contrast, in 1896, there was a very grave monetary question to be settled. It was silver versus gold; or inflation versus sound money. It was taken to the people, and the people, not the government decided it. The people voted for sound money.
Enough of this history if it serves to indicate that in our time, actually in a few years, a momentous change has taken place in the relationship between government and people. It is commonplace to say that people have lost control of government. It is a thing too vast, too complex, too pervasive in all the transactions of life to be comprehended by the individual citizen. Indeed, as the Hoover Commission was able to show, the government no longer comprehends itself.
While the number of those who administer, or assist to administer, executive government has increased fivefold, and while the expenditures of Federal government have increased twenty times in twenty years, the power of the individual to resist the advance of its authority has not increased at all. In fact it has diminished. Even organized pressure groups, such as farmers and union labor, no longer resist. They ride it and use their influence to gain freer access to the illusory benefits that now flow in all directions from Washington.
Those who remember what the American world was like in the preceding generation do not need the record. The change it indicates is known to them by feeling.
Formerly it was natural for the citizen to think and speak of my government; or for an exasperated taxpayer to say to a supercilious bureaucrat, "Look. I support this government. You are working for me. Understand?"
That spirit has entirely disappeared. The taxpayer who now goes on his errand to Washington is another person. He is timorous and respectful. He does not tell the bureaucrat; the bureaucrat tells him. He has the sense of dealing with a vast impersonal power, and it is power that may legally take away his entire income. Instead of thinking and speaking of my government he now speaks of it as the government, and this almost unconscious change from the possessive my to the article the is very significant. Only recently has it occurred in common speech that the government does this or that for its people.
In the recent great debate on foreign policy, wherein the theme was the power of the President versus the constitutional prerogatives of Congress, Senator Watkins suddenly exclaimed: "Someone else seems to be speaking for the people."
Who else could be speaking for the people? Only government. And note that when now we speak of government we mean not Congress, and of course not the Supreme Court, but the executive power, seated in the White House and spread also among various administrative agencies that make and execute their own laws, thereby exercising legislative, executive, and judicial functions, all three at once.
So it is with government. The whole, beyond being the sum of its parts, is a thing in itself, organic and self-creative, with a kind of power derived from the center of its own being. Almost the only philosopher who has applied this thought to government was J. C. Smuts.
In his work, Holism and Evolution, he said: "What is not generally recognized is that the conception of wholes covers a much wider field than that of life . . . and that beyond the ordinary domain of biology it applies in a sense to human associations like the state.' In the human being, regarded as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, there is a central control that becomes conscious and mysteriously produces what we call personality. This same thing happens again in a composite whole, which is the group, and then in the course of human associations "this central control becomes individual in the state."
The founders of the American government knew history. As far back as they could see all governments both good and bad, no matter in what form they appeared, had certain features in common, such as a natural appetite for power, a passion to act upon peoples' lives, a will to live, resources of self-perpetuation and longings for grandeur—with always the one sequel, that they abused their power and fell and were succeeded by government that did it all over again, as if by some kind of inner compulsion.
The founders of the American government did not attempt to formulate this law of inner compulsion.
What they did was to create a government that could not obey such a law if one existed.
First of all, this was to be a government without the attribute of ultimate sovereignty, so that always in the final case the people would possess the sovereign power. Then a written Constitution to be the supreme law of the land, and under the Constitution a government of three separate and coequal powers, namely, Congress as the legislative power, the President as the executive power, and the Supreme Courts as the judicial power, each of these three powers so delicately balanced that any one could check the other two. The President could veto an act of Congress, but by a two thirds vote Congress could override his veto, and then, in either case, whether the President had signed the law or Congress had passed it over his veto, the Supreme Court could say whether or not it was a constitutional law, and if it said "no" the law was dead. In the background all the time was the sovereign power of the people, who if they were so minded could change the Constitution.
Whether or not there was an unformulated law of being that had obliged all governments before to destroy themselves by first exaggerating and then abusing their powers, there was one feature the founding fathers apparently did not see clearly, for if they had they almost certainly would have done more about it. It was a very obvious fact. No government can acquire power and put it forth by law and edict. It must have the means. A tyrant may issue laws and edicts, but if he lacks the means to enforce them they have no fury. In the ancient case, means might be the direct command of labor, food, and materials. So the pyramids were built. In the modern case, means will be money.
That is why every government in the secret recesses of its nature favors inflation. Inflation provides the means. Under pretense of making money cheap for the people, the government creates money for itself. When it goes into debt for what it calls the public welfare it first fills its own purse and then, as it spends the money, it extends its authority over the lives and liberties of the people. It suborns them. Their consent is bought. It is bought with the proceeds of inflation.
Senator Dirksen tells how Cordell Hull, then Secretary of State, expounded to him the New Deal's doctrine of corrupting the people for their own good. "My boy," Hull said, "this follows a bent of human philosophy. At first people will demur at the idea of subsidies and accept them very reluctantly, and then after awhile they will accept them in good grace, and later they will demand them."
The root evils of inflation are political, not monetary; but, since the monetary effects take place immediately and touch people in sensitive places, whereas the greater evils work slowly, this important truth is obscured. Certainly what happens to the integrities of government and to the morals of the people is much more important than anything that can happen to the dollar.
Moreover, the monetary effects are erasable. The purchasing power of your money falls. The value of the money you have saved may be halved. The creditor class may be terribly hurt. The vast wealth represented by pieces of engraved paper in safety-deposit boxes may crumble away. And yet none of this need be calamitous provided, first, it happens slowly over a period of years, so that the many compensating factors have time to act, and provided, secondly, that the dynamic principles by which wealth renews itself are jealously preserved.
So long as the effects are monetary only, periodical inflation is intoxicating. It is the oxygen of booms, and everybody loves a boom, even while at the same time knowing better and that the reckoning will come.
All the primer sermons against inflation leave out the compensations. Profits rise, and, although they may be illusory, one would sooner have illusory profits than none. Speculative opportunities appear. Much more than we like to admit, one man's loss may be another's gain. As the value of money falls the price of assets will rise. The value of a dollar hidden in the cellar will decrease. But the value of the house over the cellar will increase. If you both own the house and have dollars hidden in the cellar you may come out about even; if you own only the house with no dollars hidden in the cellar you may beat the inflation. There have been times, as in the seventies and eighties of our history, when material wealth has increased with prices falling. Nevertheless, under these conditions people are despondent and there is no feeling of prosperity.
These sayings are heretical. The use of them is to make a distinction between the kind of inflation that spells economic folly for which people themselves are to blame and, on the other hand, the kind of inflation that serves government as an instrument of policy and is intended to produce revolutionary social change.
When in the conquest of power and for political ends a government deliberately engineers inflation, all the monetary evils occur as before, and then to these you add such consequences as: first, that as the government expands explosively the people will lose control of it; secondly, as the people receive millions of checks from the automatic printing machines in the United States
Treasury they learn to become dependent on government for aid and comfort; thirdly, people are first enticed by the benefits and then obliged by authority to exchange freedom for status; and finally, the revelry of public money, which for a while seems to cost nobody anything, brings to pass a state of moral obliquity throughout society.
"The first World War and American intervention therein marked an ominous turning point in the history of the United States and the world. Unfortunately there are relatively few persons who recall the days before 1914.... All kinds of taxes were relatively low. We had only a token national debt Inflation was unheard of here There was little or no witch-hunting and few of the symptoms and operations of the police state which has been developing so rapidly here during the last decade Enlightened citizens of the Western world were then filled with buoyant hope for a bright future of humanity.... People were confident that the amazing developments of technology would soon produce abundance, security and leisure for the multitude. In this optimism no item was more potent than the assumption that war was an outmoded nightmare. . . The great majority of Americans today have known only a world ravaged by war, depressions, international intrigue and meddling; the encroachments of the police state, vast debts and crushing taxation and the control of public opinion by ruthless propaganda."—Professor Harry Elmer Barnes.
Americans now are of three kinds, namely: those who are very unhappy about what has happened in one lifetime to their world—to its morals, principles and ways of thinking—and have intuitions of a dire sequel; those who only now begin to read the signs and are seized with premonitions of disaster; and three, those who like it. It is impossible to say what proportion any one of these three divisions bears to the total. It is impossible, furthermore, at any moment of time to say what the people want or don't want. They probably do not know. And what they say may be so like writing on the sand that a tide not of their making will wipe it out. This is riddle.
Suppose a true image of the present world had been presented to them in 1900, the future as in a crystal ball, together with the question, "Do you want it?" No one can imagine that they would have said yes—that they could have been tempted by the comforts, the gadgets, the automobiles and all the fabulous satisfactions of mid-century existence, to accept the coils of octopean government, the dim-out of the individual, the atomic bomb, a life of sickening fear, the nightmare of extinction. Their answer would have been no, terrifically. You feel very sure of that, do you? You would have said no yourself?
Then how do you account for the fact that everything that has happened to change their world from what it was to what it is has taken place with their consent? More accurately, first it happened and then they consented.
They did not vote for getting into World War I. They voted against it. The slogan that elected President Wilson in 1916 was: "He kept us out of war." Then in a little while we were in it and supporting it fanatically.
They did not vote for the New Deal. They voted against it. That is to say, they elected Mr. Roosevelt on a platform that promised less government, a balanced Federal budget, and sound money. Nevertheless, when it came, they embraced the New Deal, with all its extensions of government authority, its deficit spending and its debasement of the currency.
They did not vote for getting into World War II. So far as they could they voted against it. Annotating in 1941 the 1939 volume of his Public Papers, Mr. Roosevelt wrote: "There can be no question that the people of the United States in 1939 were determined to remain neutral in fact and deed." They believed him when he said, during the 1940 campaign, "again and again and again" that their sons would never be sent to fight in foreign wars. So he was elected a third time on his pledge to keep the country out of war.
Immediately afterward, in March 1941, came Lend-Lease. By any previous interpretation of international law, Lend-Lease was an act of war—the government of one country giving arms, ammunition, and naval vessels to a belligerent nation. Not long after that, actual shooting began in the Atlantic, but for a while its meaning was disguised. Our navy was escorting cargo trains of Lend-Lease goods across the Atlantic, under pretense of patrolling the waters, and German submarines were trying to sink the cargo vessels; the trouble was that when the protecting U.S. Navy vessels appeared the Germans would shoot only in self defense, because Hitler did not want to attack, whereas what Mr. Roosevelt needed to release him from his anti-war pledges was an attack. That went on until, in October, 1941, Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, sent a message to all fleet commanders saying: "Whether the country knows it or not we are at war."
And still there had been no attack that would release Mr. Roosevelt and unite the country for war. After a cabinet meeting on November 25,1941, Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War, writing in his diary, defined the problem that had been discussed that day. It was how to "maneuver" the Japanese "into the position of firing the first shot." Pearl Harbor solved the problem. But in fact we had already been in the war for at least nine months.
They never voted for the Welfare State, with its distortions of the public debt, its basic socialism, its endless vista of confiscatory taxation, its compulsions and its police-like meddling with their private lives. Certainly they never voted for it in the way the English voted for socialism. Yet step by step they accepted it and liked it.
They did not vote for the United Nations, nor for putting the United Nations flag above American troops in foreign countries, nor for the North Atlantic Pact, which may involve us in war automatically and thus voids the Constitutional safeguard which says that only the Congress can declare war. A report entitled "Powers of the President to send Armed Forces Outside of the United States," signed by the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, says: "The use of the Congressional power to declare war has fallen into abeyance, because wars are no longer declared in advance."
And to all of this the people have consented, not beforehand but afterward.
They have never voted on a foreign policy that steered the ship from the American main at the top of the world to the international shoals of extreme danger. Whereas in 1945 the American word was law in the world and the Chief of Staff could report to the President that "the security of the United States now is in our own hands," five years later the government was telling the people they would have to fight for survival against the aggressor for whom we had swapped Hitler; and that we could save ourselves only with the aid of subsidized allies in Europe. Never having voted for it, having had in fact nothing to say about it, people nevertheless accepted it as if it had been inevitable in the pattern of American destiny.
They never voted for whittling away the restraints imposed by the Constitution on the power of executive government. They were deeply alarmed when, in a letter to the chairman of a House Committee, President Roosevelt asked why the Constitution should be permitted to stand in the way of a desirable law; and their feeling for the sanctity of the Constitution was so strong that when Mr. Roosevelt proposed to enlarge the Supreme Court in order to pack it with New Deal minds he was defeated by a spontaneous protest of extraordinary intensity.
Nevertheless, since then the mind of the Supreme Court has changed. What Mr. Roosevelt had been unable to do by onslaught was done by death and old age. As the conservative judges fell out, their seats were filled by men whose sympathies inclined to the Welfare State. By a series of reinterpretations of the Constitution, the reformed Supreme Court has so relaxed the austerities of the supreme law as to give government a new freedom. In this process it has cast itself in a social role. Formerly its business was to say what the law was, according to the Constitution; if people did not like the law they could change it, only provided they changed it in a lawful manner by amending the Constitution. Now the Supreme Court undertakes to say what is justice, what is public welfare, what is good for the people and to make suitable inflections of the Constitution. Thus law is made subordinate to the discretions and judgments of men, whereas the cornerstone of freedom was that the government should be a government of law, not of men.
They did not vote to debase the dollar. Everything that has happened to money was done to it by government, beginning with the deceptive separation of people from their own gold, then a confiscation of the gold, then making it a crime for a private citizen to own gold, together with a law forbidding contracts to be made in any kind of money but irredeemable paper currency, and finally the dishonorable repudiation of the promissory words engraved on its bonds. All of this with an air of leave-these-things-to-the-wisdom-of-government, as if people could not understand the mysteries of money. That was absurd. The controlling facts about money are not mysterious. By contrast, in 1896, there was a very grave monetary question to be settled. It was silver versus gold; or inflation versus sound money. It was taken to the people, and the people, not the government decided it. The people voted for sound money.
Enough of this history if it serves to indicate that in our time, actually in a few years, a momentous change has taken place in the relationship between government and people. It is commonplace to say that people have lost control of government. It is a thing too vast, too complex, too pervasive in all the transactions of life to be comprehended by the individual citizen. Indeed, as the Hoover Commission was able to show, the government no longer comprehends itself.
While the number of those who administer, or assist to administer, executive government has increased fivefold, and while the expenditures of Federal government have increased twenty times in twenty years, the power of the individual to resist the advance of its authority has not increased at all. In fact it has diminished. Even organized pressure groups, such as farmers and union labor, no longer resist. They ride it and use their influence to gain freer access to the illusory benefits that now flow in all directions from Washington.
Those who remember what the American world was like in the preceding generation do not need the record. The change it indicates is known to them by feeling.
Formerly it was natural for the citizen to think and speak of my government; or for an exasperated taxpayer to say to a supercilious bureaucrat, "Look. I support this government. You are working for me. Understand?"
That spirit has entirely disappeared. The taxpayer who now goes on his errand to Washington is another person. He is timorous and respectful. He does not tell the bureaucrat; the bureaucrat tells him. He has the sense of dealing with a vast impersonal power, and it is power that may legally take away his entire income. Instead of thinking and speaking of my government he now speaks of it as the government, and this almost unconscious change from the possessive my to the article the is very significant. Only recently has it occurred in common speech that the government does this or that for its people.
In the recent great debate on foreign policy, wherein the theme was the power of the President versus the constitutional prerogatives of Congress, Senator Watkins suddenly exclaimed: "Someone else seems to be speaking for the people."
Who else could be speaking for the people? Only government. And note that when now we speak of government we mean not Congress, and of course not the Supreme Court, but the executive power, seated in the White House and spread also among various administrative agencies that make and execute their own laws, thereby exercising legislative, executive, and judicial functions, all three at once.
Beyond how it works and how it touches our lives, how little we know really about the nature of government. You may identify its parts and when you have accounted for all the parts you have the whole. But if you say the parts are in the whole and the whole is in the parts, and stop there, you stop just where something else begins.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts, even as what we call society is more than the sum of its members. That which is more is what Rousseau called the General Will, acting by a process that cannot be understood as a simple counting of hands.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts, even as what we call society is more than the sum of its members. That which is more is what Rousseau called the General Will, acting by a process that cannot be understood as a simple counting of hands.
So it is with government. The whole, beyond being the sum of its parts, is a thing in itself, organic and self-creative, with a kind of power derived from the center of its own being. Almost the only philosopher who has applied this thought to government was J. C. Smuts.
In his work, Holism and Evolution, he said: "What is not generally recognized is that the conception of wholes covers a much wider field than that of life . . . and that beyond the ordinary domain of biology it applies in a sense to human associations like the state.' In the human being, regarded as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, there is a central control that becomes conscious and mysteriously produces what we call personality. This same thing happens again in a composite whole, which is the group, and then in the course of human associations "this central control becomes individual in the state."
The founders of the American government knew history. As far back as they could see all governments both good and bad, no matter in what form they appeared, had certain features in common, such as a natural appetite for power, a passion to act upon peoples' lives, a will to live, resources of self-perpetuation and longings for grandeur—with always the one sequel, that they abused their power and fell and were succeeded by government that did it all over again, as if by some kind of inner compulsion.
The founders of the American government did not attempt to formulate this law of inner compulsion.
What they did was to create a government that could not obey such a law if one existed.
First of all, this was to be a government without the attribute of ultimate sovereignty, so that always in the final case the people would possess the sovereign power. Then a written Constitution to be the supreme law of the land, and under the Constitution a government of three separate and coequal powers, namely, Congress as the legislative power, the President as the executive power, and the Supreme Courts as the judicial power, each of these three powers so delicately balanced that any one could check the other two. The President could veto an act of Congress, but by a two thirds vote Congress could override his veto, and then, in either case, whether the President had signed the law or Congress had passed it over his veto, the Supreme Court could say whether or not it was a constitutional law, and if it said "no" the law was dead. In the background all the time was the sovereign power of the people, who if they were so minded could change the Constitution.
Whether or not there was an unformulated law of being that had obliged all governments before to destroy themselves by first exaggerating and then abusing their powers, there was one feature the founding fathers apparently did not see clearly, for if they had they almost certainly would have done more about it. It was a very obvious fact. No government can acquire power and put it forth by law and edict. It must have the means. A tyrant may issue laws and edicts, but if he lacks the means to enforce them they have no fury. In the ancient case, means might be the direct command of labor, food, and materials. So the pyramids were built. In the modern case, means will be money.
That is why every government in the secret recesses of its nature favors inflation. Inflation provides the means. Under pretense of making money cheap for the people, the government creates money for itself. When it goes into debt for what it calls the public welfare it first fills its own purse and then, as it spends the money, it extends its authority over the lives and liberties of the people. It suborns them. Their consent is bought. It is bought with the proceeds of inflation.
Senator Dirksen tells how Cordell Hull, then Secretary of State, expounded to him the New Deal's doctrine of corrupting the people for their own good. "My boy," Hull said, "this follows a bent of human philosophy. At first people will demur at the idea of subsidies and accept them very reluctantly, and then after awhile they will accept them in good grace, and later they will demand them."
The root evils of inflation are political, not monetary; but, since the monetary effects take place immediately and touch people in sensitive places, whereas the greater evils work slowly, this important truth is obscured. Certainly what happens to the integrities of government and to the morals of the people is much more important than anything that can happen to the dollar.
Moreover, the monetary effects are erasable. The purchasing power of your money falls. The value of the money you have saved may be halved. The creditor class may be terribly hurt. The vast wealth represented by pieces of engraved paper in safety-deposit boxes may crumble away. And yet none of this need be calamitous provided, first, it happens slowly over a period of years, so that the many compensating factors have time to act, and provided, secondly, that the dynamic principles by which wealth renews itself are jealously preserved.
So long as the effects are monetary only, periodical inflation is intoxicating. It is the oxygen of booms, and everybody loves a boom, even while at the same time knowing better and that the reckoning will come.
All the primer sermons against inflation leave out the compensations. Profits rise, and, although they may be illusory, one would sooner have illusory profits than none. Speculative opportunities appear. Much more than we like to admit, one man's loss may be another's gain. As the value of money falls the price of assets will rise. The value of a dollar hidden in the cellar will decrease. But the value of the house over the cellar will increase. If you both own the house and have dollars hidden in the cellar you may come out about even; if you own only the house with no dollars hidden in the cellar you may beat the inflation. There have been times, as in the seventies and eighties of our history, when material wealth has increased with prices falling. Nevertheless, under these conditions people are despondent and there is no feeling of prosperity.
These sayings are heretical. The use of them is to make a distinction between the kind of inflation that spells economic folly for which people themselves are to blame and, on the other hand, the kind of inflation that serves government as an instrument of policy and is intended to produce revolutionary social change.
When in the conquest of power and for political ends a government deliberately engineers inflation, all the monetary evils occur as before, and then to these you add such consequences as: first, that as the government expands explosively the people will lose control of it; secondly, as the people receive millions of checks from the automatic printing machines in the United States
Treasury they learn to become dependent on government for aid and comfort; thirdly, people are first enticed by the benefits and then obliged by authority to exchange freedom for status; and finally, the revelry of public money, which for a while seems to cost nobody anything, brings to pass a state of moral obliquity throughout society.
The monetary debacle is relatively unimportant. The moral debacle is cancerous and possibly incurable.
if You go here you can finish parts 5,6,7,at the bottom
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