ABSTRACT
"Creeping socialism" and "the welfare state" were terms of anathema with Robert Taft. In an humane economy, Taft repeatedly argued, equality of opportunity—though not equality of final reward—is a matter of public concern, at every level of government. Socialized medicine would be a curse; but prudent governmental assistance to improve the health of people of low income is a national benefit, Robert Taft reasoned. During his time in the Senate, the Beveridge Plan was adopted in Britain, and the British National Health Service came into being. A humane commonwealth in which a free economy would make possible the steady improvement of the lot of an economically depressed one-fifth of the population, without recourse to the totalist devices of socialism: this was Robert Taft's design. Measures would guard the free economy and the free society against socialism by diminishing the afflictions for which the socialists pretended to offer a radical remedy.
