David W. Eakins, Business Planners and Americas Postwar Expansion, in David Horowitz, ed., Corporations and the Cold War, New York: Monthly Review, 1969, pp. 143-171. An excerpt (pp. 150, 156, 167-168): Corporate liberal businessmen were generally agreed that the government should continue to help sustain full production and employment, but most of them were opposed to more internal planning -- that is, to an expanded New Deal at home. . . . In 1944, the National Planning Association offered a foreign economic policy plan on the scale of that proposed by Secretary of State George C. Marshall three years later. It called for a great expansion of government-supported foreign investment, and it did so strictly on the basis of American domestic needs, using, of course, none of the later justifications that were to be based on a Cold War with Russia. . . . The corporate liberal planners who began to work out the system during World War II [in groups such as the National Planning Association, the Twentieth Century Fund, and the Committee for Economic Development] were aware of the political potential of foreign aid -- in the sense that it would help create the kind of economic and political world that the United States would like to see prevail. But their scheme had broader implications. It stemmed, first of all, from a well-learned lesson of the New Deal, that it was the duty of government to prevent the stagnation of the capitalist economy by large-scale compensatory spending. But that spending, if free enterprise at home was to be saved, had to be largely directed abroad. . . . [The Marshall Plans program of massive] foreign aid emerged to provide an elegantly symmetrical answer to several dilemmas. It was a form of government compensatory spending that avoided revived New Deal spending at home. . . . To have turned inward to solve American problems -- to allow foreigners to choose their own course -- might very well have meant, as [senior State Department and World Bank official] Will Clayton put it, radical readjustments in our entire economic structure . . . changes which could hardly be made under our democratic free enterprise system. These men were fearful of the expanded New Deal solution to continued economic growth precisely because they felt that such a program would be compelled to move far beyond the most radical projections of New Deal planners. For a more detailed description of the origins of the post-war military economy, and of military spendings general role as a floor under the economy to prevent the return to depression conditions,
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 00:07:29 +0000
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