Who's Picking Whose Pocket?

"To a small-town fellow come to the big city it was bound to happen sooner or later, and finally it did," said the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal. "On the way to Wall Street, that den of iniquity, our pocket was picked in the subway, that haunt of the huddled masses."

The man who was plucked by a member of the light-fingered league in the I.R.T. was Journal Editor Vermont Connecticut Royster, a Raleigh, N.C., boy despite the Yankee twang to his name. To Royster, the loss of his credit cards, shopping lists and drugstore prescriptions, not to mention $100 "secreted in the back of our wallet against such grave emergencies as running out of expense-account money in San Antonio or St. Paul." turned out to have a leaven of unexpected value. "I use all kinds of incidents that happen to me when I'm groping around for a way to make a point," said Royster. Last week he used his months-old misadventure to make the point that "if some of the economic theories bruited about today are correct." the deft dip did much to help the U.S. economy.

"We do not approve of pickpockets, especially those who pick our own," said the Journal, but "the result represents a consummation devoutly to be wished by influential thinkers of the day." Since Royster's $100 was transferred from one party to another, the editorial reasoned, both the gross national product and the national income showed gains, and such "redistribution of income" is "the whole object of current economic policy." It also helps, added the editorial, if money "can be transferred from corporations and rich folk, who might have a proclivity toward savings, to the hands of those who will inject it more quickly into the spending stream."

But the Journal pointed out that the Government goes a step farther than the pickpocket. "We are told that the good effects of all this are enhanced if the Government, unlike our friend on the subway, can spend more than it takes, or at least seem to. Big deficits, especially those arising from tax cuts, allow more dollars to be put into some people's pockets without appearing to take quite so much out of other people's pockets." While this is illusory, "there's no denying it's less painful to steal a bit from everybody's dollars by inflation than to take the money away from them in immediate taxes."

Concluded the Journal: "On the subway we had a blissful ignorance of being plucked until, much later in the day, we found ourselves less well off than we thought. And even now we think there must be many a helpful pickpocket who wishes that policemen understood the ethics of the new economics."

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