OLD-AGE PENSIONS

Today Harvard undergraduates will have a chance to vote, in the New York Herald Tribune poll on current events, on the question of Government Old Age Pensions. There are two sides to the question.

One side can be stated somewhat as follows: Thousands of old people in the country are too poor to support themselves in any degree of decency, and are likewise too old to carry a paying job. Therefore the Government should use all its great resources in making the last years of these aged as comfortable as possible.

The question which remains open is how much the Government can afford to pay all the aged. Intelligent people agree the Townsend Plan is absurd; the Roosevelt Social Security Bill, however, is still open to doubt, whether the provision of the eventual 9.3% pay-roll tax of 1949, and $15 to $20 per month payments, lies above or below the humane and the possible.

The other side takes the attitude that such redistribution of wealth is not the Government's business, not intrinsically, but because private capitalism can handle the old age problem far more efficiently, more intelligently, more democratically, and more honestly. At present the aged are not, as a general rule, starving to death. They are supported by charity, in a small number of cases, by past thrift, in a larger number of cases, and by relations, in the majority of cases.

The alternative is not, as political rascals would have us believe, between government paternalism and the present rotten and hap-hazard situation, but between government paternalism and an improvement along liberal, but completely capitalistic lines, an education of all the people according to the good, old-fashioned, bourgeois ideals of individual responsibility, thrift, the home, and suspicion of politics and politicians.

A chance of productive employment, of course, is the first and foremost essential to bringing on the new era along capitalistic lines, and this chance retires further and further into the background of possibility when deliberately job-eliminating measures such as the Wagner Bill, the N. R. A., and the Wealth Confiscation Bills are in force, also when the Chamber of Commerce, Monopoly, and High Powered Advertising distinguish our great sandy-geared system.

But the hope which lies in the future is that the next emergency such as the Great War, or the bottom of the Depression, when true leadership is possible, will provide as President someone other than a loud-mouthed weakling, some-one who will use his power to attack Monopoly, to fight Waste, to encourage Investment, to simplify the Government, to educate the masses of the people in Conservative, Constructive. Enriching, Strength-and-Happiness-giving ways.