Through twenty long years of big government, “interference” with business, and lopsided budgets, the Republican opposition—or at least its most vocal spokesmen—dreamt longingly of a return to a laissez-faire, small-government, low-tax economy. Last fall the Conservative Dream seemed about to be realized. But, J. K. Galbraith here asserts, the New and Fair Deals were in large part a response to necessities, and the Eisenhower administration, responding to the same necessities, may prove as frustrating to the anti-New Dealers of the farther right as the Democrats were. 

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Our folklore has long held that the difference between the political left and right in the United States—I am not here concerned with the pathological extremes—lies at least partly in the approach to reality. The left is romantic; the right is realistic. On the left one finds idealists who dream of a better world; the right is hard-headed, pragmatic, and wholly aware of the confining qualities of facts and human nature. It is my impression that a good many liberals are inclined to acquiesce in their reputation for visionary idealism. They agree that the hard-headed men are in the opposition. As for themselves, they may be impractical but at least they have ideas.

Such is the myth, and it is not easily squared with the facts of our time. In the election last autumn not many of the liberals who worked so ardently for Stevenson could have supposed that the government of the United States would be radically changed were their man elected. It would be the Fair Deal less the 5 per cent, with friends instead of cronies, and with national policies articulated for adults. Their candidate promised no more.

Things were very different on the Republican side. Many devoted Eisenhower supporters did expect great changes if their candidate gained office. They foresaw a new kind of government in Washington with a very different relation to their own lives and the economic life of the country at large. General Eisenhower, or at least his speechwriters, also made it clear that if he went to Washington there would be sweeping changes, and a part of his following undoubtedly took him at his literal word. It was the country clubs and not the serious set—and certainly not the union halls— which buzzed last fall with talk of a new social order.

Though the notion may come to many as a surprise, there is really nothing very remarkable about this. For a long while it has been conservatives—one group of conservatives—not liberals, who have been dreaming of a different world. Unlike the liberals, they have had—in the writings of Hayek, von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and others—a literature depicting an economic and political order radically different from any we now know. Liberals in the United States have no counterpart of such blueprints.

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A Government far smaller and far more passive than at present is the sine qua non of the conservative’s system. In part this is an end that can be achieved by better administration. The public service is viewed as an enclave where the easygoing, the impractical, and the over-sophisticated find refuge from the rigors of competitive existence. The work now done by these slothful and somnambulant hordes could be executed by a far smaller number of firm-jawed and forthright men who know precisely what they are about. And because they know what they are doing there would be no silly mistakes—no wasteful extravagances on air bases in Africa, no buying of mountains of mouldy potatoes, no procurement of overcoats that a soldier cannot carry. These things do not happen in business; with a business administration they would not happen in Washington.

But more than good administration is required. Government in this system confines itself to the protection of persons and property, securing the national defense, and to as little else as possible. It is because of such restraint that administration can be lean and compact, that the budget can be balanced and taxes reduced.

Any detailed concern with the minutiae of individual welfare and any temptation to manage the economy must be particularly resisted. Controls and social measures shield and protect the few but discourage and damage the many. Freed of such restraints, the economy would respond with increased production and a more rapid rate of growth.

Everyone who deserved to be better off would be better off.

In this system the dead hand of bureaucracy and the crushing burdens of taxation are the principal things which prevent the businessman from providing jobs. Lift these and the threat of depression obviously disappears. Prodigal government is the principal cause of inflation. With reduced government spending that threat also vanishes. Management of the economy is unnecessary. There remains only the ancient and inevitable mechanism of supply and demand which metes out a rugged justice in which strong men glory. The able and efficient are rewarded and they keep their reward. The incompetent and the lazy are extruded as they should be.

There are other details of this society which can be altered to suit individual taste. For some, it requires a healthy and uninhibited foreign trade which will bring us inexpensive raw materals and eliminate the need to subsidize enfeebled allies. For others it requires a tariff to reinforce the American businessman’s ability to provide jobs at American wages.

These matters, though not unimportant, are not central to the design. On the central features—a slim, precise and sure-footed bureaucracy, low taxes and a balanced budget, many fewer government functions, freedom from controls, and reliance on uninhibited and modestly taxed energies for a good and largely automatic performance by the economy—there is general agreement.

It would be grossly unfair to General Eisenhower to suggest that, as a candidate, he committed himself to all of the specifics of the system just outlined. But this is an image—a goal—that is deeply imprinted in the minds of hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of his more influential supporters. And the General’s picture of the government of the United States as a vastly overgrown, incompetent, and meddlesome thing, and his magic reference to the mess in Washington, could only mean to such sup porters that he had caught the essence of the conservative dream. Without doubt the commitment accepted by this part of his audience went far beyond his words.

Their man won, and in the manner of people who win elections it is reasonable to suppose that they are expecting results. Liberals will mostly respond by saying that the goal they seek is not a good one—that it is harsh and heartless and altogether not very nice. The much more immediate question, however, is whether substantial progress can be made toward this conservative Utopia. It has commonly been suggested of socialists that they have voted for a dream that could not be realized on earth. It is important to know whether the same thing is happening on the right.

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The hope for the conservative Utopia depends, in the last analysis, on the same optimistic view of man’s social destiny that socialists have long held. In this view we can have any social order that we will to have—the decisions of man, not the rule of circumstance, are controlling. The New and Fair Deals were what the New and Fair Dealers wanted to make them. The conservative goal is equally possible if that is what the government wills to have.

Such a view is, to say the least, somewhat sanguine. The first hope of the conservative idealist, I have suggested, is for greatly improved administration. In fact, there is little that the New Team can or will do to reform the management of the federal government. This is not because waste and lost motion are lacking in Washington—there is a great deal of both. But, unfortunately, there is little wholesale waste that can be readily detected and which, accordingly, lends itself to drastic surgery. Most of it is retail or intercellular and therefore hard to find. It will yield only to painstaking improvements at all levels in the public service—to the development of better leaders and to improvement in morale, technical competence, and sense of service of public employees everywhere. With this will go a better adjustment of talent to task and—by way of correcting the worst shortcoming of government—a better adjustment of workers to work to be done. All this takes time. Improvement is possible, but revolutionary improvement is impossible. Those who are counting on great reforms in administration are thinking, without much doubt, of sweeping reorganization of departments and bureaus and also of the fact that, for the first time in some years, the leadership of government departments is now almost completely in the hands of businessmen. But if gains were possible from reorganizing and reshuffling bureaus, the federal government would now be the most efficient piece of administrative machinery in the world. We have been reorganizing for twenty years and undoubtedly hold some sort of world’s record for this sort of tiling. Reorganization is a seductive activity, for, while the disadvantages of any existing organization are always extraordinarily evident, the possibly greater disadvantages of the alternative never become apparent until the reorganization is completed. (Then there is another.) It is possible that since the time of Cordell Hull the State Department has needed nothing so much as a brief breathing spell from reorganizations.

Just as there is no hope for great improvement from reorganization, so it is unwise to count too heavily on business administration. It will be recalled that there have been businessmen in Washington before—hundreds of them. There is no reason to think that these were an unrepresentative selection. Some were very good managers and some were very poor. It was a common wartime observation that in the new world of Washington the businessmen, in comparison with professional civil servants, lawyers, or college professors, suffered from a tendency to underestimate what they did not know and also from an inclination to wait for crises to develop rather than to forestall them. While the myth runs strongly to the contrary, it is certain that the American businessman is also an exceptionally tolerant chap. Few men are more unwilling to jeopardize personal relationships by trampling on other people’s toes; there is a well-developed habit of protecting the ego of colleagues and subordinates even to the admitted stuffed shirt. The fact that business is a highly organized activity wherein men must work amicably together may well make any other kind of behavior intolerable. But it does not lead to tough, rigorous, demanding administration.

However, such generalizations on the administrative capacities of particular groups are not of great moment. The important thing is that, even with the best will and capacity, the federal bureaucracy can be changed only slowly. It is only in the press releases and in Time that a public agency is dramatically streamlined. It is significant that to get economy in the Defense Department, a notably unstreamlined agency, no alternative could be found, when the test came, to a highly controversial cut in the Air Force budget.

There will also continue to be errors, bobbles, and downright mistakes—the early months of the new administration have not been precisely free of them. The notion that business can supply a hard-headed cadre of executives who, unlike civil servants and politicians, are above error is based partly on romance and partly on the fact that Washington has, and the business world does not have, machinery for uncovering and publicizing mistakes. Mr. Charles E. Wilson, during his years at General Motors, never had to fear the headline Waste Exposed in New Buick Plant, not because waste was totally absent from GM operations but because no one was seeking it out in order to advertise it. Moreover, it is the peculiar good fortune of the businessman at home that he can write off a bad idea as an indication of his wholly admirable willingness to invest risk capital. Washington is not so tolerant. There, in addition, one man’s wisdom is another man’s bobble and vice versa. Mr. Wilson’s unhappy miss in the matter of the low bid of an English firm on the generators for the Chief Joseph dam was undoubtedly for some citizens an enlightened effort to protect American jobs and markets.

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Thus the notion that the New Team can do the same public tasks with much greater efficiency—and without bumbling or fumbling—is almost certainly an illusion. However, conservative hopes have not been for a government that does the same for less, but for one that does much less for very much less. Here too, however, there are formidable barriers to any advance toward the conservative Utopia.

First, of course, there is the intractable problem of military expenditures. They account for approximately 60 per cent of the current budget and are the most important reason why the government is big, and they also, until recently, have accounted for some of the most intrusive of its controls. In the past there has been a tendency on the right to regard this sort of explanation of big government as Fair Deal special pleading. Price and rent controls, in particular, have regularly been viewed as the result of ideological preference rather than economic necessity. Now the unsophisticated arithmetic of the matter, namely that the government cannot be small while military outlays are large, is in command. The conservative ideal is inescapably in conflict with the admitted requirements of national security. The new administration was able, to be sure, to discard price and wage controls, but these had become largely redundant. It would have taken a formidable commitment to the idea of control for the sake of control to have kept them. Circumstances did require the continuation of a limited control over rents—in some respects now the least equitable of controls.

Military expenditures and such contractual obligations as payments of interest and aids to veterans comprise the substance of big government (and also account for nearly all the increase in government outlays since 1939). However, it is the remaining civilian functions, in all their infinite variety, which convey the impression of big and ubiquitous government. If these could be drastically curtailed there would still be evidence of progress toward the goal.

Unfortunately, the administration, while it is pledged to cuts in government functions in general, is pledged or morally bound to the maintenance of the status quo in nearly every particular. Thus the present farm program, an exceedingly costly and elaborate form of government intervention, received the nearly unqualified blessing of General Eisenhower during the campaign. (The Republican platform, written by men for whom the conservative ideal was a more deeply cherished goal, did imply a much more general curtailment of the farm legislation.) In St. Paul last winter, Secretary of Agriculture Benson suggested some retreat from the present policy of providing comparatively generous supports to the prices of staple farm products. The lack of agrarian enthusiasm for the idea was so vociferous that he devoted several more speeches to assuring his audiences that he would stand firm at least for a while. This means that the fixing of minimum prices for farm products, loan and storage operations, government purchases of products in the magnitude of Secretary Brannan’s famous potato operation (one is now under way for butter), all will be continued. Next year, it seems almost certain, there will be acreage allotments and marketing quotas for wheat and cotton—the most comprehensive forms of regimentation devised by the New Deal. For soil conservation, an activity with many markedly paternalistic overtones, Congress recently voted the Secretary more money than he requested.

Similarly, although nothing so completely symbolizes the welfare state as social security, President Eisenhower is firmly on record for more rather than less of it. Perhaps there won’t be more, but it is hard to suppose there will be much less. But even where there are no commitments, the administration has little more freedom of movement. Functions are deeply defended by special interest or— the far more common situation—are deeply sanctioned by custom. Sentiment for states’ rights does not go so far as to allow abandonment of grants-in-aid for roads, research, or agricultural extension, to all of which state budgets are accommodated. Our devotion to private enterprise does not run to such extremes as to allow elimination of subsidies to shipbuilding, the shipping companies, or to air routes. The Post Office, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, the Library of Congress, the Senate subway, the Corps of Engineers, the Panama Canal, the Farm Credit Administration, the Alaska Railroad, and several thousand other enterprises are now so completely a part of our way of life that they cannot be disturbed. In fact, nearly everything the government is doing, it has been doing long enough for the activity to seem commonplace and conservative, especially to those who benefit from it. One of the misfortunes of the new administration is the paucity of new public services in recent years. This means that there is little that can be dispensed with that isn’t already habitual. The most important of the postwar innovations, the public housing program, has already been cut to the point of extinction by previous Congresses.

As a result, government under Eisenhower will be about as big and have about the same range of functions as government under Truman. This does not mean that the new administration will endear itself to liberals. There will undoubtedly be enough curtailment of what are thought to be important functions as well as enough difference of opinion on policy questions—trade and tariffs, tax incidence and alienation of resources, for example—to sustain liberal indignation on economic questions. But the liberals did not vote for Eisenhower. The conservative idealists did and they will have much more legitimate grounds for complaint. Under the best of circumstances, performance is certain to fall far short of the ideal which they have formulated. Their hoped-for atrophy of the federal government, even under the best of circumstances, will not occur. Should there be war or an increased threat of war, government will get even bigger—at least until Washington is blotted out. And should there be a depression it will also be bigger, for the President has promised, in such an eventuality, that all of the resources of the government will be mobilized to deal with it. This would mean, as Secretary Humphrey has already implied, a planned increase in public spending and steps have been taken—or at least announced—to initiate a survey of needed projects. With reduced tax revenues, this would mean, inevitably, deficit financing and thus, as a climax, the New Team would be joined by the deus ex machina of the New Dealers, the most suspect figure of them all, John Maynard Keynes. While Keynes’s reputation for social radicalism is greatly exaggerated, it is hard to believe that many Republicans voted for him last fall.

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Any political party can be roughly thought of as composed of two types of people— those who are loyal to party and those whose first allegiance is to principle. A large part of the Republican leadership will almost certainly acquiesce in what will look to truly devout conservatives like a continuation or at most a mild attenuation of the Fair Deal. Members of the executive, in particular, will be disposed to do so. The changes in attitude that are required are not especially difficult for men who are in positions of responsibility; the intellectual process is basically the same as occurred under the New and Fair Deals. Then, as will be the case now, administrators found themselves making what seemed to be the most practical or least troublesome adaptation to overriding circumstances. It will be interesting, but it should occasion no surprise during the months ahead, to hear Secretaries Humphrey, Wilson, or Weeks explaining, in reminiscent tones, the inevitability of big government, the inescapability of high taxes, and perhaps, should depression come, the desirability of a substantial deficit. There will be like—though fewer—voices in Congress, and Senator Taft has already shown that with health his will be one. The great opposition mistake in the past was in supposing that the Democratic administrations were for the policies just mentioned as a matter of ideological preference. In fact, they were rationalizing what seemed to them to be the only thing to do.

However, there will be many who will not accept the fact of continued big government and all that goes with it. These are the men of principle, and their loyalty will remain with the idea and not with the party that appears to be betraying the revolution. And the concessions that can be made to their point of view that still fall short of political disaster—concessions which the administration may well seek to make—will look woefully inadequate. It is more than a straw in the wind that Congressmen Taber and Reed have already effectively broken with their party on the issues of appropriations and taxes. Congressman Reed flatly declared that a failure to reduce taxes would be a betrayal of the electorate. This is an issue which summarizes the success or failure of the conservative revolution and touches the pocketbook as well. It is especially calculated to divide the right.

There is nothing very unusual about a split in a political party or in discovering that the Republicans are likely to be as divided on domestic issues as on foreign policy. The much more interesting thing is how closely the Republican division parallels past tendencies to division on the left. When it was the left that had the vision of a new world, it had to contend with the differences between those who wanted action and those who wished to be practical and stay in office. Now that the vision of a different (if not precisely new) order is on the right, there one finds the Bevans who make life uneasy for the men in office. The Democrats by contrast—the party of the New Deal and Fair Deal—are united by a program that is already enacted and by a convenient absence of any ideas for extending it.

Parties, especially in the United States, have far more often survived than succumbed to division. Doubtless the Republican party can survive a struggle between those who either reject the conservative dream or feel they must yield to circumstances, and those whose mood and freedom from responsibility allow no such surrender. After all, the alternative for both is to lose power and, who knows, risk another Roosevelt besides. But so long as the vision of a different society is so strongly held on the right as now, there we shall find the prime focus of political conflict. Those who look for it in debate between Fair Deal Democrats and Old Line Republicans will be rewarded with a certain amount of sound and fury. But this will be the form and not the substance of political difference. The latter will be along the line where men divide as to the nature of the economic society we should (or can) have.

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