On

the First World War, Keynes observed that "the immense accumulations of fixed capital, built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a society where wealth was divided equitably." This "remarkable system," he said, "depended for its growth upon a double bluff or deception. the one hand the laboring classes *** were compelled, persuaded, or cajoled *** into accepting a situation in which they could call their own very little of the cake that they and nature and the capitalists were cooperating to produce. And on the other hand the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs *** on the tacit understanding that they consumed very little of it in practice."

In drawing the lesson from his parable, Keynes indulged himself in a heretical forecast of the day when the cake might be cut: "*** when there would at last be enough to go around * * *. In that day overwork, overcrowding, and underfeeding would have come to an end, and men, secure in the comforts and necessities of the body, could proceed to the nobler exercise of their faculties."

For most other economists, however, and for the owners and operators of the system, the perpetual growth of the cake remained "the object of true religion." It remains so today, sustained by the almost unanimous conviction of the community that high wages are bad (because they increase current consumption) and big profits are good (because they go to increase productive capacity).

The first portent that the system had fulfilled its purpose came in the 1930's. The economics of scarcity was then confronted by the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty. Strangely enough, as Clarence E. Ayres has pointed out, it was Keynes who saved the true religion with his "investment subterfuge.' The Keynesian technique for administering the business cycle calls for increase in the current rate of investment on the downturn of the business cycle, with the Government supplying the funds, by deficit financing if necessary. Investment creates consumers but no addition to the consumable surplus, and so it delivers a powerful stimulus to the entire economy. The priming of the investment pump by the Government was a scandalous notion when first put into practice by the New Deal, but today it is a constitutional function of our Federal Government. More investment could not go on serving, however, as the remedy for too much investment. Our economic system has found another way to certify citizens as consumers. The production of armaments, it turns out, can serve something like the same economic function as investment: it certifies additional workers with paychecks to consume the surplus and yet it certainly makes no addition to the consumable surplus. By this device, by dumping a quarter of our industrial output into the sink of armament, we have achieved affluence if not abundance. For a few years, we even attained full employment. But now in 1962, despite a 25-percent increase in military expenditure, the number of unemployed again exceeds the number unemployed at the last recovery peak.

The progress

There are other signs that the time has come to cut the cake. of technology has stirred a new ingredient into the recipe. It is the sorcerer's ingredient that so astonished the apprentice. The cake now grows out of its own substance at no cost to the abundance of its consumable output. Despite the huge appetite of the Military Establishment, no certified consumer goes without any good that he hankers for. Admittedly, some 50 million of us continue to be ill fed, ill clad, and ill housed, but idle plant and rotting surpluses testify that we have more than enough to go around.

There is no doubt that disarmament would compel the cutting of the cake. The first word that follows disarmament in any economic essay on the prospect is: Depression. But the authors of these studies hasten on to dispel what they call any misconceived or exaggerated apprehensions about the potential economic impact of an agreement. As you read on, you are enthralled to learn what promise the future holds, when we are at last disarmed and freed to cultivate the arts of peace. In the first place, both Republicans and Democrats agree that disarmament would bring no corresponding cut in the expendiutres of the Federal Government. The major portion of the funds released by disarmament are to be invested in the enrichment of our land and our people.

In a memorandum on the economic and social consequences of disarmament addressed to the Secretary General of the United Nations, the Kennedy administration declares that this country has "a backlog of demand for public services comparable in many ways to the backlog of demand for consumer durable goods and housing and producers plant and equipment at the end of World War II." By way of illustration, the memorandum shows that there is demand for an additional $10 to $15 billion in our annual expenditures for education, an additional $4 billion for control of environmental pollution, and $12 billion more each year

for conservation and for the development of our natural resources. A parallel study by the National Planning Association sees need for a total annual investment of $66 billion in the realms of education, mass transportation, urban renewal, natural resources, and scientific research; this compares to a current annual investment of $30 billon in the public domain. To the Eisenhower administration we are indebted for glimpse of what the Federal budget might look like after a first substantial step toward disarmament. Such figures as $7.5 billion for education, $3.7 billion for public health, $3.2 billion for urban renewal, $4 billion for resource development, and $3 billion for space research, and a total increase in the Federal civilian budget of about $30 billion, show that the Republicans can be as imaginative spenders as Democrats are reputed to be.

The Kennedy administration has yet to make such a full-dress forecast. But a report issued by the Disarmament Agency finds it possible to pick up some of the slack from disarmament by putting $9 billion into space research. With the galaxy out there beyond the solar system, we have no cause to worry about depression.

The consensus is clear: we can offset the reduction in the arms budget by worthwhile and long overdue investment in the upgrading of our human and material resources and the enhancement of our domestic life. The possibilities inherent in the expenditure of Pentagon-size sums on these objectives stagger the imagination.

The prospect of disarmament confronts us, therefore, with a lesson, a vision, and a question. The lesson is that the public sector-comprising the Federal, State, and local governments must continue directly and indirectly to certify a major and a growing percentage of our consumers with purchasing power. From 25 percent today, the figure is bound to go up, not down, on the day after disarmament. There is no return to normalcy in sight. On the other hand, the continued expansion in the scope and power of the Government lays serious hazards to self-government. We may hope that the exercise of citizenship will commend itself in the future to a citizenry blessed with increasing leisure time. The vision is the vision of the Founding Fathers: the realization of the values of freedom, equality, security, abundance, and excellence in the life of our Nation. The question is: What are we waiting for? If education should indeed command twice the present annual expenditure at some future date, then the children who are going to school today are being cheated. If our cities cry out for $100 billion worth of reconstruction in the course of a half decade, some years hence, we are losing time and corrupting precious human resources in the slums and ghettoes of the present. The same reasoning applies to the topsoil and the forests now going down the drain and up in smoke.

A hint of the answer to the question of why we are waiting is contained in the recent economic report of the Disarmament Agency which declares: "the chief obstacles * * * would be political resistance rather than deficiencies in our economic knowledge." It is difficult for anyone, including even the Secretary of Defense, to resist the demands on the Public Treasury laid by the Armed Forces. Those demands are now backed by the substantial economic interest of a giant industry exclusively devoted to armament. No such absolute moral sanction supports the claims of education, for example, and no comparable vested interest stands to gain from them. In many fields, as in natural resources and urban redevelopment, the expansion of governmental activity is bound to bring public and private interests into collision with one another. There are good grounds for the view that it will take disarmament and the threat of a great depression to overcome "political resistance" to our passage into the age of abundance.

But the politics of the situation can also be stated the other way: We are unlikely to get disarmament unless we are ready to embrace and vigorously advance the economic alternatives to armament. The large, round numbers I have quoted from the reports and studies made thus far must be translated into programs and engineering drawings. Local and individual initiative has an important role to play in this effort, especially in those regions and industries in which armament expenditures are now concentrated. While the Federal Government need not and cannot assume the entire burden, a real commitment to disarmament on the part of the administration would begin to bring the New Frontier into view on this side of the far horizon.

The choice one way or the other cannot be postponed much longer. The arms budget is losing its potency as an economic anodyne. It is concealing less and less successfully the underlying transformation of our economic system. Progress in the technology of war, as in all other branches of technology, is inexorably cutting back the payroll. With the miniaturization of violence in the

step from A-bombs to H-bombs, from manned aircraft to missiles, expenditure on armaments has begun to yield a diminishing economic stimulus. Armament in any case holds out no endless frontier. By some estimates, we are already armed with the equivalent of 10 tons of TNT for every man, woman, and child on earth. We acquired this monstrous capacity for destruction by a subterfuge on the investment subterfuge. There is surely little to be gained, economically or militarily, by raising that figure to 20 tons. Even in the postponement of disarmament, the economic and social consequences of abundance must soon be recognized and accommodated in our politics. If we had acquired the kind of armament most of us thought we had, scaled to the "rational" strategy of deterrence, we would be in the midst of abundance today.

In all that I have said I have dealt with the state of our Nation in isolation from the worldwide political crisis that so heavily conditions our domestic existence. I have done so deliberately, in the conviction that our country's domestic situation plays no inconsiderable role in shaping the nature of the world crisis. It goes without saying that we do not command all the variables in current history. But we can and must put our own house in order or we will surely lose what command we now claim. We have come to the fork in the road.

Reverend BEACHY. Senator Hubert Humphrey, of Minnesota, has conducted a survey of the firms in our coutry which are currently engaged in defense contracts. These number a total of 400; yet, 24 of the 400 companies accounted for 70 percent of the total expenditure. The fact that decisionmaking in areas of national importance is thus taken out of the hands of the civil government and placed in the hands of the military industrial complex should, we believe, be a matter of grave concern to the Members of the United States Senate. We reiterate our conviction that the continuation of the draft will further strengthen the hold of this military industrial complex upon the economic and political life of our Nation.

2. The continuation of conscription will cast us more and more in the mold of the totalitarian regime of communism, whose plan for world domination we are now committed to resist. By subjecting our youth to military indoctrination in which unquestioning obedience to the superior officer is regarded as the desired standard of military excellence, we remake ourselves in the image of the power we are trying to resist. Conscription hardens the tendency to seek military solutions to problems that are largely ideological and economic. The military mind-set which it helps to engender will render us incapable of seeing the cracks in the Communist "wall" which indicate, if not a fundamental change in ideology, at least a significant shift in strategy, which calls for a nonmilitary response on our part. I refer to the recent publication in Russia of the anti-Stalinist novel, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." A criticism of the slave labor camps under Stalin, it represents a chink in the armor of the "closed society," which we should exploit to the full. Our continued reliance upon a military structure whose capacity for violence has no rational military or political justification can only serve to strengthen the conviction of the opposition in the cold war that we do not really desire peaceful solutions. Thus, the chink in the armor can be closed again by American as well as by Russian intransigence. Furthermore, the continuation of conscription hinders the work of the Disarmament Agency and makes all our effort toward a reduction of the armament race appear to be lipservice only.

3. Conscription places a cloud of uncertainty over the education and training of those who plan to continue formal education beyond high school. Furthermore, it often makes it difficult for the youth who does not plan formal education beyond high school to find gainful

employment, while his military service is still pending. The net result of this is that military service is not viewed as a patriotic duty but as a rude interruption of one's personal or educational career. Many who volunteer for military service are not motivated by a sense of patriotic duty so much as by the desire "to have it over with." In a day when the Nation needs its most able minds, not only in the sciences but in the humanities as well, it can ill afford a system of conscription which casts a shadow of uncertainty over the academic future of every American male after he becomes 18 years of age.

4. While conscription is theoretically universal, it has actually become under the present system highly discriminatory. This is due to the fact that the need for manpower replacement secured through the draft for the armed services is so low numerically that selective service has become, in fact, very highly selective so highly selective that very few of those eligible for military service by law are actually drafted. Those who are drafted, therefore, often resent the fact that they were "caught," while many of their friends escaped the dragnet of conscription.

5. We believe that the national ideals and goals of the United States of America can best be maintained and achieved by diverting the vast financial expenditure and the large personnel now consumed by conscription to creative and constructive ventures such as the Peace Corps. The vast sums now spent on the procurement of weapons and for the military training and indoctrination of our youth do nothing to alleviate the most urgent needs of the peoples of the world whose poverty and disease make them an easy target for communism, which promises to alleviate their wretched condition.

We thank the committee for this opportunity of appearing before them and speaking in opposition to this proposed legislation. It is our hope and prayer that the members of this committee and of the U.S. Senate will find both the wisdom and the courage which is needed to end conscription and begin a more creative approach to the solution of the world's complex and often baffling problems.

Chairman RUSSELL. We are glad to have your statement, Reverend Beachy.

The next witness is Mr. Edward Eichel Burns, who will present the views of the Student Peace Union Committee of Brooklyn College. STATEMENT OF EDWARD EICHEL BURNS, ON BEHALF OF THE BROOKLYN COLLEGE STUDENT PEACE UNION COMMITTEE

Mr. BURNS. My name is Edward Eichel Burns, and I am a student at Brooklyn College in the city of New York.

The Brooklyn College Student Peace Union Committee strongly opposes the bill before this committee to extend the draft.

We believe that peacetime conscription is in direct defiance of American traditions. It represents an invasion of the right to privacy inherent in our historical tradition.

The draft disrupts young men during an important period of their lives. At precisely that time when they should be allowed to develop unfettered, they are subjugated to a system that could not care less about them. Their ability to develop their intellectual outlets is crushed by an overpowering system.

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The draft inculcates on young men acceptance of war and militarism as a sane, normal, integral feature of our way of life. Military conscription in no way works to the advantage of the youth of this Nation. It does, however, serve the purposes of those cold-war parasites whose main interest rests not in their patriotism, but, rather, in their overzealous desire to reap superprofits from war preparations. To these people the draft represents the solution to the economic problems of this country.

The flaw in American policy, the flaw which allows it to say, ergo: military conscription is the belief that nuclear annihilation is a myth. In 1945, with the explosion of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, civilization entered a new historical epoch. At that time many people realized the horrible implications of Hiroshima, but only a few farreaching minds like the late Dr. Albert Einstein could envision the possibilities for a time when the H-bomb would be produced. Speaking of that possibility, he said:

If successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities * * *. In the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation.

It was not until 1956 with incidents like "Lucky Dragon" that we began to learn that what science had undergone in 1945 was not merely a quantitative change from one type of weapon to another, but, rather, science had undergone a qualitative change a change to a weapon that has the possibility to destroy all life on the planet earth— perhaps even the planet earth itself.

Speaking to this point, in his article "Commandments for a Nuclear Age," that appears in his correspondence with the Hiroshima pilot, the noted German philosopher, Gunther Anders, has remarked:

*** the effect of the bomb is greater than any conceivable end for this end will necessarily be destroyed by its effect. Every end will be destroyed together with the entire world in which "ends and means" had existed (Burning Conscience).

We are facing a danger today unlike any other danger that humanity has ever been faced with. There are now in the possession of the Soviet Union and the United States more than enough nuclear weapons to wipe out all life, all societies on the planet earth.

The scientists who know best, people like Linus Pauling and Leo Slizard, have agreed that the prerequisite for the survival of the human race is that there should be no world war III.

In their old age, words tend to lose their meaning. They no longer are clear. This is precisely what has happened to words such as "defense" and "deterrent". The qualitative changes of the nuclear age have made it imperative that we alter our conceptions of these words.

In the context of this understanding, then, we think it is clear that we are dangerously ignorant when we speak of war as a means of settling the problems of the world. Having the draft means giving government an agent through which it can manipulate world tensions. We saw this in action during the Berlin crisis. We stard unalterably opposed to any action that will lead us down the path toward nuclear annihilation.

The Brooklyn College Student Peace Union believes that to end the draft would be a catalyst toward reducing world tensions ard would represent a creative, intelligent beginning toward approaching the problem of world peace and the survival of the human race.