50
PARTISAN REVIEW
I do not myself believe that American workers, and the American
masses generally, are equalitarian in their social thinking. So far as I
have been able to tell, they feel not only that some men inevitably do
get greater material rewards than others, but that things ought to be
so; and they are more often pleased than jealous when someone
"gets up in the world." They show this attitude by the size of the
salaries-and expense accounts-which they vote their own union
leaders, or which they do not object seriously to when the leaders take
them without a vote. But they, and most men
in
the world, think that
the line ought to be drawn somewhere, and somewhere considerably
short of the spot where the heads of the great American corporations
are drawing it.
Let me turn to another business attitude, where we find a com–
bination of greed, ignorance, and a kind of economic cowardice. The
United States imposes a "protective" tariff on most imports at the
same time that the rest of the world is groaning from a lack of dollars.
All suggestions for radical reduction of the tariff are immediately
fought by the lobbies of the industrialists, who want to block even a
minor foreign competition
in
the .home market. Even the mild and
still high-tariff Hull "reciprocal trade treaty" program was initiated
and continues only against the opposition of much of the business
community. Nevertheless, the businessmen insist on their right to sell
their own products anywhere in the world, and they complain at any
measures of discrimination. They show their greed by wanting to
exploit the home market to a maximum without any interference that
might (though it would not necessarily ) cut into volume and prices,
while simultaneously wanting a hog's share in foreign markets at what–
ever detriment to the economies of other nations. They show their
timidity-these same businessmen who lament so piously the "growth
of statism"-by relying on the tariff-shield of the state to shelter their
home monopoly. They show their ignorance in their failure to realize
that the two parts of their program- to sell but not to buy-are
contradictory. (That the world's principal creditor nation should
operate its foreign trade on a virtual free-trade basis should be among
the most elementary of economic lessons.) And they prove their lack
of any vision of the fact that the present stage of industrial civiliza–
tion demands a perspective of the development of the world economy
as a whole.
