Welfarism
Those with long memories will recall the bitter criticism leveled at Herbert Hoover for believing that free enterprise prosperity would benefit everybody. They called it the “trickle down” theory, and were quite sarcastic about it.
Hoover, thou shouldst be living at this hour, if only to turn the tables on you r critics! For if there was ever a “trickle down” situation, it is the sort of thing that is described in Shirley Scheib-la’s Poverty Is Where the Money Is (Arlington House, $5.95). The billions have gone out for the Jobs Corps, the Community Action programs, the Head Start kindergartens, the Child Development Group of Mississippi, the United Planning Organization of Washington, D.C., and all the other taxpayer-financed contraptions run by the Office of Economic Opportunity, and very little of lasting benefit has trickled through to the “worthy poor” at the bottom of the pyramid.
The difference between Hoover’s free capitalism and Sargent Shriver’s 0E0 Welfarism is not to be discovered in the official justifications of two ways of letting riches flow to the bottom. The theoretical justification of capitalism is that it produces savings that provide the man at the bottom with more tools, and therefore with a steadily increasing income. Sargent Shriver would, no doubt, claim a somewhat similar benefit from tax money spent to give skills to young men in the Job Corps. Unfortunately for Shriver, the Hoover theory, save for occasional interruptions (as of 1929), has paid off in practice ever since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, whereas the theory of OEO Welfarism has yet to produce anything but a fiasco.
Reading Shirley Scheibla’s story of the War on Poverty is a most uncomfortable experience. You feel like laughing at the farcical things that have been going on in the administration of the poverty programs, yet you are constantly aware that real people, not comic strip characters, are being victimized by the social worker jokesters. So you end up feeling rather miserable as Mrs. Scheibla, a Washington correspondent for Barron’s, unrolls her vast tapestry of ineptitude, cupidity, and plain nonsense.
Disappointing Results
The intentions behind the creation of the Jobs Corps may have been good. But what has become of it all? Mrs. Scheibla tried very hard to get firm figures about job placements resulting from training at Job Corps centers across the country, but nobody has any decent records, and OEO has had to fall back on pollster surveys to find out what becomes of its “graduates.” A Louis Harris poll, dated March 1967, showed that 57 per cent of graduates and dropouts were working after leaving the Job Corps, whereas 58 per cent were doing so beforehand. Only 6 per cent had kept their new jobs more than six months, and less than half with jobs were working at what they were trained for in the Corps. The median pay per hour was $1.32, fifteen cents an hour better than before their very expensive training. In the meantime we had had inflation.
Mrs. Scheibla recounts the scandals that beset the Job Corps program. Razor slashings, public drunkenness, lead-pipe bludgeonings, and sex crimes have bedeviled the camp directors. Of course, the same people would have probably been misbehaving in identical ways elsewhere if they hadn’t been tapped for rehabilitation through work, so you can’t blame it on the OEO. But the point is that there hasn’t been much rehabilitation.
Not even the big corporations —Westinghouse Electric, Litton Industries, IBM, Xerox, and so on —have been able to do very much with the training programs which they undertook at Sargent Shriver’s behest. The cost figures for the entire Job Corps adventure have been terrific. Representative Edith Green of Oregon, an early advocate of the Corps, put it sharply when she quoted from a letter from a constituent. The letter read: “How can I possibly pay taxes to support people in the Job Corps centers at $13,000 a year? Our total income is $6,000 a year, and we have three children. We had hoped that we would be able to send our three children to college. Instead of that you are passing a program in the Congress of the United States which says I am to pay taxes to support one person at $13,000 a year.”
Says Mrs. Scheibla: “Even figured for enrollees, costs exceeded $13,000 at some centers. According to Senator Strom Thurmond, they came to $22,000 at Camp Atterbury, and Representatives Fino and Goodell found the costs per graduate came to $39,205 at St. Petersburg, Florida.”
Loaded for Bear
If the Job Corps have not done the job that old-fashioned vocational training and business apprenticeship programs once did, the Community Action programs across the country haven’t done much better. In places, the local action projects have been means for paying $25,000 salaries to directors in cities whose mayors get $18,000. The projects have been havens for Maoists, anarchists, and even orthodox communists whose pasts have been an open book. Before being cut off by OEO, LeRoi Jones’s notorious Black Arts Theatre had received $115,000 from New York City’s Haryou-ACT (an amalgamation of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and Associated Community Teams). Jones’s credo is apparent not only in his poetry and drama but in some of his more dogmatic utterances. “The force we want,” so he has written, “is of twenty million spooks [i.e., Negroes] storming American cities with furious cries and unstoppable weapons. We want actual explosions and actual brutality.” When New York policemen raided Jones’s theater, they discovered an arsenal of deadly weapons, a rifle range, sharpened meathooks, pistols, knives, and a cache of ammunition.
Head Start to Nowhere
The most appealing of the War on Poverty ideas was the project called Head Start. I am probably a softy, but I still see some potential merit in the idea of creating a pre-kindergarten program for slum children who never see an educational toy, a book, or the evidence of any other cultural amenity, at home. Alas for my lingering hopes, Mrs. Scheibla tells me that the only public evaluation of Head Start shows that the “initial advantages” gained by children in the OEO-sponsored pre-kindergartens lasted only for the first few months when they went on to upper grades. “The teachers themselves,” so Mrs. Scheibla quotes from a report, “were a more decisive factor than participation in Head Start… Head Start children scored higher if they had good teachers, but lower… if they had poor teachers. We can easily predict that even the finest pre-school experience for deprived and segregated children will wash out and disappear as these children pass through the grades.”
Reading Mrs. Scheibla’s summary of 0E0 appropriations ($1.7 billion for fiscal 1968), I recall Tommy Corcoran’s cynical prescription for “spreading the wealth.” Back in the nineteen thirties, at the height of WPA, Tommy shook his head and said that the government might do a better job if it “threw the money out of airplanes.”
THE NEW ORDEAL BY PLANNING: The Experience of the Forties and the Sixties by John Jewkes (London: Macmillan, 1968, 42 shillings)
Reviewed by Peter P. Witonski
In “Henry IV,” Glendower proudly declares, “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” To which Hotspur caustically replies, “Why, so can I; or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?” During the past twenty-five years, Britain has twice fallen victim to Glendower’s illusion. Twice within less than one generation the British electorate have submitted to the socialist fantasies of a Labour Party bent on summoning spirits from the bathos of economic planning. Twice the Labour Party has carried Britain into the abyss of economic despair. Britain’s postwar experiment with socialism inspired Professor John Jewkes of Oxford University to produce his memorable book entitled Ordeal by Planning (1948). It is an illusion, he argued, to believe that elaborately constructed economic blueprints, written by some socialist theoretician in London, can successfully determine the rate of growth and the general health of the economy. “I believe that the recent melancholy decline of Great Britain,” he wrote, “is largely of our own making. The fall in our standard of living to a level which excites pity and evokes the charity of many other richer countries, the progressive restrictions on individual liberties, the ever-widening destruction of respect for law, the steady sapping of our instinct for tolerance and compromise, the sharpening of class distinctions, our growing incapacity to play a rightful part in world affairs —these sad changes are not due to something that happened in the remote past. They are due to something that has happened in the past two years. At the root of our troubles lies the fallacy that the best way of ordering economic affairs is to place the responsibility for all crucial decisions in the hands of the State.”
The tragedy of the centrally planned economy, as the British experience has plainly demonstrated, is that the plan almost invariably fails to achieve its promised ends. Indeed, more often than not, it backfires in unexpected and calamitous ways. But not even a succession of failures convinces the planner that the philosophy behind planning is all wrong. If economic disaster results from his plan, the planner simply comes up with another. Today, in the midst of Britain’s second major flirtation with planning, the Labour Party dirigisme has succeeded in virtually destroying the economy; and yet the socialist planners continue to turn out “new” and “better” plans. So, once again, Professor Jewkes has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the free economy, re-issuing his magnum opus under the title, The New Ordeal by Planning: The Experience of the Forties and the Sixties. To the original work he has added a profoundly vivid and perceptive analysis of the failures of central planning since 1961.
It was hard for those Britons who endured the failure of the first wave of planning in the forties to accept, let alone understand, the new wave of planning initiated by the Conservative Government of Harold Macmillan in 1961. In 1964 the Conservative Plan — a rather primitive attempt to stop economic growth and then get it started again when the planners felt the climate was right — was rejected by the electorate in favor of socialism, which promised “a coherent, long-term plan.” The socialist plan was little different from the conservative plan, and in the end the entire country found itself in one of the most tragic economic binds in recent history.
Indeed, the present economic plight of Britain is so dire that many informed persons are now persuaded that the idea of planning has been permanently discredited. Certainly the population at large is fed up with planning. And yet, somehow the myth survives, and this is what horrifies Professor Jewkes. The planners will be defeated at the next General Election, simply because they have failed again; but this will not necessarily spell the end of planning in Britain. The British voter has thrown the planners out before and lived to invite them back again. Professor Jewkes fears yet a third renaissance of central planning and presents this volume, and all the new information contained therein, as a warning against just such a contingency.
It is Professor Jewkes’ firm belief that the British Government, like all governments, has only limited power to do good, but virtually unlimited powers to do harm. Government must get its priorities straight. Instead of experimenting with all sorts of fantastic planning schemes, it should get back to its primary duties of providing for national defense, curbing internal violence, and maintaining the value of the currency. In recent years, the British government has failed in all these tasks. Instead, it has created a welfare state that is threatening the very existence of Britain as an economic entity.
“The people never give up their liberties,” Edmund Burke wrote, “but under some delusion.” It is clear that the British were deluded into believing the promises of both the Conservative and Socialist planners, and that they are only just now — at the nadir of their country’s political history —beginning to face up to the evils of planning per se. Economically depressed, deprived of many of their traditional freedoms, they are fast turning away from the ideology of planning, hopefully toward the kind of free economy Professor Jewkes advocates. Until the fallacious thinking behind central planning is properly refuted economic progress will be almost impossible. Professor Jewkes has written such a refutation, and it is sincerely hoped that his views will reach a large public on both sides of the Atlantic.
GEORGE WASHINGTON in the American Revolution (1775-1783) by James Thomas Flexner (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1968), 599 pp., $10.00.
Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton
The early American scene was crowded with great men — Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton, to name the most prominent intellectual leaders, 17641789. But none of these worthies could have filled the shoes of the military leader of the American “revolution,” George Washington. And he had the strength of character and devotion to the good cause to stick at a difficult job for eight long years.
The real humanity of our first great national hero has been obscured, on the one hand, by portraying the man as a demigod, and, on the other, by debunkers who write him off as a self-seeking and philandering plutocrat. The scholarly multivolumed study by Douglas Southall Freeman avoids these extremes but sometimes loses Washington amidst all the detail. And the sheer mass of works on Washington tends to scare off some who are interested in learning about the man. Now at last we have Flexner’s work (the book under review is the second of a projected three-volume study) which not only avoids the extremes of opinion but carries its scholarship lightly and never loses sight of its subject. Washington is the central figure of this canvas and Flexner, for all his admiration, has not been afraid to paint him, warts and all.
Washington was not a great orator whose words we can memorize and cherish; neither was he a fiery commander brandishing his sword over his head as he leads singlehandedly an attack on the enemy. His much less glamorous job can be fully appreciated only by those who have themselves had the responsibilities of leadership, no matter on how small a scale. Consider, if you will, the difficulties Washington had to overcome. (1) In his previous military experience he had held only minor commands but here he was, in 1775, the commander in chief. (2) He was not the warrior type, along the lines of a “Stone-wall” Jackson or a George Patton, but a man of peace, in love with his home and his land, and always yearning to return to them. (3) Trained officers were scarce and those with foreign experience often looked down on him as a provincial, sometimes doing more harm to the cause than to the enemy. (4) His forces were more rabble than army, hard to keep together and resistant to discipline. (5) Logistics was a constant nightmare, his men often suffering from lack of food, clothing, and shelter in a land of plenty. (6) Congress dragged its feet on touchy matters and eagerly passed the buck to General Washington on many occasions. (7) Individual states, jealous of each other and of Congress, failed to respond when called upon. (8) Congress lacked the power to tax so the Continental army was nearly always broke (the paper money printed by the Continental Congress was “not worth a Continental”). (9) Civilian leaders were wary of the military so they often hampered Washington’s efforts to make his army more efficient. (10) Many colonists were, if not opposed to independence from Great Britain, not very helpful to the patriots; and there were the usual faint hearts too cautious to take any definite stand. This list could be extended but surely the point is already clear: given Washington’s job, few men would have stuck it out.
But what really sets Washington apart from other men was his absolute refusal to accept the dictatorial powers some wanted to grant him after the war for independence had dragged on and on without victory. After the years of frustration it must have been very tempting to Washington to accept the proffered power and use it to bring order out of the chaos and put down opposition to the cause. But he flatly refused.
Flexner closes his book with an essay on Washington that reminds us why among the leaders of our young republic there were so many men of integrity, why the best men, it seems, got to the top more often then than now. Leaders of Washington’s day, writes Flexner, did not normally kowtow to the electorate. They did not wander the fields taking public opinion polls.
They gained ascendancy by being willing and able to bring their intelligence and property to bear in effectively helping their less powerful and less informed neighbors to achieve ends which they persuaded their followers were for the common good. Nothing in Washington’s Virginia training urged him to seek popularity by shaking hands and grinning. And his elevation to leadership in the Revolution had not resulted from electioneering — quite the reverse. He had sought to evade the responsibility which had been forced upon him.
Since Washington did not have to stoop to conquer, “no important outside pressure impeded [his] efforts to steer by the highest stars. He could wholeheartedly pursue his conviction that he could serve his fellowmen best by serving the great principles.” And, declares Flexner, “it was in his ability to recognize the great principles that Washington’s most fundamental greatness lay.”
