OPINION: Lend & Lose?

U.S. citizens, complacent over their own generosity to ravaged Europe, got a dash of cold water last week. Writing in Freedom & Union, organ of Clarence Streit’s Federal Unionists, former Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts reminded them of an old adage: every time you lend, you lose a friend.

Roberts was blunt. “Can the present European Recovery Plan do other than place us in the poisonous rich-uncle, poor-relationship situation that has severed so many family ties?” Europe’s democracies are proud. “They feel that they gave what they gave for the benefit of free men everywhere. Is it surprising they resent the role of begging from our nation?”

Only by uniting the U.S. and Europe’s democracies in a federal union with common citizenship, Roberts thinks, can the U.S. draw the poison from this donor-beggar relationship. Roberts appealed to a higher logic than dollars & cents: “Free men are the best assets we have outside the U.S.; men who think and act like us.”