It is mighty fine to come again to your great State of California and to see at first hand the progress you are making under my good friend, your distinguished Governor Earl Warren. I am happy too to hear from him that your next United States Senator will be your able Lieutenant Governor, Frederick F. Houser.
As I have traveled here, across this magnificent country of ours, I find that men and women everywhere are looking eagerly toward the peace which will follow our total victory over Germany and Japan.
I find that as they look ahead beyond the final victory, two great desires are paramount. We want political freedom and we also want economic security. The great question of the years ahead will be this: can we have both political freedom and economic security?
I believe we can. I believe we must find a way to have both. To solve that problem, we need a new administration. That’s why it’s time for a change.
The present administration has failed utterly to find a solution for that problem. Saturated us it is with the defeatist theory that America is past its prime, the New Deal can see only two possibilities for America – ever increasing regimentation as one alternative, and reaction as the other. It believes that economic security can only be purchased at the price of freedom.
That argument is false. Our people do not want to see this country dragged further and further toward complete government control over every aspect of our lives. Neither do we want to go back to the reactionary philosophy of dog-eat-dog.
Neither of these alternatives is necessary. There is a better way. There is an American way to meet the modern needs for greater economic stability and individual security within the framework of a free society.
Let’s consider a moment where we are today. We speak of freedom, but the farmer asks, “Does that mean freedom to go broke when there are peacetime surpluses and the prices of our crops fall ruinously?” Labor asks, “Does that mean freedom 1o walk the streets in bad years, looking for work at any price?”
These are questions which go to the heart of our problem. No man can be free when he stands in constant danger of hunger. By the same token, no man can be either free or secure under a government which seeks to regulate his whole life.
So, what is the solution? Must we accept the New Deal way of ever-increasing regimentation as the only escape from reaction? I think not.
Whether we like it or not, and regardless of the party in power, government is committed to some degree of economic direction. Certain government measures to influence broad economic conditions are both desirable and inevitable
Let me give you just three examples:
First. money and credit. Before we have finished financing the war, our national debt may be over $300 billion. The annual interest on that debt at current rates will be $6 billion.
That is more than the total annual cost of our national government in any peacetime year before the New Deal. That $6 billion a year must be raised by taxes before we begin to meet the current costs of government. We cannot afford a substantial rise in interest rates which would still further increase the cost of carrying our national debt.
So, one result of this unprecedented government debt which now faces us is this: In order to keep down taxes and prevent the price of government bonds from falling as they did after the last war, the federal government is going to have to keep interest rates stable.
Now let’s take up another vital aspect of our life – wages. In bygone days, working men and women worked for whatever they could get. When a lot of people were working for work, wages went down.
In hard times people had to work for literally starvation pay. That was one of the brutal ways our society adjusted itself to depressions under the old-time dog-eat-dog economy. Those days are never coming back again.
They are not coming back because we are never again going to submit to mass unemployment. Government’s first job in the peacetime years ahead will be to see that conditions exist which promote widespared job opportunities in private enterprise.
There are many means to that end including the creation of foreign markets and the promotion of foreign trade. If at any time there are no sufficient jobs in private employment to go around, then government can and must create additional job opportunities. There must be jobs for all.
We have unemployment insurance, old-age pensions and minimum wage laws. They are here to stay and we are going to broaden them. Tomorrow night on the radio from Los Angeles, I shall discuss some of the things we need to do to advance our social progress.
We have strong labor unions, protected by law in their rights to collective bargaining.
Moreover, we have developed over the years a social viewpoint which will not tolerate any solution to the economic cycle which rests upon the grinding down of the wages of working men and women.
So here again we recognize that our economy has become more subject to government action. The savage old cutthroat adjustments are gone for good. We simply will not tolerate them.
Now, consider agriculture. The farmer, too, has lived under the iron law of supply and demand. In wartime or when crops were normal and demand was good, the farmer prospered. When crops were big and demand was small, the farmer watched his produce go begging while his children were in need.
But the farmer had no control over either supply or demand. He might work his head off all summer long, and then lose everything. He had no protection from the inexorable swings of the economic cycle, which swept him alternately from good times to distress.
All that is also in the past. As a nation, we are committed to the proposition that the farmer must be protected against extreme fluctuations of prices. We are committed to the proposition that the prices of major farm crops must be supported against the menace of disastrous collapse.
We have undertaken that commitment for the sake of the entire nation. We know that depression on the farm leads to depression in the nation, just as unemployment and misery in the city leads to misery on the farm.
In agriculture, in labor and in money, we are committed to some degree of government intervention, in the free workings of our economic system. In many directions the free market which old-time economists talked about is gone.
Now, in all these, there exists an obvious danger to our fundamental freedoms. The danger is that in accepting the support of government in certain broad aspects of our economy, we may slip by stages into complete government control of our lives. In other words, in our search for economic security, we may lose forever our personal and political freedoms.
Not once in all the past 12 years has the New Deal faced this situation frankly and courageously.
Instead, it has sought to buy the favor of one group and then of another. It has pretended to be the generous uncle for each group, meanwhile playing one against the other for political profit. It has but up a towering bureaucracy which today reaches into the smallest village in the country and directly affects the lives of all our citizens.
Not content to deal with major economic factors, or possibly because it was not competent to deal with them, it has sought to fasten upon the individual citizen the deadening hand of bureaucratic control.
The result is that today we confront two dangerous alternatives. Under one, we may slip by gradual stages into complete government regulation of every aspect of our lives. Under the other, we may become so intolerant of the restraints and interferences in our lives as to take refuge in complete reaction.
Either of these courses would be tragic. Neither is necessary.
We have reached a point where we must make a crucial decision. We must decide this year whether we shall reject both of these courses and choose a new leadership pledged to attain a maximum of security without loss of our essential freedoms, and with neither malice nor favor toward any group or class.
For myself, I am utterly confident that America can achieve stability and lasting prosperity without the loss of any part of its political freedom.
Facing the world ahead and recognizing the necessity of a government active in promoting the best interests of individuals and of individual enterprise, we should establish three principles at the base of such action. All three of these principles are the exact opposite of the New Deal.
The first is that government action must be of a character consistent with the American system of opportunity for ail. Its objective must be not to restrict individual economic opportunity but to widen it. Government must do this without any reservations as to its faith in individual enterprise. It must promote fair trade and not consider trade as. something to be tolerated.
The second principle is that government action must be administered by men and women who believe in and understand American workers, American businessmen and American farmers. There has perhaps never been a time in our history when the character of the men who compose our government was so important as it is now.
The temptation to be bureaucratic, to usurp power, to puff themselves up has proved irresistible to those who have swarmed to Washington under the New Deal.
We must have men in government who have the strength of character to resist the inevitable temptation toward petty tyranny. We must have men in office who believe that the preservation of individual rights and freedoms is more important than the exaggeration of their own power.
Finally, we must have a new point of view toward the relationship between government and the people, The role of government cannot be the purely negative one of correcting abuse, of telling people what they may or may not do. Government must be the means by which our people, working together, seek to meet the problems that are too big for any one of us or any group of us to solve individually.
The industrial worker, however capable and energetic he may be, cannot in our modern society assure himself by his own unaided efforts continuity of employment. Even the largest industrial corporation cannot maintain employment, if the country as a whole is undergoing a depression.
Yet if there is one thing we are all agreed upon, it is that in the coming peacetime years, we in this country must have jobs and opportunity for all. That is everybody’s business. Therefore, it is the business of government. But how?
Where are we going to find these jobs for everyone who wants to work? Certainly, they will not be found in government itself. If all of us should go to work for the government, then our system would be no different from Communism or Fascism.
There can be jobs for all only if business, industry and agriculture are able to provide those jobs. There are no clever shortcuts to this goal. It cannot be achieved by some ingenious scheme concocted by a social dreamer in a government bureau.
The New Deal pulled rabbits out of hats for seven years and ended up in 1940 with 10 million still unemployed. We will achieve our objective only if we create an economic climate in which business, industry and agriculture can grow and flourish.
Our small businessmen, our farmers, the men who run our offices and factories and stores and mines must know that government wants each of them to succeed, that government stands ready, not to hinder, but to help. I am concerned only that our people shall have jobs, and people cannot have jobs if businessmen are afraid to go to work, if management is afraid to manage, if farmers are afraid to produce.
We want the enterprising men and women of America to make a success of their endeavors because that is the only way we can have a going American economy in which all our people can find work at decent pay.
We have seen in the war what can be dope when American technical and management skill is given a chance to do a job. All that was necessary was to give American enterprises the green light in order to bring forth miracles of production. In the same spirit, American business and American industry can be given the green light for peacetime production. Then we shall see peacetime miracles as we have seen wartime miracles.
There is much that government can do. Our repressive tax laws, which now operate to penalize incentive and to put a brake upon the kind of enterprise that makes job opportunities, must be drastically revised. We must have the kind of taxes that do not discourage, but encourage men to start new businesses and to expand old businesses. At another time, I shall discuss this question of taxes in detail.
Government regulations which discourage and wear down producers in every field must be revised. The whole atmosphere of studied hostility toward our job producing machinery must be replaced.
More than this, we must have laws that are sufficiently simple and clear so that men can know what they are allowed to do. Most of the laws passed by the New Deal and the regulations under them are so involved and complicated that it is impossible for even the ablest lawyer to advise what they mean.
The judges, when called upon to apply them, are violently divided among themselves. There can be neither freedom nor a healthy economy under laws and decrees which are so multitudinous that businessmen, labor leaders and indeed citizens generally, cannot be law abiding except by doing nothing.
The man who has an idea that could lead to greater job opportunities must feel that government is as anxious for him to succeed as he is himself. That means also that government must cease to pursue policies which foster antagonism and mutual distrust between workers and employers.
For too long we have been a nation divided and government has been the great divider. Now under the stress of war we have drawn closer together. We have come to appreciate a little better the part that each of us must play. Labor, industry and agriculture, each in its place, have made a mighty contribution to the winning of the war. We must learn to work together in peace as we have worked together in war. We must seek mutual understanding.
The worker, the farmer and the businessman are equals and are equally important. No one can disregard the interest of the others save to his own cost. No one can be master over the other two. No one is entitled to a voice in the affairs of government at the sacrifice of the others.
The government must be equally concerned with the welfare of all elements in our society. Government is not the property of any section of the country or any segment of our society. It should be the servant of all.
We are not going back to the days of unregulated business and finance. We are not going back to the days of unprotected farm prices. We are not going back to the leaf raking and the dole. We are not going down the New Deal road to total control of our daily lives. We are going forward on the better road. We are going forward to achieve in peace what the New Deal could only achieve at the cost of war – jobs and opportunity for all.
And we shall recover and preserve our individual freedom, which has once again been made sacred by the blood of American men.
