Washington -- If you watched Rep. Newt Gingrich, the House speaker-to-be, on TV Sunday talking about orphanages as welfare reform, I hope you also read the column on welfare in Monday's Wall Street Journal by Herbert Stein, who was chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers.
You might say, "Thank God, there's still some diversity of heart and mind among Republicans!"
From Mr. Gingrich, on "Meet the Press," you got a silly use of Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney in the 1938 movie "Boys Town" as justification for his proposal to "help" America's 9.5 million welfare children by putting them in state-run orphanages.
From Mr. Stein you got a truly thoughtful discussion of the repercussions of a large reduction in welfare benefits, and some incisive, insightful questions about what Americans think they will do through "welfare reform."
To convince us that it is wise to deny aid to teen-age mothers and put their babies in orphanages, Mr. Gingrich offers the simplistic observation that "the little 4-year-old girl who was thrown off a balcony in Chicago would have been a heck of a lot better off in Boys Town."
Of course, as would have been the South Carolina children who were given a watery grave by their mother, Susan Smith.
But welfare reform involves millions of children who are not victims of bizarre or routine abuse and violence -- just children who live under circumstances where their parents (or parent) cannot provide adequate food, shelter, clothing or guidance. Is the clamor for reform based on an assumption that slashing funds will seriously ameliorate this problem?
Mr. Stein writes:
"Now people say that if we cut the welfare benefits given to young unmarried mothers, young unmarried women will have fewer children. Q.E.D. Cutting the benefits will cure or at least ameliorate the problem. But if cutting the benefits by, say, 50 percent reduces the number of children newly born to young unmarried women by, say, 5 percent the problem is not reduced but is aggravated. There will be more misery among children -- that is, somewhat fewer children but each in a much more miserable condition."
Mr. Gingrich talks as though he thinks the goal of welfare reform is to punish women who have sex outside wedlock with males who cannot support a resultant baby -- and that he can discredit the 1960s social programs that he says created sexual promiscuity and economic dependence.
Mr. Stein observes with remarkable honesty that while expansion of welfare may have contributed to "the conditions we now deplore," we must be aware that "a lot of other things have happened in America in the past 30 years that may have contributed to the problem."
It seems not to have occurred to Mr. Gingrich that in the "Boys Town" of 1938, neither parents nor orphanages had to protect children from a culture in which drug abuse is rampant in every level of society, and in which the gratification and skills of sexual intercourse are the top selling force for movies, jeans, perfume, TV fare, books and almost everything else.
Mr. Gingrich plays to greed and racial and class hatreds, arousing those who say they should not have to pay taxes to feed a bunch of loose, lazy women and their broods of bastards.
Mr. Stein dares to suggest that welfare programs increase "the personal security of the middle class" and may increase "the productivity of the labor force." Morally, he says, "It is not right for a country as rich as the U.S. to allow so many of its residents to live in misery and squalor without making a strenuous effort to prevent it."
So there are two Republican views: one splenetic and draconian, another reasoned and tempered by compassion and a sense of national self-interest.
The view that prevails will alter all our lives.
Carl T. Rowan is a syndicated columnist.