No, Thank You!

April 29, 1958

DEAR MR………………..:  

Indeed we will not support an ef­fort to bring pressure on the House Appropriations Committee for funds to construct the Cross-Florida Barge Canal. Our con­gressman is a member of that com­mittee, and we want him to know we are maintaining a consistent position on federal spending; we shall send him a copy of this letter. There is no greater domestic need in these times than for a substan­tial reduction in spending by the federal government, so that both the national debt and taxes may be reduced and the threat of return­ing inflation may be avoided.

We are familiar with the argu­ment, usually put forward in situ­ations of this kind, that the im­provement will so stimulate busi­ness that the resulting increase in taxes paid to the federal govern­ment will soon pay for the original expenditure. The trouble with that argument is that the people have been able to think up new spend­ing schemes more rapidly than the income has increased. Why else should federal revenues have fallen short of expenditures in all but four or five years since 1930 and the national debt moved persist­ently upward? In that respect Uncle Sam is in somewhat the same position as the man with an income of $300 a month whose wife rushes around spending $350 a month taking advantage of “sav­ings” at bargain sales.

The 1957 edition of the Statisti­cal Abstract of the United States, published by the Bureau of the Census, shows that for 1955 (latest information available), General Revenues of the State of Florida were $383,944,000 and General Ex­penditures were $383,928,000, leaving a surplus of $16,000. The state’s debt was $85,758,000, or 22.3 per cent of the year’s revenue.

For the same year the net receipts of the federal government were $60,389,743,000 while expen­ditures came to $64,569,973,000, a deficit of $4,180,230,000. The national debt then stood at $274,374, 000,000, or 454 per cent of reve­nues for the year. It would appear that the financial position of your state may be much more sound than Uncle Sam’s. Could it be that the state of Florida could better afford the construction of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal than could the federal government?

As for us, we have recently turned down suggestions that we exert pressure for federal spend­ing right in our own back yard, and we are certainly not going to jump on the bandwagon and start beating the drum for somebody else’s pet project.

Yours truly,

Jim Patrick

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Ideas On Liberty

Privilege and Politics

Whenever the sovereign authority invades the marketplace, it is inevitable that what we naively call “corruption”—which is but the political means of acquiring economic goods — will pol­lute the economy. History is so emphatic on this point that one wonders at the persistence of the pollyanish hopes of public-ownership advocates; in the final analysis these hopes must rest on sublime faith in the miraculous mutation of human nature in public office. The partnership of privilege and politics is as natural as the marriage of men and women; the way to dissolve the ensuing monstrosity of “corruption” is to dissolve the partnership by forbidding political meddling in the affairs of the marketplace.

Frank Chodorov, The Myth of the Post Office, published by Henry Regnery Company.