From the archives: Our country's productive strength flows from our liberty

Opinion editor's note: The following editorial is reprinted from the Sept. 4, 1950, issue of the Minneapolis Tribune.

In his report to the nation last week, President Harry Truman warned aggressor nations against the productive strength of the United States. Hitler and the Japanese generals, he reminded his listeners, badly miscalculated that strength 10 years ago. "Let would-be aggressors make no such mistake today," he said.

Labor day is a good occasion to contemplate the nature of that productive strength.

Essentially it is a strength which flows, not merely from an abundance of physical resources, but from a free system which makes possible the efficient and socially useful development of those resources.

In the United States, labor is free to organize and bargain. It does not wear the shackles imposed upon it in totalitarian countries.

Management, similarly, operates in an atmosphere of freedom. Here we have the elements of incentive and initiative which can flourish only in a system of free enterprise. We are productively strong because labor and management both breathe this atmosphere and operate within this system.

The totalitarian strength is the strength of a system in which the individual is nothing, the state everything. It has never measured up to, and by its very nature can never measure up to, the remarkable productive vigor which characterizes the partnership of free labor and free enterprise.

In World War II this partnership was decisive. Our industrial might slowly tipped the balance against the Axis powers. The part that American labor and management played in that victory constitutes one of the shining chapters of the war.

It is the same team, working within the same framework of freedom, that Mr. Truman was thinking of last week when he warned Russia and its satellites of this nation's economic strength.

That team is superb in war only because it operates under a system that has proved its soundness in both war and peace. This system has provided us with the highest living standards in the world because it is the most productive system in the world. And parallel with these standards, which are physical and material, have run the spiritual values.

The democratic emphasis has been on the dignity of the individual, and on his right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." At the very heart and center of the system has been the free man — on the farm, in the factory and at the office. The concept of "free and equal" has been imperfectly realized, to be sure; but we have made extraordinary progress toward it.

Labor day is traditionally the day on which the nation considers the achievements of labor. Would-be aggressors, meanwhile, have good reason to hate and fear American labor. For labor still stands, firm and strong, as one of the chief bulwarks of the most productive and freest economic system in the world.