PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

impinge upon the private habits of the followers. That is one great
reason why governments have such a free hand in foreign affairs. Most
of the frictions between two states involve a series of obscure and
long-winded contentions, occasionally on the frontier, but far more
often in regions about which school geographies have supplied no
precise ideas. In Czechoslovakia America is regarded as the Liberator;
in American newspaper paragraphs and musical comedy, in American
conversation by and large, it has never been finally settled whether
the country we liberated is Czechoslavia or Jugoslovakia.
In foreign affairs the incidence of policy is for a very long time
confined to an unseen environment. Nothing that happens out there is
felt to be wholly real. And so, because in the ante-bellum period,
nobody has to fight and nobody has to pay, governments go along
according to their lights without much reference to their people. In
local affairs the cost of a policy is more easily visible. And
therefore, all but the most exceptional leaders prefer policies in
which the costs are as far as possible indirect.
They do not like direct taxation. They do not like to pay as they go.
They like long term debts. They like to have the voters believe that
the foreigner will pay. They have always been compelled to calculate
prosperity in terms of the producer rather than in terms of the
consumer, because the incidence on the consumer is distributed over so
many trivial items. Labor leaders have always preferred an increase of
money wages to a decrease in prices. There has always been more
popular interest in the profits of millionaires, which are visible but
comparatively unimportant, than in the wastes of the industrial
system, which are huge but elusive. A legislature dealing with a
shortage of houses, such as exists when this is written, illustrates
this rule, first by doing nothing to increase the number of houses,
second by smiting the greedy landlord on the hip, third by
investigating the profiteering builders and working men. For a
constructive policy deals with remote and uninteresting factors, while
a greedy landlord, or a profiteering plumber is visible and immediate.
But while people will readily believe that in an unimagined future and
in unseen places a certain policy will benefit them, the actual
working out of policy follows a different logic from their opinions. A
nation may be induced to believe that jacking up the freight rates
will make the railroads prosperous. But that belief will not make the
roads prosperous, if the impact of those rates on farmers and shippers
is such as to produce a commodity price beyond what the consumer can
pay. Whether the consumer will pay the price depends not upon whether
he nodded his head nine months previously at the proposal to raise
rates and save business, but on whether he now wants a new hat or a
new automobile enough to pay for them.