COLUMN RIGHT/ JOSHUA MURAVCHIK : Unmet Needs Will Always Be With Us : The Marshall Plan repaid a generous America. So can aid to the former communist countries.

With America in a recession, appeals for help from the Soviet Union and other states emerging from communism are being greeted with a growing chorus of objections. “Don’t send large sums overseas while we have unmet needs at home,” goes the refrain.

With the economy sour, an election year approaching and foreign aid always unpopular, this may make good politics. But it’s a false argument, because the sums in question could make, at best, a small dent in our domestic problems. And even if they did, this would scarcely alleviate our sense of having unmet needs.

If we applied the several billion dollars proposed to aid formerly communist countries--indeed if we threw in the entire foreign-aid budget--to domestic goals, how much closer would it bring us to reaching them? Never mind that the liberals in the anti-aid chorus are at odds with their conservative allies over whether the funds should be spent on the government’s domestic programs or returned to the private sector.

If, one way or the other, we succeeded, say, in raising average SAT scores by a few points or providing health-insurance to additional thousands or reducing unemployment levels by a few tenths of a percent, would we feel any less the need to continue improving our schools, our health care or our overall level of prosperity?

The answer is that our “needs” rise with our achievements. Indeed, it is this very dynamic of rising expectations that makes us feel that the domestic situation amounts to a catalogue of “unmet” needs. By the standards of only a few decades ago, these same needs seem to have been well met.

Compare America’s domestic plight today to our situation in the late 1940s, the era of our greatest overseas generosity. Despite recession, our income per person is more than twice what it was then. The average American completes 13 years of schooling now, compared with nine then, and can expect to live to the age of 75, compared with 68 then, as a result of improvements in medical care. And if some social problems--say, drug abuse--are worse today, the monster of all American social problems--racial discrimination--has substantially attenuated.

Yet in the face of all those unmet needs, America launched the Marshall Plan, into which (together with aid to Japan and other nations) we poured more than 2% of our gross national product for more than five years--a portion about 20 times larger than the amounts debated about today.

How that investment has paid off. The strong, stable international economy that the European recovery undergirded has provided a basis for our own postwar prosperity, allowing many domestic needs to be better met. Above all, the investment bought us the priceless treasure of peace and security that has now been crowned by the amicable capitulation of our only imminently threatening foe.

Today, the eastern half of Europe stands as if on the morrow of a great war--its economy, its physical being and its people ravaged by a horrendous experiment that took as many lives as all the battles of World War II. Compassion is sufficient reason to offer help, but self-interest suggests reasons of its own.

There is little chance of a return of communism but much danger of new forms of strife and tyranny. The huge arsenals of the Soviet military sit there, subject to who knows what new, frightening uses. Prudence counsels us to ease the passage of these nations to free-market democracy.

This would, moreover, constitute an unparalleled triumph for American principles likely to bring us many long-term benefits. And aid to the former communist nations will probably redound even to the benefit of our domestic economy, while the contraction of their armies enables us to save billions on defense and the recovery of their economies provides us with new opportunities for commerce.

It is said that we cannot be confident that our aid will be well used, and of course not all of it will be. The transition from communism has never been done before, and people will learn how to do it by trial and error. The Marshall Plan, we should recall, was not a plan at all. We said we would give the Europeans a lot of money if they would figure out what to do with it. They did, and it worked, but no one should imagine that every dollar was well spent.

Today, some fine American, and Russian and other East European thinkers are figuring out the best uses to which foreign assistance can be put in the transition from communism. If even some of their answers are the right ones, this would be a big boost for people who need it badly with a big payoff for ourselves as well.