The Libertarian Review March 1978 - Libertarianism.org

I Crossearrentsby Walter Grinder- Austrian Economics ConferenceMany of the country's leading Austrianeconomists gathered at New York Universitytogether with other prominent economistsfor two days in early January for arather impressive and useful conference on"Issues in Economic Theory: An Evaluationof Current Austrian Perspectives."Cosponsored by the Institute for HumaneStudies and NYU's Center fo- AppliedEconomics, the conference was organizedand directed by Mario Rizzo-a member ofa rare and curious breed in that, althoughhe earned his doctorate at the University ofChicago, his sympathies and interests arefar closer to the Austrian than to theChicago School.Speakers and discussants at the conference,in addition to Rizzo, included suchnotables as Ludwig M. Lachmann of NYUand South Africa; Murray N. Rothbard ofthe Polytechnic Institute of New York; SirJohn Hicks of Oxford; Gerald P. O'Drisc'oll,Jr. of Iowa State University; Israel M.Kirzner of NYU; Richard E. Wagner ofVirginia Polytechnic; Leland B. Yeager andRoger W. Garrison of the University ofVirginia; Harold Demsetz of UCLA; JohnB. Egger of Goucher College; and HarveyLeibenstein of Harvard.Economists with an Austrian bent are inresidence at a growing number of academicinstitutions. But with Rizzo, Kirzner, andLachmann (the latter as a frequent visitingprofessor) at NYU, Washington Square appearsto be the best place in the country foradvanced study in economics with anAustrian flavor. Kirzner and Lachmannhave been published widely, and I look forsome of the most important work inAustrian economics during the next severalyears to come from the pen of ProfessorRizzo. His major interests at the momentinclude the relationship between law andeconomics, and the implications of Hayek'swork on the "spontaneous order" of socioeconomicdevelopment. For those interested,there are a number of fellowshipsavailable at NYU for qualified students.Rizzo plans to collect and edit the conferencepapers, and it is hoped these proceedingswill be published soon thereafter.For more information, write Dr. Rizzo atLibertarian Reviewthe Department of Economics, 516 TischHall, New York University, New York, NY10003.• Looking for a Textbook?One of the peculiar frustrations of trying toteach an introductory economics coursewhetherto college freshmen or sophomores,or to an independent studygroup-from the Austrian viewpoint hasbeen the lack of an appropriate textbook.Those of us who have been faced with thispuzzle have searched for years for asuitable volume. Standard works likeSamuelson or imitators thereof are bothcontradictory and too eclectic. Lipsey andSteiner are too abstractly rigorous and,even worse for a beginner, usually bear norelation to real-world human action.Alchian and Allen, Rothbard, Mises are, inall but exceptional cases, too difficult forbeginners.Yet in my delvings I have discovered twointroductory-level texts I could recommend,with one basic caveat: the macroeconomicssections of each of them-sincethey are not written from a' strictlyAustrian analysis-are less than sound, inmy view.First is Henry N. Sanborn's What, How,For Whom: The Decisions of EconomicOrganization (Cotter-Barnard Company,P.O. Box 8466, Baltimore, Maryland21234). Sanborn's book would best bedescribed as a less-advanced and lessrigorousversion of Alchian and Allen'sfamed University Economics. The book isparticularly good on specialization, divisionof labor, and savings and investment.The second introductory text I wouldrecommend, and the one I tend to favor, isPaul Heyne's The Economic Way of Thinking(Science Research Associates,Chicago). Like Sanborn, this author'spolicy implications are clearly quite libertarian,and Heyne is good on specialization,efficiency, monopoly, profit, andother topics. But Heyne's book is myfavorite principally because it is imbuedtotally with one of the major buildingblocks of Austrian theory-opportunitycost. Heyne's version of opportunity cost isnot as consistently subjective or as forwardlooking as most Austrians would prefer,but it is clearly the best I've seen in anycollege-level introductory text.I am looking forward to the day when anintroductory text is written by an Austrianeconomist who will deal with all mattershothmicro and macro-from a consistentlyAustrian point of view. Until then,though, I do recommend both Heyne (first)and Sanborn.If we ever expect to replace our currentsystem of state capitalism with that of thefree market, then we simply have to knowhow the unhampered market works and beready to answer various criticisms of thefree market. Therefore, as ancillary readingalong with either of these texts, I stillrecommend using Henry Hazlitt's marvelousEconomics in One Lesson, which is goingthrough yet another revision and updating.Other than Hazlitt's little gem, Iknow of no book which so repeatedly andconvincingly presents the basic economiclesson that within each and every projectedeconomic policy measure are entailed anumber of secondary (usually deleterious)consequences, the nature of which it is thejob of the good citizen-economist to traceout, to understand, to explain, and to considercarefully before a policy decision ismade.-Changing of the GuardThe principal organizing genius behind thecreation and development of the Center forLibertarian Studies has been its first president,John Hagel III. Thanks in large partto Hagel's tireless efforts, the Center haddeveloped into a top-notch academic thinktank. Its publications, conferences, andresearch projects are among the finest inthe country, and certainly the finest in therealm of purely libertarian studies producedin recent memory. At the end of hislatest tenure as president, Hagel resignedbecause increasing time commitments of abusiness career will keep him out of thecountry a large part of the time.Speaking for the whole libertarian community,I want to thank John for his sustainedand creative efforts in making theCenter the reality that, before he proddedothers to action, many of us once onlydreamed about.Fortunately for the Center and for thecause of liberty, Hagel is being replaced byanother talented and ardent libertarian.The Center's new president is David H.Padden, a Chicago businessman. He ispresident of his own investment firm andpast chairman of the board of a majorChicago-based conglomerate. Like Hagel,he earned his MBA from Harvard University,albeit two decades earlier. Padden's administrativetalents should ensure the con-7

tinued growth and success of the Center.Since the Center is now well established,I am now able to leave my post as executivedirector and return to my scholarly pursuitsof researching, writing, and teaching.The Center's new executive director is J.Phillip Sykes, another dedicated libertarianwho come to the Center from a combinedbackground of business and scholarship.Phil is an able and amiable administrator,who, when combined with Padden, givesthe Center a first-rate executive team.Sykes' administrative assistant is JoanneEbeling. The new position of project directoris being filled by Richard Ebeling.Richard, by all accounts, is one of thebest-read young academics in the libertarianmovement. In particular, I knowthat his knowledge of the Austrianeconomics literature is practically unparalleled.Rounding out this capable staffis Alyson Tufts.With this staff, the Center is bettermanned than at any time in its short existence.I wish them all well, and I expectthat we will see a continued prospering ofthe Center.-Stone on StoneOne of the truly great investigative journalistsof the twentieth century (and perhapsof all time) is I.F. Stone, known tofriend and foe alike as Izzy. Practicallyalone of all the journalists in America, IzzyStone firmly held to his belief in an absolutelyfree press and in unfettered civilliberties for all Americans during theheavy-handed years of the early Cold War.I.F. Stone8For those of us who were trying to findout what was really going in the Pentagonand behind other cloaks of governmentalsecrecy during the fifties and sixties, therewas often only one place to turn to getdocumented evidence and informedanalysis: in the last of the great one-manoperations, I.F. Stone's Weekly.There are probably many young peoplewho know little about this journalisticgenius and who have never read any of hisperceptive and informative essays in theWeekly. I recommend that everyone readtwo volumes which contain some of Stone'sbest articles on the beginnings of the ColdWar, and on the concerted attacks on civilliberties by the Truman regime (and laterby Senator McCarthy). The first is TheTruman Era, and the second is The I.F.Stone Weekly Reader, edited by Neil Middleton(both books are 1973 Vintage paperbacks).And for what still remains one ofthe best journalistic accounts of the SouthKorean government's instigative role in thewar of the Korean peninsula, I recommendThe Hidden History of the Korean War(Monthly Review Press, 1970).Stone closed down the Weekly severalyears ago, and has written only sporadicallyfor the New York Review of Books sincethen. I thought that he had otherwise goneinto retirement. I should have known betterabout one who was so active. The sparkthat jogged my memory about Stone was aclever and revealing self-interview, "Izzyon Izzy," which ran in The New YorkTimes Magazine on January 22, 1978. Wefind that, far from retiring, this septuagenarianJeffersonian is back at school(a nonmatriculant at American Universityin Washington, D.C.) studying the historyof the freedom of thought and expressionand the struggles for it throughout thehistory of Western civilization. He is evenlearning Greek to facilitate studying thehistory of these issues in Hellenic times.Throughout his long career, Stone's centraland all-consuming passion has been tofight for freedom of thought. For doing soin a consistent and enthusiastic manner, hewas unmercifully and groundlessly redbaited,time and again, by both conservativesand liberals.Unfortunately, he does suffer from themodern liberal malady of not appreciatingthe need for the same absolute freedom inthe economic sphere as he rightfully demandsfor those freedoms usually cataloguedunder the rubric of civil liberties.This dichotomy shows up in his own wordsmost glaringly when he writes about thenature of his forthcoming book: "I woulddo a study in depth of what concerns memost-freedom of thought and expresion,and how to preserve it against the new excusesfor repression bound to arise in everygeneration, but just freedom of thought,not 'liberty,' which is too vague and slippery,and may include, as it often does, thefreedom to exploit others."This false separation of freedom ofthought from economic liberty is the fatalflaw of modern liberalism. If libertarianscan resolve this question to the liberals'satisfaction, and show them conclusivelythat liberty is indivisible and that propertyrights are crucially important humanrights, then libertarians will have gone along way in leading the best of the liberalsout of the wilderness.Personally, I remain nonplussed byStone's own position on this matter. ForStone, more than few other living Americans,benefitted from this country's longheritage of economic liberty and privateownership of the tools of production. DoesStone seriously believe that he could havecreated and maintained the Weekly if some"public" authority had owned all presses,newsprint, and other assorted printing supplies?This tragic flaw aside, Stone is eminentlyworth reading, and, more particularly,worthy of our highest esteem and appreciation.I am looking forward to the publicationof his book on a subject that should beof central concern to us all.Coming soon inLibertarianReview• An interview withAustrian economistLudwig Lachmann• John Hospers onRose Wilder Lane• Murray Rothbar~'snew monthly column,"The Plumb Line"• George H. Smith onHerbert Spencer• Jeff Riggenbach onthe Jarvis-Ganntax initiativeMarch 1978

I MediaGeraldo and the prohibition agentsbyJeff RiggenbachGeraldo Rivera comes highly recommended.Ron Powers of the Chicago Sun­Times, the only TV critic ever to win thePulitzer Prize, calls him "a journalist ofconsiderable ability" who has earned his"renown for tough reporting". He's alsowon more than a hundred awards for his"excellence" and his "humanitarian services"as a reporter. And if you're still notconvinced, he'll tell you himself:"One of the reasons I dropped out ofshow business," he told Gallery magazinelast June, "is because no one was mentioninganymore that I am a lawyer or that I ama newsman with a hundred journalismawards. Suddenly they were talking aboutwhat a cute ass I've got, or my hair style".Geraldo's venture into show businesslasted from 1972, when he produced hisPeabody Award-winning documentary onthe conditions at the Willowbrook StateSchool for the Mentally Retarded in StatenIsland, New York, to 1975, when he movedfrom his local news job on WABC-TV inNew York to his present ABC Networknews position. During those three years,Geraldo spent much of his time emceeingbenefit rock concerts to raise money for thementally retarded. But for the past threeyears, he's been back at his chores as atough reporter, "smoldering with illcontainedoutrage," as Ron Powers puts it,"on behalf of the downtrodden commonman," exposing the evils of motorcyclegangs, venereal disease, seasonal farmwork, and, most recently, cocaine.Geraldo's five-part series on cocaine wasbroadcast one week in December as part ofthe ABC "Evening News" with BarbaraWalters (Harry Reasoner was on vacation).It got underway one wintry Monday evening,with Walters's declaration that "sevenmillion Americans have tried cocaineand one million now use it regularly".*"Yet," said Geraldo, who was now oncamera, walking the streets of Harlem, "cocaineis almost as dangerous as heroin, andcosts even morel"*Statements attributed in this article toBarbara Walters and Geraldo Rivera, includingthose enclosed in quotation marks,are reproduced from handwritten notes.Libertarian ReviewIn fact, Geraldo continued, cocaine wasbeing used more and more by junkies, whoneeded a substitute for the poor qualityheroin they were getting for their moneythese days. The Drug Enforcement Administrationhad so cut the inflow of heroin tothis country, you see, that the smugglersand pushers had to make what little theydid get through go a long way. So they hadGeraldo Riverato cut it practically to nothing, and selltheir junkies a white powder that wasabout 5 percent heroin and about 95 percentsomething else. Of course this enervatedproduct did next to nothing to slakethe heroin addict's insatiable craving fordope, and he was forced to turn to otherdrugs, notably cocaine, in his frenziedquest for relief and escape.Geraldo visited a couple of junkies whowere mumbling incoherently and shootingup coke~ He visited a party where coke wasbeing snorted through soda straws. Hevisited a discotheque where people weredancing energetically and snorting coke inrestrooms. He commented that most ofthese cocaine users believed the drug wasnot addictive like heroin. But how did theyexplain, he wondered, "the terribledesperation of the junkie's craving foranother shot of 'snow'?"To underscore this point, Geraldo talkedwith a young man who allowed as howhe'd do most nearly anything for cocaine,"though," he added after a second'sthought, "I doubt I'd kill for it." Next time,Geraldo promised, he'd show us where cocainecomes from.And he did. But before going on, let usdwell a few moments on what we learnedin part one of Geraldo's series. We learnedthat there are a million regular cocaineusers in America; and, by implication,since they received the lion's share of thetime devoted to the subject, that heroin addictsaccount for a significant portion ofthis million. In fact they do not. LesterGrinspoon and James B. Bakalar of theHarvard Medical School assessed theavailable evidence a little more than a yearago, and concluded that "the use of cocaineby opiate addicts is a very small corner ofthe contemporary scene anywhere in theworld."The studies cited by Grinspoon andBakalar would support the contention thatabout 20 percent of all junkies are alsoregular cocaine users. The D.E.A. claimsthere are about half-a-million junkies in theUnited States, which would seem to meanthat no more than about 100,000, or 10percent, of those one million regular cocaineusers could possibly be junkies.And those who are junkies are not usingcocaine as a substitute for heroin. RichardAshley, in his 1975 book, Cocaine: ItsHistory, Uses and Effects, flatly denies thatany such substitution is possible:Cocaine is a Central Nervous System stimulant,heroin a Central Nervous System depressant.They have opposite effects and one cannot be thesubstitute for the other. To belabor the point: ifcoke was a substitute for heroin, an addict couldstave off the pains of withdrawal with cocaine,as he can with methadone. But he can't.9

This latter point is confirmed by WilliamBurroughs, in his "Letter From a MasterAddict to Dangerous Drugs," publishedmore than twenty years ago in the BritishJournal of Addiction. Burroughs statesunequivocally that cocaine "produces astate of nervousness for which [heroin] isthe physiological answer," so that for anyjunkie whose heroin supply is adequate,"the use of cocaine . . . always leads tolarger and more frequent injections of[heroin]." Any attempt to substitute cocainefor heroin, then, would only intensifythe addict's craving for junk.And as for the junkie's "desperate cravingfor another shot of snow," Burroughswrites:The desire for cocaine can be intense. I havespent whole days walking from one drug store toanother to fill a cocaine prescription. You· maywant cocaine intensely, but you don't have anymetabolic need for it. If you can't get cocaine youeat, you go to sleep and forget it. I have talkedwith people who used cocaine for years, thenwere suddenly cut off from their s~pply. None ofthe experienced any withdrawal symptoms.This finding is, as far as I have been ableto discern, universal in the literature on cocaine.And I have been able to find onlyone book on the subject which speaks ofjunkies using cocaine as a substitute forheroin-Marc Olden's Cocaine (LancerBooks, 1973), which is admittedly basedalmost entirely on interviews with DrugEnforcement Administration agents.Why would the D.E.A. seek to associatecocaine with heroin in the public mind,even try to create the impression that' theyare interchangeable drugs? Well, asRichard Ashley has observed, in discussingthe federal government's misclassificationof cocaine as a "narcotic": "By calling cocainea narcotic the government anticocainepropagandists reaped the advantageof having all the drug-innocentcitizens associate these frightening storiesof narcotic addiction with cocaine as wellas with the opiates which the stories, infact, usually were about." Clearly, if the,Drug Enforcement Administration can get"the populace at large to identify cocainewith . . . drugs such as heroin and thereams of adverse publicity received bythese drugs," the Drug Enforcement Ad~ministration can also get funding from thepopulace at large to stamp out the cocainemenace. As Thomas M. Coffey observes inhis recent book, The Long Thirst: Prohibitionin America 1920-1933 (Norton, 1975),"the parallels between our current narcotics[sic] prohibitions and the alcohol prohibitionof the 1920s are too striking to ignore":. . . the agencies responsible for stopping thedrug traffic . . . like the liquor enforcement officersin the '20s, have big stakes in the continua-Hon of the narcotics prohibition. The honest officershave only their jobs to protect. The otherswould also lose great chunks of clandestine incomeif the system were changed.Of course, all this has implications forthe reporter, especially for the "tough"reporter. H.L. Mencken explored them,with characteristic directness, in the July1925 issue of The American Mercury:The average, even the aboveaverage broadcast journalist oftoday is less generally educatedand less informed about currentevents than the average newsmanof 50 years ago. Today, he readsalmost nothing but newspapers,newsmagazines, and bestsellers.Who, ordinarily, would believe a Prohibitionagent? Perhaps a Federal judge in his robes of office;I can think of no one else. Yet thenewspapers are filled every day with the dreadfulboasts and threats of such frauds; they are setbefore the people, not as lies, but as news. Whatis the purpose of such bilge? Its purpose, obviously,is to make it appear that the authors an"actually enforcing Prohibition-in other words,to make them secure in their jobs. Every newspapermanin America knows that Prohibition isnot being enforced-and yet it is rarely that anAmerican newspaper comes out in these dayswithout a gaudy story on its first page, rehearsingall the old lies under new and blackerheadlines.Today the headlines .are spoken, notprinted ("Biggest Cocaine Bust in U.S.History-Film at Eleven"), but the rest ofthe story is the same . . . or almost thesame. As I have observed before in thesepages, the average, even the above average,broadcast journalist of the 1970s is lessgenerally educated and less informed aboutcurrent events than the average newspapermanof fifty years ago. The average broadcastjournalist of today reads almostnothing, or nothing but newspapers, newsmagazinesand bestsellers. And he willnever read in any of these places that theheroin Prohibition isn't being enforcedeither: that despite the occasional sensationallypublicized bust, the drug remainsreadily available; that the evidence suggestsit is being used by more and moreAmericans with each passing year; that, infact, its users have grown more numerousin every year since the drug was first prohibited,setting their greatest growthrecords in precisely fnose years when themost money was poured into the "war ondrugs". The average broadcast journalist oftoday will never read anywhere that streetheroin has been only five to six percentpure for the past thirty years. And therefore,when the D.E.A. tells him it hasbrought the purity of street heroin down tofive percent, he will not know that he islistening to a con-a con desigend to getmore money out of those who, in the end,keep the D.E.A. in business: the taxpayers.The average broadcast journalist of todaywill never read anywhere that heroin andcocaine are not interchangeable or evensimilar drugs, and therefore, when theD.E.A. tells him they are, he won't besuspicious.I have to suppose that this tendency ofthe contemporary broadcast journalist tobe unlettered explains the inaccuracy ofGeraldo's first report on cocaine, and, forthat matter, of the other four as well. Ihave to suppose, for example, that Geraldohasn't ever read (even during the researchhe surely must have done for his nationallytelevised reports) Cocaine: A Drug and ItsSocial Evolution by Lester Grinspoon andJames B. Bakalar (Basic Books, 1976). Thisbook, as close to a definitive study of cocaineas has yet seen print, contains severalpages of revealing information on the attitudestoward cocaine which prevail south10March 1978

of the U.S. border-information whichmight have enabled Geraldo to place thefacts he brought out in his second report insome kind of perspective.Geraldo's second report was from SouthAmerica, where he visited an open airmarket in the Andes and saw bunches ofdried coca leaves being openly, legallytraded. From there he travelled to Lima andto Bogota, where he accompanied citypolice on a coke bust at the home of a majortrafficker-a man who (allegedly) refinedcocaine from coca leaves in his ownlab, then exported his product to the UnitedStates.Geraldo reported that coca-leaf chewingis legal in South America and is lookedupon by the people there as coffee drinkingis by the people of this country. Cocaine isillegal, however, and South Americanpolice have been intensifying their effortsto stop the manufacture and sale of thedrug, motivated by some monetary grantsand some diplomatic pressure from theUnited States. "But mostly," Geraldoreported ruefully, "they're catching youngAmericans, many of whom had hoped tofinance a trip south by bringing back anounce or two of coke. Instead they woundup in jail, in countries where the Bill ofRights doesn't apply." The major traffickers,meanwhile, have remained free,and have built such a business that Colombiaexported more dollars worth of cocainelast year than coffee.There are no factual errors here, mindyou-just a curious failure to see the patternbehind the facts (or to do the researchwhich would have cast that pattern intohigh relief, made it too obvious to ignore).Grinspoon and Bakalar quote an unidentifiedU.S. diplomat as saying of SouthAmerica: "These countries don't have adrug problem themselves. There's no mutualinterest to work with." They comment:What this means is not that South Americans donot use cocaine but that they do not regard it (orcannabis) with the horror that North Americandrug enforcement officials consider appropriate.It is hard for them to take the menace of cocaineseriously while the coca leaf serves as the ordinarydaily drug of millions in Peru andBolivia-even if they are poor and often despisedIndians. (It is the same with opiates in SoutheastAsia.) Cocaine itself has always been relativelyeasy to buy, too.Moreover,Most of the people who deal in cocaine, ... likeillicit alcohol refiners, use the drug they sell. Thegame of evading the cocaine laws is like the gameof evading income taxes commonly played inmany countries, or like the methods onceadopted in the United States in the face ofalcohol prohibition.Many South American government officialshave been unmasked as cocaine traf-Libertarian Reviewfickers themselves, Grinspoon and Bakalarwrite, and those who aren't in the businessare understandably reluctant to prosecutethose who are; as Geraldo's own figures indicate,cocaine is important to the economiesof the countries in which it's produced.Little wonder, then, that when thegringos come south with their grants andtheir demands for arrests, the SouthAmericans arrest not their own countrymen(who are, in their eyes, merely persecutedbusinessmen) but other gringos. Thisis not, needless to say, the version of thingsendorsed by the Drug Enforcement Administration.And by the time he'd reached theend of part two, with forty percent of hisseries behind him, Geraldo had cited asingle source for every fact he had referredto: the D.E.A.In part three, Geraldo talked with cokeusers about their bad experiences. Onestock broker said his habit had cost him$500 a week until he'd kicked it. A BeverlyHills High School student said he'd had tohave his stomach pumped after loading upon quaaludes, Tylenol and coke.In part four, Geraldo talked perfunctorilywith the editor of the drug abuser'smagazine, High Times, and theMassachusetts judge who threw out cocainepossession charges against a Bostonman last year on the grounds that the lawsprohibiting cocaine possession were unconstitutional.The editor snorted somecoke on camera and said he thought it wasa good high and harmless in moderation.The judge said coke was less harmful thantobacco and alcohol, and laws forbiddingits possession for personal use thereforeconstituted an unreasonable invasion ofprivacy. Then Geraldo talked, a little morelengthily, with the D.E.A.And finally, in part five, Geraldo visitedtwo laboratories where governmentsponsoredstudies. of cocaine were beingcarried out. He revealed that scientists atone of the labs had given monkeys thewherewithal to supply themselves with cocaineat will. And, lo!, the monkeys likedcoke so much they supplied themselves incessantly,like people who chain-smokecigarettes. Geraldo looked grave as herevealed this, and I wondered if maybe itwas because he was running out of timeand hadn't mentioned whether the constantingestion of cocaine was harming themonkeys in any way. But then BarbaraWalters was back on camera with a warningthat cocaine was a menace not only tomonkeys, but also to humans."The federal government has told ABCNews," she intoned breathlessly in that inimitablevoice of hers, her every vowelgrating like a rusty hinge, "that 1500 cocaineusers have been injured in the pastyear after using cocaine. And there havebeen nine deaths in the past year in incidentsdirectly related to cocaine use."And with a brief reminder that cocainepossession was a serious crime, she was intothe next story of the evening. Geraldo'scocaine series was over!But what had it revealed? That the DrugEnforcement Administration has done itsjob so well where heroin is concerned thatthe junkies and pushers have turned to cocaineand created a brand new problem?That South American police just happen,by sheer bad luck, to apprehend more pennyante North American smugglers thanlarge scale South American smugglers?That black market drugs are expensive?That taking three or four different drugs inlarge doses simultaneously may lead to thestomach pump? That monkeys like cocaine?Did Geraldo think those accident anddeath figures proved cocaine is dangerous?Nearly 1500 people are injured every yearafter using bicycles. And a great manymore than nine are killed in incidentsdirectly related to bicycle use.Why did Geraldo turn to one authorityand one authority only-the governmentand its hirelings-for all his "facts"? Whydid he give the only pro-cocaine speakerson the program significantly less time to explainthemselves than his anti-cocainespeakers?Why did ABC send Geraldo to SouthAmerica and Washington and Boston,when they could have produced exactly thesame program in New York by hiring ascript written arOUNd D.E.A. propagandaleaflets and hiring a few actors to play theparts of the South Americans? It wouldhave been equally factual in the end.I can only suppose Geraldo did it theway he did it because he's too uninformedon the subject of drugs to doubt the Prohibitionagent's veracity. Otherwise I maybe forced to admit that George BernardShaw was right about journalists when hesaid that the archetypal reporter isa cheerful, affable young man who is disabled forordinary business pursuits by a congenital erroneousnesswhich renders him incapable ofdescribing accurately anything he sees, orunderstanding or reporting accurately anythinghe hears. As the only employment in which thesedefects do not matter is journalism... , he hasperforce become a journalist. ...Perhaps it's true. GBS was right about somany things.Jeff Riggenbach teaches broadcast journalismat Pierce College in Los Angeles,and practices it, as a writer and anchorman,at KFWB all-news radio in that city.He writes regularly for Libertarian Review.11

I Liberty's HeritageTariffs and Reciprocityby Frederic BastiatIntroductionIn this age of protectionism and nationalism,the whole rich legacy of classicalliberalism desperately needs to be rediscovered.With worldwide protectionism onthe rise, however, no one is more relevanttoday than Frederic Bastiat, the greatFrench pamphleteer, economist, and politician.Born in Bayonne on June 29, 1801,Bastiat rose to prominence carrying thebanner of free trade, pouring out over theyears a series of brilliant pamphlets killingstatist and protectionist fallacies withcaustic wit and naked logic.As Rose Wilder Lane has pointed out,"His labors' were prodigious. He organizedthe first French Free Trade association, andacted as secretary of its central committeeFrederic Bastiat12in Paris; he organized its branch societies;he interviewed politicians, collected funds,edited a weekly journal, contributed tofour other journals, addressed meetings inParis and throughout France, deliveredcourses of lectures on the principles' ofpolitical economy to students in the collegesof law. He was dying of tuberculosis."Bastiat died in Rome on December 24,1850."Tariffs and Reciprocity" is taken fromChapter Ten of the first edition of FredericBastiat's Economic Sophisms, translatedfrom the French by Patrick James Stirling.These brilliant commentaries first appearedas a series of articles that Bastiat contributedto the Journal des Economistes in1844, and attracted attention throughoutEurope.There is no more fitting testament to thegenius of this man than that offered byLane:"Frederic Bastiat is one of the leaders ofthe revolution whose work and fame, likeAristotle's, belong to the ages. Aristotle,too, was a pioneer in an unexplored continentof human knowledge; he did littlemore than blaze two trees where theWilderness Road began; he showed theway to a new world that he did not reach.What modern science owes to Aristotle, afree world will someday owe to Bastiat."We have just seen that whatever increasesthe expense of conveying commoditiesfrom one country to another-in otherwords, whatever renders transport moreonerous-acts in the same way as a protectiveduty; or if you prefer to put it inanother shape, that a protective duty actsin the same way as more onerous transport.A tariff, then, may be regarded in thesame light as a marsh, a rut, an obstruction,a steep declivity-in a word, it is anobstacle, the effect of which is to augmentthe difference between the price which theproducer of a commodity receives and theprice which the consumer pays for it. In thesame way, it is undoubtedly true that marshesand quagmires are to be regarded inthe same light as protective tariffs.There are people (few in number, it istrue, but there are such people) who beginto understand that obstacles are not lessobstacles because they are artificial, andthat our mercantile prospects have more togain from liberty than from protection, andexactly for the same reason which makes acanal more favorable to traffic than asteep, roundabout, and inconvenient road.But they maintain that this liberty mustbe reciprocal. If we remove the barriers wehave erected against the admission ofSpanish goods, for example, Spain mustremove the barriers she has erected againstthe admission of ours. They are, therefore,the advocates of commercial treaties, onthe basis of exact reciprocity, concessionfor concession; let us make the sacrifice ofbuying, say they, to obtain the advantageof selling.People who reason in this way, I amsorry to say, are, whether they know it ornot, protectionists in principle; only, theyare a little more inconsistent than pure protectionists,as the latter are more inconsistentthan absolute prohibitionists.The following apologue will demonstratethis:Stulta and PueraThere were, no matter where, two townscalled Stulta and Puera. They completed atgreat cost a highway from the one town tothe other. When this was done, Stulta saidto herself: "See how Puera inundates uswith her products; we must see to it." Inconsequence, they created and paid a bodyof obstructives, so called because theirbusiness was to place obstacles in the wayof traffic coming from Puera. Soon afterwardsPuera did the same.At the end of some centuries, knowledgehaving in the interim made great progress,the common sense of Puera enabled her tosee that such reciprocal obstacles couldonly be reciprocally hurtful. She thereforesent a diplomat to Stulta, who, laying asideofficial phraseology, spoke to this effect:"We have made a highway, and now wethrow obstacles in the way of using it. Thisis absurd. It would have been better to haveleft things as they were. We should not, inthat case, have had to pay for making theroad in the first place, nor afterwards haveincurred the expense of maintainingobstructives. In the name of Puera, I cometo propose to you, not to give up opposingeach other all at once-that would be to actupon a principle, and we despise principlesas much as you do~but to lessen somewhatthe present obstacles, taking care toestimate equitably the respective sacrificesMarch 1978

we make for this purpose." So spoke thediplomatist. Stulta asked for time to considerthe proposal, and proceeded to consult,in succession, her manufacturers andagriculturists. At length, after the lapse ofsome years, she declared that the negotiationswere broken off.On receiving this intimation, the inhabitantsof Puera held a meeting. An oldgentleman (they always suspected he hadbeen secretly bought by Stulta) rose andsaid: The obstacles created by Stulta injureour sales, which is a misfortune. Thosewhich we have ourselves created injure ourpurchases, which is another misfortune.With reference to the first, we arepowerless; but the second rests withourselves. Let us, at least, get quit of one,since we cannot rid ourselves of both evils.Let us suppress our obstructives without requiringStulta to do the same. Some day,no doubt, she will come to know her owninterests better.A second counsellor, a practical, matterof-factman, guiltless of any acquaintancewith principles, and brought up in the waysof his forefathers, replied: "Don't listen tothat Utopian dreamer, that theorist, thatinnovator, that economist, that Stultomaniac.We shall all be undone if the stoppagesof the road are not equalized,weighed, and balanced between Stult.a andPuera. There would be greater difficulty ingoing than in coming, in exporting than inimporting. We should find ourselves in thesame condition of inferiority relatively toStulta as Havre, Nantes, Bordeaux, Lisbon,London, Hamburg, and New Orleans arewith relation to the towns situated at thesources of the Seine, the Loire, theGaronne, the Tagus, the Thames, the Elbe,and the Mississippi, for it is more difficultfor a ship to ascend than to descend a river.(A Voice: Towns at the mouths of riversprosper more than towns at their source.)This is impossible. (Same Voice: But it isso.) Well, if it be so, they have prosperedcontrary to rules." Reasoning so conclusiveconvinced the assembly, and the oratorfollowed up his victory by talking largelyof national independence, national honor,national dignity, national labor, inundationof products, tributes, murderous competiton.In short, he carried the vote infavour of the maintenance of obstacles;and if you are at all curious on the subject,I can point out to you countries where youwill see with your own eyes road-makersand obstructives working together on themost friendly terms possible, under theorders of the same legislative assembly,and at the expense of the same taxpayers,the one set endeavoring to clear the road,the other set doing their utmost to render itimpassable.Libertarian ReviewNowAvaIlable:The Roots of CapitalismBy John ChamberlainA provocative look at the intellectual forces and practical accomplishmentsthat have created American capitalism. IIA vastly persuasive case forcapitalist theory and practice" -Barron's. Hardcover $9.00, Paperback $3.00.The Wisdom of Adam SmithAdam Smith may have been the first great economist, but he was nodismal scientist. He was instead a man of great philosophical and historicallearning, and his literary style was widely admired. The Wisdom of AdamSmith brings together his most incisive and eloquent observations on subjectsranging from political and economic history to morals, philosophy, art,education, war and the American colonies. Compiled by British scriptwriterand playwright John Haggarty, edited and with an introduction by BenjaminA. Rogge. Hardcover $7.95, Paperback $1.95.Essays On IndividualityEdited by Felix MorleyTwelve distinguished writers and educators examine the place of theindividual in contemporary society. The contributors are John Dos Passos,Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Milton Friedman, Friedrich A. Hayek, Joseph WoodKrutch, James C. Malin, William M. McGovern, Felix Morley, HelmutSchoeck, Richard M. Weaver, Roger J. Williams and Conway Zirkle.Foreword by Arthur Kemp. Hardcover $8.00.LlbertyJW~Uber~lasslCSWe pay postage on prepaid orders.To order these books, or for a copyof our catalog, write:LibertyPress/LibertyClassics7440 North Shadeland, Dept. F6Indianapolis, Indiana 4625013

I The MoveDlent• Campaign in CaliforniaA serious libertarian challenge to thepolitical establishment may be under wayin California, where Libertarian Party candidateEd Clark is actively campaigning forgovernor. Clark, a prominent Los Angeleslawyer and a long-time libertarian activist,is emphasizing the issues of tax cuts (he iscampaigning hard for the Jarvis tax limitationinitiative, which will slash propertytaxes by 60 percent), an end to governmentmonopoly education, and legalization ofvictimless crimes. Clark recently spokebefore 450 people in Sacramento and 350people at Stanford and has made a numberof media appearances, most recently theJim Eason Show in Northern California. Hehas campaigned with libertarian psychiatristThomas Szasz during a recentSzasz speaking tour of the state sponsoredby the Libertarian Party.The campaign will require over 100,000signatures to qualify for ballot status, agoal which Clark believes he can reach. Interestedpersons may wish to contact thecampaign at 544 Vine Street, #1, Glendale,CA 91204. Clark's call for an immediatedollar-for-dollar system of tax credits forprivate education is already gaining attentionin a state burdened with inefficient,dangerous, prison-like public schoolswhich often serve as breeding grounds forcrime. Clark is also campaigning in the religiousand Spanish-speaking communities,emphasizing educational diver6ity in a freemarket for those parents desiring a religiousor bilingual education for theirchildren.A direct-mail campaign will begin inApril and will initially reach over 20,000California libertarians as well as othergroups open to libertarian appeals. Fullpage ads in state editions of nationalmagazines are being contemplated in conjunctionwith the national Libertarian Party.Special ~ brochures for small businessman,stildents, taxpayers, and othergroups are being prepared by campaignstaffers. Clark, who is campaigning with19 other California LP candidates, hopes togain over 175,000 votes, the margin bywhich present Governor Jerry Browndefeated Republican Houston Flournoy in1974, thereby making the LP the balance ofpower in California.The California LP's recent state conven-14tion was disorganized and unfruitful, andmany LP leaders hope libertarians inCalifornia will coalesce around an effectiveand hard-hitting Clark for governor campaign.The Clark campaign intends to gobeyond simple media exposure for libertarianideas and have a real impact onCalifornia politics. If Clark picks up asizable following at the polls, 150,000 ormore, major candidates and politicalfigures will have to take libertarian· issuesand ideas seriously. The popularity of theJarvis tax limitation proposal, whichgathered well over one million signatures inattaining ballot status, promises a constituencyfor political figures who will addressthe issue of government intrusion andcoercion. Ed Clark hopes to be the one totake advantage of that sentiment.• Libertarian Review filmLibertarian Review recently released thefirst professionally produced film about thelibertarian movement. For A New Liberty:The Libertarian Movement in America is afull-color, 30-minute film documenting therecent growth of the libertarian movement.Directed by John Doswell, director of TheIncredible Bread Machine, For A NewLiberty promises to be one of the most effectivetools available to libertarian groupsand activists. This fast-paced movie featuressuch prominent figures as SenatorWilliam Proxmire, Eugene McCarthy, columnistJack Kilpatrick, and author JohnMarks discussing the importance of thelibertarian movement and their view of itsfuture. Also featured are such prominentlibertarians as Murray N. Rothbard, DomArmentano, Roger L. MacBride, F.A.Hayek, Roy Childs, Nathaniel Branden,and Bill Evers.This combination of libertarian spokesmenand prominent political figures andsocial commentators will go a long waytoward establishing the legitimacy of thelibertarian movement as a serious competitorin the modern political spectrum.For A New Liberty was unveiled at apublic showing in San Francisco before alarge audience. of libertarians and guests.The response was enthusiastic and anumber of copies were purchased at theshowing.The film discusses movement organizationssuch as the Center for LibertarianStudies, the Libertarian Party, the NationalTaxpayer's Union, the Association ofLibertarian Feminists, Libertarian Review,and more. It is useful for showing to civicgroups, political clubs, high schools, colleges,or just friends and neighbors. Copiesof the film may be purchased for $175 andare available for rental at $30 per week plusround-trip shipping costs. Orders may besent to: Libertarian Review, Inc., 1620Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA94111.• The only trendWe've always proclaimed that libertarianismis the movement of the future.But such claims. are always looked ataskance by outsiders until one of their ownkind sits up and takes notice. Well, theliberal left seems to be opening its eyes, ifan item in the February 3 Baron Report, aWashington insiders' newsletter, is any indication.The Baron Report is produced by AlanBaron, who is also Washington correspondentfor· the new, left-liberal political affairsjournal, Politicks and Other HumanInterests. This recent entry into a field thatis quite hazardous financially is publishedby Rockefeller son-in-law Tom Morgan. Inan item titled "Swing to the right?", Baronquestions whether the electorate is reallydisplaying a trend toward conservatism.He explains that we are dealing with a matterof definition, because "positions whichwere viewed as liberal a few years ago areconsidered moderate or even conservativenow." Thus, while fewer voters callthemselves liberal, fully two-thirds of theincreasing body of self-proclaimed conservativesfavor governmental action inemployment, job safety, and health care,and 40 percent favor decriminalizing marijuana.After making these observations, Baronpoints out that if there is any evident trendin opinion, "it's toward libertarianism-thephilosophy that argues against governmentintervention and for personal rights. Con...;servatives welcome that trend when it indicatespublic skepticism 0ver federal programs;liberals welcome it when it showsgrowing acceptance of individual rights insuch areas as drugs, sexual behavior, etc.,and increasing reticence of the public tosupport foreign intervention."• A progressive viewIn the same vein as Alan Baron's commentson libertarianism is a rather favorablereport on the movement in the Januaryissue of The Progressive, that 70-year-oldbulwark of the populist left. In the article,free-lance journalist Carol Polsgrove notesthat while "most Americans probably stillMarch 1978

figure that a libertarian is a cross between alibertine and a librarian" (will someoneplease come up with a new joke?), "inmany ways, that is too bad. There is surelya place in this country for a party of principle,if only to remind Americans that theyalready have some sound constitutionalprinciples which are frequently violated.There is a place for a party that says no lawis the best law, if only to encourage closerscrutiny of the avalanche of laws that tumbledown each year upon us. And there is aplace for a party which raises a radicalchallenge so essentially tolerant."Of course, one can't expect a sudden,mass conversion to libertarianism by thephilosophical descendants of RobertLaFollette. In the midst of her descriptionof libertarian philosophy, Polsgrove worriesabout the ability of the free market tosupport us all. "Libertarians, like JimmyCarter" (what a distasteful comparison!),she declares, "believe in the virtue of work;they prophesy doom for a nation whosecitizens are not productive." Thus, she explainsto the uninitiated, libertariansLet HENRY HAZLITT show you how to"berate" nonproductive welfare recipientsand bureaucrats. "Yet both the bureaucracyand the welfare rolls may havegrown simply because there is not enough'productive' work to go around. . . . Whileit is possible that in a free-market economyalmost everyone might be able to find someway to earn an adequate income, it isequally possible that the market itselfmight prove as coercive as any governmentcould be. A choice between taking a job at$1 an hour or not eating is scarcely achoice."Aside from her obvious need of a fewlessons in Austrian economics, Polsgrovealso needs to read her own copy a bit moreclosely, because there is a lot she has tolearn just from what she herself has said.The most obvious item is her equatingbureaucrats and welfare recipients-quiteaccurately, of course. Most bureaucratic"jobs" are just so much make-work. Theproblem is that these titled welfare· recipientsalso "make work"-and very unproductivework it is, indeed-for the restof us. as they intrude into everyone else'saffairs for the benefit of no one but themselves.Polsgrove simply fails to proceed tothe next step in the logical chain and seethat bureaucrats are not only nonproductive,but reduce the productivity, privacyand liberty of the rest of us.As for the work ethic, someone forgot totell Polsgrove that we are clearly in favorof letting anyone who wants to lie aroundon the lawn (their own lawn, that is) allday, if that's what they want to do. Theirsurvival is their own responsibility. Unlikethe welfare state, libertarians put no stigmaon not working; we merely place responsibilitywhere it belongs: on the individual.The most serious flaw, of course, isPolsgrove's suggestion that there "is notenough 'productive' work to go around."What else can be expected when the state soardently rewards nonproduction whilepenalizing productivity?Will some kind soul please send Ms.Polsgrove a few volumes of Mises, Hayek,Rothbard, or whatever other economiststhey favor? We clearly have a sizableeducational task before us.Master theprinciplesof successfulthinking.Did you ever realize how much depends on yourability to think? Your career. Your psychologicalhealth. Your political views. Your personal relationships.Even your life itself.Contrary to popular belief. successful thinkingis not an automatic process. It is a skill that mustbe learned. And most of us have never beentaught how to think properly and productively!But now, there's a solution: Henry Hazlitt'sThinking as a Science. In this unusual cassettetape, Hazlitt shows you how to sharpen yourreasoning powers and use your mind to its fullestcapacity.Based upon his book of the same name (now out of print), Thinking as aScience outlines techniques you can use to think correctly and constructively,organize your thought processes, improve your problemsolvingabilities, and avoid errors and fallacies.Here are some of the topics covered in this stimulating 89-minutepresentation:• What is meant by "thinking as a science"?• The role of purpose in thinking.Constructive methods in thinking: the deductive method, the comparativemethod, the historical method, empirical and experimental observation.• The importance of classification.The hazards of analogies-and how to avoid them.• The role of association in thinking.• Prejudice as an obstacle to clear thinking-and how to prevent it.How to get the most out of your reading,• How to capture and preserve your thoughts in your writing.Henry Hazlitt is known throughout the world as a distinguished economist,journalist and author. He has edited and written for such publications,as The Nation, The New York Times and Newsweek. Among hismany books are Economics in One Lesson, What You Should Know AboutInflation and The Foundations of Morality. The scope of his publishedwritings (economics, politics, ethics, philosophy, literary criticism) is anindication of his own remarkably diverse thinking abilities.Thinking as a Science comes to you with an unconditional money-backguarantee. Keep the tape for three weeks. Then, if it hasn't helped improveyour thinking powers exactly as described above, return it andwe'll send you a full and prompt refund.Nothing in your life is more important than the ability to think successfully.Whether you're a student or executive, homemaker or scientist, youcan't afford not to learn how to use your mind to its highest potential.Clip and mail the coupon today.1';~~~;~r;~7;~}~~k~~~;·51£jed. I may return the recordmg withm three weeks and Ireceive a full refund. 1113I ~~I' AddressICity State Zip II Enclosed is my check or money order for $14.95[lOr. charge my:I I11 VISA fBankAmericard) [l Master Charge rl American ExpressI Card numberIExpiration date ,I Signature iIlUDla.~aAUn« ~~..................•I 901 N. WASHINGTON ST. / ALEXANDRIA. VA 22314 ILibertarian Review15

LYou, too, can subscribe toAlllerica's lllOSt outspokennew political affairs•lllagazineYes, send me the next year ofINQUIRY for $17.50,more than 40(0) off the regularnewsstand price.o Enclosed is my check for $17.50.Because I'm saving you the billing cost,add two extra issues to my subscriptionat no extra chargeD Bill meMail to: INQUIRYBox 19270 • Washington, D.C. 20036NameAddressCity State: ----L.. 7 ip ___Jflct now and get the next year ofINQUIRYatmore than 40%offYou will read articlesby these important writers:NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN, ROSE STYRON,MURRAY ROTHBARD, PETER SCHRAG,NAT HENTOFF, DAVID WISE,WILLIAM SHAWCROSS, ROBERT NOZICK,THOMAS SZASZ, PENNY LERNOUX, IVAN ILLICH,KARL HESS, EUGENE MCCARTHY; TAD SZULC,NOAM CHOMSKY, ART HOPPE,ROBERT SHERRILL, and many more.The publishers ofINQUIRY offer you a dynamic newmagazine, an insightful alternative that helps you probethe American and international political scene. INQUIRYis the maverick publication that helps you survive theFBI, AT&T, TRW, CIA, IRS, and all the otheralphabetical exercises in bureaucracy and bigbrotherhood ... alerts you to the march of thecorporate state and its intrusions into your life ...informs you about what lies at the core offoreign policyblunders, about U.S. intervention in the affairs ofothercountries, about threats to human rights under regimesrepresenting every part of the ideological spectrum.So as the volume ofgovernment invasions of yourprivacy grows ... as this nation continues to impose itspolitical and economic institutions on the rest of theworld ... as the power seekers continue to deprive youof more and more tax money ... as the suppression ofindividuals' rights continues to mount throughout theworld . . . as we get closer to the world of 1984 . . .INQUIRY'S first-rate investigative reporting will not onlyexpose what is happening in government and politicshere and abroad, but more importantly, will uncoverwhat lies at the heart of the problems and how thoseproblems might be alleviated and overcome. Theobjective ofits publishers and editors is to bring you amagazine offact and opinion that will make a differencein American politics.Reduced Introductory OfferAct now and get the next year ofINQUIRY at a savingof more than 40%. Instead of the newsstand price of$30, you pay only $17.50 for a full year ofINQUIRY, 24biweekly issues. Ifyou enclose your check and save usthe billing cost, we'll add two extra issues to yoursubscription for no additional charge.

The Myth ofPsychotherapyItis widely believed today that just as some diseasesand patients are, and ought to be, treated by meansof chemotherapy or radiation therapy, others are,and ought to be, treated by means of psychotherapy.Our language, the mirror of our mind,reflects this equation of the medical and the mental. Fearsand foibles are "psychiatric symptoms"; persons exhibitingthese and countless other manifestations of "psychiatricdiseases" are "psychiatric patients"; and the interventionssought by or imposed on them are "psychiatric treatments"among which "psychotherapies" occupy a prominent rank.In several previous books, I have argued that this entiresystem of interlocking concepts, beliefs, and practices is incorrectand immoral. In The Myth of Mental Illness Ishowed why the concept of mental illness is erroneous andmisleading; in Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry, why many ofthe legal uses to which psychiatric ideas and interventionsare put are immoral and inimical to the ideas of individualfreedom and responsibility; in The Manufacture of Madness,why the moral beliefs and social practices based on theconcept of mental illness constitute an ideology of intolerance,with belief in mental illness and the persecution ofmental patients having replaced belief in witchcraft and thepersecution of witches. In the present work, I extend thiscritical perspective to the principles and practices of mentalhealing, in an effort to show that psychotherapeutic interventionsare not medical but moral in character and are,therefore, not literal but metaphorical treatments.There are three fundamental reasons for holding thatpsychotherapies are metaphorical treatments. First, if theconditions psychotherapists seek to cure are not diseases,then the procedures they use are not genuine treatments.Second, if such procedures are imposed on persons againsttheir will, then they are tortures rather than treatments.And third, if the psychotherapeutic procedures consist ofnothing but listening and talking, then they constitute atype of conversation which can be therapeutic only in ametaphorical sense.In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when peoplespoke of the "cure of souls," everyone knew that the diseasesLibertarian Reviewby Thomas SzaszDr. Thomas Szaszsuch cures were supposed to heal were spiritual, that thetherapists were clerical, and that the cures were metaphorical.Whereas today- with the soul securely displacedby the mind and the mind securely subsumed as a functionof the brain-people speak of the "cure of minds," andeveryone knows that the diseases psychiatrists treat arebasically similar to ordinary medical diseases, that thetherapists who administer such treatment are physicians,and that the cures are the results of literal treatments.This is neither the first nor most likely the last time inhistory that people have mistaken the metaphorical meaningof a word for its literal meaning and have then used the17

literalized metaphor for their own personal and politicalpurposes. In this book I shall try to show how coercion andconversation became analogized to medical treatment. Theresults are now all around us: dance therapy and sextherapy, art therapy and aversion therapy, behavior therapyand reality therapy, individual psychotherapy and grouppsychotherapy. Virtually anything anyone might do in thecompany of another person may now be defined as psychotherapeutic.If the definer has the proper credentials, and ifhis audience is sufficiently gullible, any such act will bepublicly accepted and accredited as a form of psychotherapy.ental illness and mental treatment aresymmetrical and indeed symbiotic ideas.The extension of somatic therapy intopsychotherapy and the metaphorization ofpersonal influence as psychotherapeuticcoincide with the extension of pathology intopsychopathology and themetaphorization of personal problemsas mental diseases. Since the Freudian revolution, andespecially since the Second World War, the secret formulahas been this: If you want to debase what a person is doing,call his act psychopathological and call him mentally ill; ifyou want to exalt what a person is doing, call his act psychotherapeuticand call him a mental healer. Examples of thissort ofspeaking and writing abound.It used to be that the forcible abduction of one person byanother constituted kidnapping. The captor's efforts tochange the moral beliefs of his captive constituted coercedreligious conversion. Now these acts are called "deprogramming"and "reality therapy.""Moonies' parents given custody; 'Deprogramming' sessionsbegin today," reads the headline of a typical recentnewspaper story. From an Associated Press dispatch, welearn that "five young followers of the Rev. Sun MyungMoon today begin 'deprogramming' sessions their parentshope will change their lives. 'This is very scary,' said JohnHovard, 23, of Danville, California, after a court decisionThursday returned him and four others to the custody oftheir parents for 30 days. 'This is like the mental institutionsthey put dissidents in in Russia.' ... Wayne Howard, anattorney for the parents, told reporters that 'realitytherapy' -procedures commonly called deprogramming­'will begin immediately.'"Although an appeals court stayed the judicial order for"deprogramming," it upheld the order placing the"children" in their parents' custody. "'This is a case aboutthe very essence of life- mother, father, and children,' saidJudge Vavuris in his decision. 'There is nothing closer in oursociety than the family. A child is a child, even though theparent might be 90. and the child 60.'" Judge Vavuris wasmistaken in asserting that there is, in our society, nothing"closer" (presumably meaning "more important") than thefamily: in modern American society psychiatry is even moreimportant, just as in medieval European society Christianitywas even more important. These, after all, are the institutionsthat legitimize the family and thus support society.Of course, before there was deprogramming or realitytherapy, there was incarceration in the good old-fashionedinsane asylum. In the recent best seller Haywire, BrookeHayward describes how that method of psychiatric treatmentwas used by her father and by the famed MenningerClinic on her brother Bill. It is an episode that provedstrangely unsettling to several reviewers of her book. JohnLeonard, for example, is dismayed that "[Leland]Hayward's [an important theatrical agent and producer]idea of being a father was to send his son to a mental institutionin Topeka, Kansas, when 16-year-old Bill wanted toquit school." Peter Prescott writes even more indignantlyindeed,libelously, were it not true- that "Bill, the youngest[child], angered his father, who had him thrown into theMenninger psychiatric clinic for two years. Sane when heentered, he quickly deteriorated." For decades, the MenningerClinic has been looked upon as the psychiatricequivalent of the Mayo Clinic, a veritable Lourdes forThomas Szasz, professor of psychz'atry at the UpstateMedz'cal Center at Syracuse, New York, zs the author ofnumerous books, z'ncludz'ng Ceremonial Chemistry, TheMyth of Mental Illness, The Manufacture of Madness, andKarl Kraus and the Soul Doctors. He zs acknowledged to bethe leadz'ng z'ntellectual figure-not only z'n the Unz'tedStates, but throughout the Western world-in the campaignagainst z'nvoluntary mental commitment, psychiatrz'c abuse,and the Therapeutic State. Thzs selectz'on from hzs latestbook, The Myth of Psychotherapy, zs reprz'nted by permzssz'onof Dr. Szasz and Doubleday/Anchor Press. Copyrz'ght© 1978 by Thomas Szasz.18March 1978

lunatics. Nevertheless, in the context of their book reviews,these noted commentators allow themselves, and theirreaders, a momentary glimpse behind the psychotherapeuticrhetoric. They do not say, as Leland Hayward probablywould have said, that Bill Hayward was confined in a psychiatrichospital because he was mentally ill; nor do theysay, as the mad-doctors at the Menninger Clinic probablywould have said, that the psychiatrists accepted Bill as a patientbecause he needed mental treatment. (After all,Hayward could not have "thrown" his son into a mentalhospital if the psychiatrists had not agreed that he was a fitsubject for psychotherapy.) The point, of course, is thatwhen a person views the proceedings approvingly, he callsimprisonment in institutions such as the Menninger Clinic"psychotherapeutic."Not only is confinement in a mental hospital therapeutic'but so is temporary leave from it. In 1976, New YorkState Department of Health Regulation #76-128 redefined"trial visits" as "therapeutic leaves." If being paroled from amental hospital is a form of treatment, then of courseMedicaid and insurance companies will pay for it. Thejustification for this piece of psychiatric legerdemainwas articulated by an apologist for the AmericanPsychiatric Association as follows: "Therapeutic leaves of increasinglength as well as overnight leaves must be introducedas early as possible into the treatment plan. Theseleaves must be professionally monitored, regulated, andmodified as clinical conditions require.... One has to concludethat not only are therapeutic leaves therapeutic, butthat they are crucial to any rational treatment plan, andfrom a practical point of view they must be reimbursable."The Hospital Association of New York State has endorsedthis view and has advised area hospitals that "day passeswould be reimbursed if they were a part of a therapeuticplan and fully documented." Moreoever, only so-calledacute patients are limited to day passes; chronic patientscan, apparently, have unlimited passes and their nonhospitalizationmay still be regarded as treatment and reimbursedby Medicaid. "Passes of greater than 24 hours durationwere not possible under the present federal guidelines,"according to the association, "except for chronic(hospitalization for more than 60 days) patients." Thetherapeutic possibilities of psychiatric semantics are clearlyboundless.A more amusing recent example of psychotherapy is theuse of profanity. Traditionally, foul language has beenregarded as a sign of poor manners. Since the psychiatricenlightenment, it is no doubt also a symptom of the passiveaggressivepersonality, and perhaps of other as yet undiscoveredand unnamed mental maladies. During thedeclining days of the Nixon presidency, it was elevated tothe ranks of psychotherapy-by, of all people, aJesuit priest!On May 9, 1974, the New York Times reported that Dr.John McLaughlin, a Jesuit priest who was a special assistantto President Nixon, held a news conference in which hedefended the president against growing charges that the"Watergate transcripts portrayed 'deplorable, disgusting,shabby, immoral performances' by the President and hisaides." Referring specifically to the "liberal use of profanity"in the Watergate transcripts, Father McLaughlin declaredLibertarian Reviewthat "that language had 'no meaning, no moral meaning,'but served as a 'form of emotional drainage. This form oftherapy is not only understandable,' Father McLaughlinsaid, 'but, I think, if looked at closely, good, valid, sound.' "The most dramatic-and, at the same time, historicallythe most transparent- examples of how the language ofpsychopathology and psychotherapy is used to vilify andglorify various human acts lie in the area of sexual behavior.Three examples will suffice.Throughout the nineteenth century masturbation wasregarded as a cause and symptom of insanity. Today, it is apsychotherapeutic technique used by sex therapists. For example,Helen Kaplan emphasizes that even though "a patientcan avoid talking about masturbation guilt in psychotherapy,she must come to terms with this issue if, in sextherapy, she is instructed to experiment with selfstimulation.""Sexual tasks" play an important role inKaplan's therapeutic armamentarium. For retarded ejaculationshe prescribes the following treatment: "The patientis instructed to ejaculate in situations which in the past hadevoked progressively more intense anxiety. Initially, he maymasturbate to orgasm in the presence of his partner. Thenshe may bring him to orgasm manually." In a similar vein,Jack Annon asserts that "masturbation may be therapeuticallyhelpful in treating a wide variety of sexual problemsand, therefore, it is important for the clinician to becomeknowledgeable and comfortable in the area if he or shewishes to take advantage of such a treatment modality." It isindeed unfortunate that masturbation is a tax-deductibleactivity only if it is prescribed by a physician.19

For decades, nudism was considered a form of exhibitionismand voyeurism-that is, a perversion and hence a mentalillness. Today, it is an accepted form of medical treatment.In reply to an inquiry from a reader, an editorial notein the authoritative journal, Modern Medz'cz'ne, explainsthat "according'to the Internal Revenue Service, such [z'. e.,nude] therapy is a deductible medical expense if the patientis referred to the group by his physician and a written statementto that effect by the physician accompanies the patient'stax return."One of the oldest tactics in.the battle between the sexesmust surely be the refusal of women to gratify the sexual .desires of men. With the dawn of psychiatric enlightenmentthis behavior too has been attributed to mental illnesses,such as hysteria and frigidity; today, however, it is alsoenlisted in the struggle against mental illness, specifically asa cure of alcoholism. An item in Parade magazine beginswith the following question: "How does a wife get a husbandto stop drinking?" In Sydney, Australia, we learn, somewives do it by "withholding sex from their husbands." Lestthe reader unscientifically conclude that these women dothis because they do not like, or are angry with, theirhusbands, we learn that the wives' conduct is in fact a formof psychotherapy: "It's all part of a program directed byProfessor S. H. Lovibond, a psychologist at the University ofNew South Wales. 'We don't tell the wives,' explains ProfessorLovibond, 'that withholding sex is the only aversiontechnique, but each is left to devise her own method. Quitea few have devised sex withholding to help an alcoholicallyaddicted husband conquer his weakness.'" Professor Lovibond'suse of language is revealing: he calls alcoholism aweakness, and sex withholding an aversion technique. Thearticle in Parade goes on to assure the reader that forhusbands who might be happy with their wives' sexualwithholding, Professor Lovibond has more persuasivetherapeutic tools at his command: "Professor Lovibond alsouses electroshock therapy on his problem drinkers todissuade heavy drinkers from the bottle."I cite these examples here not to argue that all so-calledpsychotherapies are coercive, fraudulent, or otherwise evil.That view is as false and foolish an oversimplification as isthe view that allsuch interventions are healing, helpful, orotherwise good, merely because they are called"therapeutic." My point is rather that many, perhaps most,so-called psychotherapeutic procedures are harmful for theso-called patients; that this simple fact is now obscured bythe expanded, loose, metaphorical-in short, jargonized---ccontemporaryuse of the term psychotherapy; and that allsuch interventions and proposals should therefore beregarded as evil until they are proven otherwise.Of course, people have always influenced each. . other, for better or for worse. With the developmentof modern psychotherapy, there arose apowerful tendency to view all previous attemptsof this sort through the psuedomedical spectaclesof psychiatry and to relabel them 'as psychotherapies. Accordingly,both psychiatrists and laymen now believe thatmagic, religion, faith-healing, witch-doctoring, prayer,animal magnetism, electrotherapy, hypnosis, suggestion,20and countless other human activities are actually differentforms of psychotherapy. I consider this view objectionable.Instead of claiming that we have finally discovered the realnature of interpersonal influence and given it its propername, psychotherapy, I believe our task should be to uncoverand understand how this concept arose and how it nowfunctions. That is the task I have set myself in this volume.More specifically, I shall try to show how, with the declineof religion and the growth of science in the eighteenth century'the cure of (sinful) souls, which had been an integralpart of the Christian religions, was recast as the cure of(sick)minds, and became an integral part of medical science. Myaim in this enterprise has been to unmask the medical andtherapeutic pretensions of psychiatry and psychotherapy. IObjecting to the personal useof a IIIythology, by consentingadults, is objecting to religiousfreedom; objecting to thelegal and political use of forceand fraud concealed by alIlythology is objecting toreligious persecution.have done so not because I think that medicine and treatmentare bad things, but rather because, in the so-calledmental health field, I know that the psychiatric and psychotherapeuticmythology is now used to disguise deceptionand conceal coercion-by psychiatrists, patients, politicians,jurists, journalists, and people in general.Since people need myths to sustain their existence,however, there must be restraints on the pursuit of demythologizing.Accordingly, I have- in my life and in my writings-tried to distinguish between the use of myth to sustaina person's own existence and its use to deceive and coerceothers. Objecting to the personal use of a mythology inprivate, or between consenting adults, is objecting toreligious freedom; objecting to the legal and political use offorce and fraud concealed and justified by a mythology isobjecting to religious persecution. One can, of course,believe in and defend freedom of religion without believingin the literal truth of any particular religion-theological,medical, or psychiatric. And one can object to religiouscoercion even though one might believe that some or all ofthe goals of that particular religon- theological, medical,or psychiatric-- are desirable. In either case, one would befor freedom and against coercion- not for or againstreligion or medicine or psychIatry.It is in this spirit that I have offered my previous efforts atdemythologizing psychiatry, and in which I now offer mypresent effort at demythologizing psychotherapy.March 1978

The•NeoconservattvesA Libertarian Critiqueby Daniel ShapiroThere is no doubt about it: the neoconservativesare on the rise, gaining steadily in influence,. both on the intellectual and political levels. Thequestion which libertarians must face, therefore,is a simple one: is the neoconservativetrend a bright spot on the horizon, or a black cloudthreatening to shower down upon us new, virulent forms ofstatism? Concerned as we must be with allies, let us take acloser look at their doctrines, contrasting their approach tothat of libertarianism.We simplify only slightly when we say that the neoconservativesessentially see man as split into two parts. On the onehand, there is evil self-interest, continually grasping formore and more material goods, ruled by emotional forces;on the other hand, we find sobriety, self-discipline and dutyto sacrifice- when necessary- to the common good, whichserves to hold down the poisonous muck boiling within. Thisview is hardly unique in human history. With roots goingback to ancient times, it most strongly echoes Freud(bourgeois virtue is rather like a repressive mechanism tryingto keep a lid on the id), and the concern of Marx andRousseau about the alleged split between bourgeois manand citizen. Much could be said about this deeply-held view,but what is important for our purposes is that as an explanatorydevice, this view of man is not necessary to clarifya single one of the problems the neoconservatives point to. Itis a dogmatic metaphysical commitment, held by a groupwho scorns dogmatic commitments. More importantly, it isa superficial rationalization, preventing the neoconservativesfrom seeing that what is responsible in actuality formany of the problems they link to human nature is nothingless than the state itself, with its continual manipulations ofsocial life.The entire neoconservative concern with "permissiveness,"a concern they share with the traditional Americanright, is a case in point. For nothing better illustrates the ignoranceof both groups concerning the nature of the freesociety and capitalism. As Samuel Brittain points out in hisimportant book Capitalism and the Permissive Society,capitalism is a profoundly permissive society, permittinghuman beings to do anything they wish, anything theychoose, so long as they accept the consequences and do notviolate the rights of others. Thus, in capitalist society theretends to be a social correlation between freedom and responsibility,between "permissiveness" on the one hand, and theindividual's ability to bear the costs of his so-called "permissive"actions on the other.Irving KristolBut' the fact of the matter is that the entire concept of"permissiveness," like the term "hedonism" (as used by theneoconservatives), is a very fuzzy one indeed. The charge of"permissiveness" is hurled perennially by each generation atthe next. Yet in periods of economic growth, there is areason why this "permissiveness" should be pervasive. For asan economy grows, and investment in capital goods increases,the productivity of labor increases as well. Thismeans that the level of effort necessary to achieve a givenstandard of living drops steadily in a growing economy. Thelevel of "self-discipline," "restraint," and the like necessaryto a given standard of living therefore declines as well.Daniel Shapiro, a graduate student in philosophy at theUniversity of Minnesota, was active in the antiwar andantidraft movements, and has been active in libertariancirclesfor many years.Libertarian Review21

Moreover, as their standards of living increase, people tendto devote the newly uncommitted portions of their lives toleisure.So every generation can, given such growth over time,look at the next a bit uneasily. The younger group appearsundisciplined, lax, all too unrestrained. 'But in each generationthere are different, objective levels of "discipline" appropriateto the then-current needs. The caveman wouldhave looked with envy upon the 19th century Americanfarmer; that farmer would in turn have watched the contemporaryAmerican laborer with similar envy.The level of effort, of "discipline," of "restraint" in anyculture tends to decrease over time and tends to be "proportional"to real economic conditions and requirements. "Permissiveness"is an epithet the old habitually hurl at theyoung.In previous times, religion served the function ofdrumming discipline into the culture; today, the neoconservativesare performing the same function, and are even tryingto resurrect the social power religion once had. Yetnothing should be more obvious than that such advances asbirth control lead to a "lessening" of restraints, and thatsuch lessening tends to be in accord with the changingconsequences of such things as sexual relationships. If theconsequences and contexts of actions change over time,nothing could be more natural than that the cultural normsalso change, reflecting changing facts. The neoconservatives,in fact, represent a profound "cultural lag."It is only when the state interferes with such naturalsocial, cultural, and economic arrangements that there isany deviance from such patterns. The state permits thewidespread severance of action from consequence, offreedom from responsibility- a natural consequence of statepaternalism, the very paternalism which, despite disclaimers,lies at the heart of the neoconservatives' socialpolicies.It is their blindness to such basic analysis which reveals theneoconservatives' conception of the nature and working ofthe free market process for the superficial pretense that it is.Their view that installment buying and mass consumptionare signs of "hedonism" set loose by modern capitalism is butanother instance of this shallowness. What they are referringto, of course, is the debt-oriented, spendthrift philosophywhich has come more and more to dominate Western societyin the last 50 years. But this bent toward consumption is notcaused by the bogey capitalism, which foments hedonism. Itis a direct function of inflationary psychology, produced bythe state and its intellectual apologists, the Keynesians andthe neo-Keynesians. Going into debt would be a limited,relatively responsible affair if constrained by economic reality.But the government- through the Federal Reservesystem---.,.prints more money; thus, currency values fall, savingappears progressively more pointless, and goodbourgeois frugality tends to be swept away. The free marketwould, by its very nature, sharply limit irresponsible orgiesof debt; the game of inflation, where some benefit at the expenseof the many, is an outgrowth not of our "baser selves,"but of base academics, politicians, and members of theboard of the Federal Reserve system. The neoconservatives22would do well to note that it was largely the desire to escapefrom the dzscz'plz'ne of the free-market gold standard that ledto our present-day, fiat-paper inflationary cycles. To grapsthis notion, just read any Keynesian textbook where "excess"savers are viewed with great suspicion.Similarly, when the neoconservatives blame "the revolutionof rising expectations" on the decline of bourgeoischaracter, they overlook the fact that, in a free market, expectationsare roughly proportional to the goods and servicesthat genuinely can be produced. Expectations usuallytranslate themselves into a drive to better oneself, and donot create inexorable conflicts. It is only when the state islooked on as a paternalistic provider, as a source of wealth,when it is taken for granted that one has a right to certaingoods and services, that these expectatiops produce the messwe see around us. In the free market there is no "freelunch"; no goods and services are due to anyone by right.One cannot automatically demand or expect anythingotherthan having one's rights to life, liberty and propertyrespected.One ought to say bluntly that the neoconservativesthemselves are part of the problem here. Not only are theypassionate supporters of the welfare state-witness IrvingKristol's support of social security, national health insuranceand unemployment insurance as but one of a plethora ofexamples- but they also support manipulating the marketthrough "rigging" processes, which grant to some individualsfavors extracted by force form others.These points all illustrate the libertarian thesis that theunfettered market is a great problem-solver and conflictavoider.Massive conflicts arise when the market is notallowed to work. In the market you can't help but serveother people's needs, wants and interests: A seller needs abuyer, and vice versa.Although the neoconservatives may proclaim their sympathieswith the workings of the market, they simply do notgrasp the essential opposition of state and market. Theneoconservatives follow a long line of theorists who wouldrather blame political and social problems on the release ofthe "bad" forces within us, than see the state as the guiltyparty. They carry with them obfuscation and confusion.Morality and stabilityMorality and order (or stability) are frequent neoconservativethemes, but despite all the pages of print devoted tothem, most of these writings are a mass of confusions andfallacies. To see why, we must summarize briefly the relationshipbetween morality and politics.Morality in its broadest sense is concerned with the valuesman should pursue through the whole range of his life.Because it is so broad, questions about interaction withother men are only part of its domain. Polz'tical principlesdeal with man as he necessarily interacts with other men in ahuman community. It is a branch of ethics. Two confusionsusually result from a failure to be clear about the distinctionbetween morality and politics. First there is the confusionbetween the standards employed in evaluating politicalmatters as opposed to those used for moral matters, whichMarch 1978

may have nothing to do with politics. Second, there is theconfusion between the aim of political principles and theaim of moral principles in general. Political principles areused to establish uniform guidelines so men can interact in a(hopefully) peaceful and beneficial manner; moral principlesare concerned with other matters, such as "virtue." AsTibor Machan shows in Human Rights and Human Liberties,politics is concerned with rights while morality (properly)focuses on acting rightly. Given these differing aims andconcerns, it follows one shouldn't use standards which applyonly to morality in the political sphere.Neoconservatives commit both of these errors. First, theyare quite willing to use coercion to help people behave"morally." But coercion is only justified in the politicalsphere, where the aim is to prevent unjustifiable conducttowards others. To use coercion to promote virtue is toassume the aim ofpolitics is to help create a virtuous order,rather than establish domestic peace and a climate of mutualcooperation. That Kristol could applaud the prohibitionmovement for having a good conscience is tantamountto believing that the political order should keep peopleupright. Such a view of politics is a regression to ancientpolitical philosophy, which l~cked the idea that there werecertain spheres (called rights) where the state could not intervene.In fact, the neoconservatives have it backwards: Not onlycan't the state create or help create moral people, but itusually makes things worse. It disrupts the voluntary attemptsof people to solve their problem and produces unanticipated,pernicious consequences. In fact, the drug laws,today's analogue of prohibition, are a showcase for how thestate undermines the bourgeois character neoconservativesvalue. Our wars on drugs have been a major force increating a drug culture and mystique, through suchmeasures as castigating the drug user as an alien, sick beingand forcibly separating him from society, and by making thedrugs sound more dangerous-and thus alluring-than theyreally are. In addition,.the drug laws have caused increasedcrime and the disruption of millions of lives, contribution tothe exploitation of the taxpayers, and caused the deaths ofthousands because of impure street drugs. None of this isconducive to strengthening bourgeois virtue. (For more onthis point, see the writings of Thomas Szasz, from whom theneoconservatives could learn a great deal.) Our drug lawshave created the "drug abuse" problem: The state underminesmorality by attempting to enforce it. The theoreticalerror that politics (in this case, the state) should aim for themoral goal of virtue leads to disaster in practice.The order ofthe free societyRelated to the neoconservatives' blunders about "morality"is their lack of comprehension of the concept of "order,"another one of their key values. The neoconservatives needto study long and hard Hayek's notion of a "spontaneousorder." To call for "wedding order organically to liberty," asIrving Kristol does, misses the point that liberty creates itsown order, far better than does the state-which can, atbest, only provide the peaceful conditions under whichLibertarian ReviewNorman Podhoretzorder can develop. The neoconservatives have correctlystressed the complexity of social reality; but this means notthat the government should move cautiously, not that thosegovernment programs which survive have a reason for theirexistence, not that a program of conservative reform is required,but that a radical commitment to the market isnecessary, since only the market can handle the complex interactionsof largely unknown facts. No matter how cautiousgovernment officials are, they can never anticipate thecountless changes, the bewildering complexity of the world;only the unhampered market system, with its marvelousability to adapt and change, to adjust to facts which no onecan know in their totality, does this. Only the market canmake full use of the knowledge scattered throughoutmillions of human beings in society. When the state tries toanticipate what it can never anticipate, it produces disorderand conflict.Therefore, since state coercion usually foments conflictswhile the market tends towards harmony, the best road toorder is via freedom.Of course, behind these confused appeals to "order" is athinly veiled yearning for a state elite to promote "morality"through the use of coercion- an imposed order, not a spontaneousorder-a position we have already discussed andfound wanting.Sometimes the neoconservative quest for "order" revolvesaround the need for stability. By this, I mean their dislike ofa turbulent polity and moralistic politics, and their approvalof consensus welfare state politics and an unquestioned,23

ipartisan, interventionist foreign policy.. The latter two areimplicit, not explicit, but can be seen in their attacks on the"radicalism" of the left (New Left) or right (McCarthyism),and in their attacks on isolationism. Unfortunately, ratherthan seeing the whittling down of the state as the road togenuine order and stability, the neoconservatives see theirtask as one of attacking ideology, which they see as thesource of all this turbulence and anticonsensus radicalism.The failure ofanti-ideologyThe anti-ideological attack of the neoconservatives is aclassic case of hostile reaction to one's past experience.Former socialists, they now use the Marxist notion ofideology as grounds for condemning all ideologies assimplistic; interpreters of McCarthy as a typical ideologuewho injected a moralistic atmosphere into politics, theybelieve political discourse should be primarily focused onpractical, concrete issues, not moral principles. It is obviouswhat has gone wrong here: The Marxist notion of ideology isnot correct. No neoconservative has ever argued for theproposition that ideologides must destroy and simplify. Indeed,how is a personto make sense of the complex world ofpolitical reality without the aid of a coherent, systematicview-namely, an ideology? Neoconservative skepticismabout the power of reason, and their hankering for religion,have blinded them toone of man's greatest needs: the needOnly the market can makefull use of the knowledge ofmillions of human beings.When the state tries toanticipate, it produces onlydisorder and conflict.to make things rational and coherent. Ideology is one of theinstruments we use for meeting this need; it almost alwaysfails, sometimes spectacularly, but there is nothing necessaryabout these failures. There is a second question: Why isMcCarthy necessarily taken as the paradigm of anideologue? He was obviously more along the lines of ademagogue; because he conducted his crusade against Communismlike a preacher rooting out the Devil does not meanall morally principled approaches within the political arenamust be of that character.From a libertarian perspective, the neoconservative abandonmentof ideology leads to pernicious consequences: theanti-ideological, practical, nonmoralistic approach topolitical matters amounts to a concealed conservativeapologetic for American statism.At a time when statist institutions are being battered by24increasing skepticism and hostility, the neoconservative approachto politics-"Does it work?" rather than, "Is itjust?" - is, in effect, a device for preventing this hostilityfrom developing into a fundamental reexamination of thesystem of American statism itself.This underlying principle is illustrated very well indeed byIrving Kristol, in an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled"Reforming the Welfare State." Kristol begins byobserving.that "it is unarguable that the welfare state is introuble." He points out that while countless billions havebeen poured into welfare measures the welfare state has not"cured poverty," but rather has created as many problems asit has solved. And yet Kristol's announced aim is to save thewelfare state. He announces that he wants to reform, not todismantle the welfare state. He complains that existing programsare just excessive paternalism, with their allencompassingattempt to "solve problems," that "it is theseprograms, which do not work ... that are bringing thewelfare state into dispute." He goes on to attack those whowould raise fundamental questions, who would dismantlethe welfare state:There· is no more chance today of returning to a society of 'freeenterprise' and enfeebled government than there was, in the 16thCentury, of returning to a Rome-centered Christendom. Theworld and the people in it have changed. One is permitted toregret this fact-nostalgia is always permissible. But the politics ofnostalgia is always self-destructive.When one questions a government proposal by asking if itis expensive or too bureaucratic, rather than by askingwhether it is immoral or unjust, one is operating within aframework where the fundamental questions about theAmerican welfare-warfare state simply are not being raised.In fact, the whole neoconservative attitude towards"morality" can be seen as an argument that moral criticismshould aim only at preserving the legitimacy of theAmerican social order, rather than condemning it orradically changing it. The neoconservative plea for a moralregeneration in the West is really a yearning for an elitewhich will help institute a value system that will resurrectbourgeois virtue and provide legitimacy to the social order.If and when this elite gets involved in politics, it should providemoral guidance, not radical criticism. Intellectualsshould help to solidify the foundations of the social orderrather than shaking it so that it may crumble. That is whyconsensus politics is the ideal for neoconservatives: It impliesan agreement on the basics of the polity and involves a giveand-takeapproach where questions about the justness of thepolitical framework are not raised. Ideologies, with theirmoralistic attacks, subvert such consensus politics. Hencethe neoconservative critique.The neoconservatives are right that ideologies frequentlyraise fundamental questions about the polity, disrupt consensuspolitics, inject moral questions rather than a costbenefitmentality into political parlance; but why must thisalways be condemned? The real reason they condemn it isthe neoconservative identification of ideological thinkingwith utopian thinking. This linkage is an obsfuscation."Utopian" can refer either to a radical who sets forth a setof principles, which he refuses to compromise even thoughMarch 1978

Nathan Glazerthey have no present chance of being adopted, or to someonewho advocates a Utopia in the literal sense-meaning"nowhere", an impossible pipe dream which if tried in practicewould wreak havoc. To condemn ideology for beingutopian and to contrast it with a practical, nonmoralisticapproach to politics is tantamount to arguing that any set ofprinciples which present a radical critique of the presentsocial order (here, American statism) involves a flight awayfrom reality into a Platonic, unrealizable vision.But such is true only if the existing social order is fundamentallysound; only then would a radical critique beUtopian in the Platonic sense. Thus by a neat semantic trickthe neoconservatives have hidden their basic assumption:American statism is not fundamentally unjust or evil; wemay tinker and modify, we may make it more efficient, lessbureaucratic, but that's all. When Kristol called capitalismmodified by a welfare state the best of all available worlds hedemonstrated this same trick in a different vocabulary. Ofcourse American statism is better than many other availablestatisms being offered; surely it is preferable to England orRussia. But so what? That the American form of governmentmay be the best one available says nothing about whatit should be or could be: It should and could be a lot better.To offer a radical ideological program as our framework forhow it could be better is not to offer a "nowhere" type ofUtopia. The neoconservatives have not argued for this, andin fact couldn't, for its indefensible. Their assertion-andthat's all it is - that ideology means Utopianism allows themto get away with a bald-faced apologetic for statism, albeit aLibertarian Reviewmilder form than we have now. It is a crowning irony thatthe anti-ideology of the neoconservatives is exactly whatMarx seems to have thought all ideology was: an apologeticfor the existing social system. On this point, at least, theneoconservatives have deserted Marxism only to turn out tobe its foils. Time and time again, the neoconservatives showthemselves as prisoners of their past: narrowly-read, trappedby the categories and issues of the 1930s. They would drageveryone else into the narrow disputes which formed theirearly convictions.Another serious problem with this anti-ideological approachis that it makes neoconservatives incapable ofunderstanding the inner logic of states. From neoconservativeliterature one could well conclude that governmentsare often inefficient, bureaucratic, and (most of all) incompetent,but never even come close to considering thefact that governments are exploitative, try to increase theircoercive power, and have economic interests which oftendetermine what they do. The point is that an antiideologicalposition limits one's understanding of social andpolitical phenomena. To approach government from theframework of competency or efficiency or stability is tooverlook more rudimentary questions: Efficiency for what.'?Competence in what? Stability for what? Clearly, asystematic, coherent, principled account of the state wouldhave to answer at least these questions, while an efficiencyorientedapproach never even raises them. It is interesting tonote that the two most systematic theories of the statelibertarianismand Marxism- have both given similaranswers (though they mean quite different things by theanswers) in their attempts to "see through the politicalrealm" (Nozick's phrase). Rather than states being merebunglers, they are primarily exploitative, coercive wieldersof power who operate not out of benevolent purposes butmost frequently from attempts to further their clientele's interests.Thus, looking at the state from the point of view ofcompetence or efficiency is worse than naive: It is akin to insistingthat a criminal gang should be more "efficient" in itsplundering and looting.The neoconservatives' anti-ideological approach appearsto prevent them from even raising the issue of coercivepower and its relation to the state's favoring certain economicgroups in society. Why do regulatory agencies helpthose they regulate? Why do unions fight for the minimumwage? Why do most big businessmen favor an interventionistforeign policy? Questions of these sort are rarely raised bythe neoconservatives, with their stress on efficiency and competence.(True, their concern with the "new class" does showan awareness that certain people have a vested interest instate power, but they fail to raise the question of whetherthis is typical of all political elites.)The spirit of libertyPerhaps the most damaging charge against the antiideologicalapproach is that such a slant on politics cannever contain the spirit of liberty. A fighter for liberty usesas his weapon the abolitionist spirit towards injustice, not acost-benefit calculating machine or a misguided "realism."25

This is another way of saying that a natural-rights ideologyis essential for providing the fuel necessary to sustain one inthe long, arduous encounter with the Leviathan state, and itis thus not surprising that neoconservatives lack such a commitment.I do not mean to suggest that one has to be a consistentlibertarian to have the spirit of liberty; what oneneeds is the view that if a certain policy is detrimental toliberty it is therefore unjust and should be abolished asquickly as possible. If one adopts this view on at least somekey issues then one is capable of the spirit of liberty, at leastsome of the time. That the neoconservatives lack thiscapability is shown by the fact that on two of the most importantmatters of state policy-the draft and high taxestheyfail even to come close to understanding the wrongnessof these state invasions of people's rights. The draft isslavery, pure and simple, but the sole neoconservative commentduring the tumultuous years of the 1960s was DanielMoynihan's praise of this noble American institution. As faras crippling taxation goes, reactions range from DanielBell's and Nathan Glazer's claims that high taxes arenecessary and right in this day and age to the occasionalcomplaint that high taxes are creating instability andbureaucratization.In the name of opposition to ideology, in the name ofrealism and practicality, neoconservatives unwittingly endup as apologists for American statism, view politics throughblinders which prevent them from even raising basic questionsabout the state, and dull their moral sensibilities to thepoint that they can't even be upset by the draft or cripplingtaxation. The old theme of sacrificing justice on the altar ofrealism has been repeated.The witches' breuJThere is some merit to the neoconservative writings, par­~icularly when they are exposing the failure of certainwelfare state policies, or of socialism. There is virtually nomerit in their writings on foreign policy. Until very recentlythey have been maddeningly unspecific on foreign policyissues. Recently, however, they have become more concrete,but at the cost of their much-vaunted commitment to"complexity." The idea that the West is facing a "failure ofnerve" (as if all we had to do was to be more gutsy and thingswould get much better), that the appeasers are marching uslike lemmings into the sea, is so simplistic that it's hard to seehow a group of people dedicated to the view everythingshould be kept as complex and ambiguous as possible couldhave fallen for it. Although the neoconservatives aremiddle-aged (and proudly so - recall the beginning issue ofThe Public Interest described in my previous article), on thismatter some of them seem to have ossified into near senility:Surely Norman Podhoretz's "The Culture of Appeasement"is a new low in the neoconservative arsenal. The idea hepresents, that pacificism, homosexuality, and lack ofpatriotism are a malevolent triumverate which were acceleratedand distilled during the Vietnam War into anti­Americanism, would be laughable were not Podhoretzserious.26But there is more to the growing neoconservative, interventionistclamor than this recent mental rigidity.Another factor is their conception of prudence. Neoconservativeshave always favored an interventionist foreign policy,but now that "Pax Americana"·is under increasing attack intheory and in practice they see it as prudent to stand up andbe counted, so to speak. The neoconservatives have notbecome more "moralistic" in foreign policy than in domesticmatters because of an aberration in their thinking; rather,seeing the bipartisan consensus in favor of interventionismbeing challenged, they have decided that a forceful defenseof Wilsonianism is in order, particularly since they fear "theabandonment of Israel." As neoconservatives see it, in aworld filled with hostile totalitarianism the world's largestdemocracy must "defend its values." According to some ofthem, this process of reaffirmation entails an expandeddefense budget, clear nuclear superiority, and a hostilitytowards notions of detente and arms control.This view demonstrates an alarming inability to understandthe moral and practical implications of interventionism.If there were individuals walking around withlabels marked "democrat" (good guys) and others with thetag "totalitarian" (bad guys), and the latter were committingaggressive acts against the former, then coming tothe aid of the good guys might make sense. Things are notlike that. The label "democrat" is only a limited compliment;it is far better than being a totalitarian, butdemocratic states can and do commit monstrosities day andnight. The assumption that democratic states will act morejustly than totalitarian nations is hogwash. (Who has beenmore aggressive in the last 20 years, China or the UnitedStates?) Moreover, because we are concerned with governmentsinteracting with governments, not ordinary individualswith other ordinary individuals, this makes thesituation extremely complicated. One must consider the effectson the citizens of the various countries in question, andwhen one does, one comes up-or should come up-withthe answer that most attempts to "stand up" for "our" valuesusually result in war, the permanent soaking of the taxpayers,the creation of a military bureaucracy; in short, withan enormous drain on the productive energies of the people.Surely it is the mark of prudence to realize that the 20thcentury has been a century of mass murder on an unprecedentedscale, and that one should be looking for waysto change this. Instead, most of the neoconservatives spendtheir energy directly or indirectly in fomenting the armsrace, shouting that the Russians are coming, and doingwhat they can to prevent disarmament. During the Vietnamwar, at least, Glazer, Moynihan and Podhoretz were at timesaware of the moral monstrosities that were being perpetratedin Indochina. Now, however, awareness of themoral horror of war seems to have escaped from the neoconservativeconsciousness.It would be nice if this obsession with proving we still haveit in us, to show the Russians we're tough, were a passingaberration; but, unfortunately, all available signs andsignals show that this will be the neoconservative theme inthe future. I'm afraid we must plan for a long siege againsttheir bellicosity.March 1978

The question ofalliancesTo evaluate the question of neoconservative compatibilitywith libertarianism, let us present some contrasts.1) Libertarians consider liberty the highest political endbecause coercion violates individual rights, and therefore isunjust. Neoconservatives consider liberty to be one amongmany important values, which sometimes can be sacrificedfor the sake of other values such as stability and creating amoral climate. Libertarians take the offensive: They takeliberty as a good to be fought for determinedly. Neoconservativestake either a cautious, "responsible" attitude towardsit-yes, it's important, but let's not go overboard-or adefensive attitude, when they perceive liberty to be extremelythreatened. Libertarians define liberty as the absence ofcoercion. Neoconservatives rarely define it, and even advocatecoercive measures in its name. Libertarians are passionatelyconcerned with individual rights; neoconservativesrarely mention such, given their anti-ideological and socialscience background, and Kristol's sympathy with classicalpolitical philosophy'S emphasis on virtue, not rights.2) Libertarians are ideological radicals. Neoconservativesare "practical," efficiency-conscious moderates. Thus, libertariansview most states as evil, coercive mechanisms whichdisrupt and distort people's lives and energies, and whichoften act out of consideration for the interests of their subsidizedclientele. Neoconservatives view the state occasionallyas a force for moral rectification, sometimes a bungler,sometimes stupid, but never as exploitative or evil.3) Libertarians view the existence of an encompassingpolitical sphere as a clear sign of injustice in the community;we enter politics in order to reduce it to the minimal amountpossible. Thus we don't value stability in the political communityper se. The key question for evaluating politics is,What is considered to be the bounds of legitimate politicalaction?; not, Are political affairs turbulent? A turbulentpolity, which is turbulent due to hostility directed at coercivemeasures, is preferable to one where all is stable becausepeople aren't sufficiently aroused to the dangers of statism.The neoconservative view, on the other hand, could easilyconsider a just polity one where ther was a large sphere ofpolitical affairs, if it "made sense" to the citizens and containedthe right "blend" of political values.4) Libertarians are necessarily rationalists in that they areideologists committed to a consistent, principled approachtowards politics. Furthermore, they tend to blame politicalinjustices not on the evil nature of man, but on the state thatprevents people from acting in accordance with their ownperception of their interests and values. Neoconservativesare skeptical of reason; they dislike principled, systematicapproaches to evaluating political matters. Viewing man ascontaining deep-seated, irrational forces, they often blamepolitical maladies on the freeing of man's darker side, ratherthan on the effects ofstate malevolence.5) Libertarians are in favor of dismantling all state elites,which parasitically drain the life blood of their citizens.Neoconservatives lack the awareness th~t states necessarilycreate ruling elites, and in any event aren't hostile to this occurence;instead, neoconservatives favor a state elite whichLibertarian ReviewDaniel Bellwill help regenerate the West. (More precisely, they are willingto use the state to help the elite perform,its task.)6) Libertarians are political isolationists, principled advocatesof a noninterventionist foreign policy, which theytake to be eminently practical as well. They are opposed toincreasing the arms budget, to the draft, and to foreign entanglements.They see jingoism as an aberration and assomething to be fought. They are opposed to colonialism,militarism and imperialism, seeing all these as aggressivelyopposed to individual liberty, both domestically and inother nations. By contrast, the most prominent neoconservatives-particularly Moynihan and Podhoretz - are ardentinterventionists, opposed to political isolationism; advocatesof ever-increasing armaments budgets; opponents of disarmamentand detente; apologists for the draft (when it existed);blind to the horrors of colonialism, militarism andimperialism, to the threat that these constitute to "bourgeoisvirtue." They are the closest group we have to classicaljingoists. In the case of the Middle East, they are usually themost ardent and militant Zionists and hard-liners, seeingany "retreat of American power" anywhere on the globeanyretrenchment from foreign entanglements- as yetanother step on the road to "making the world safe for communism"and "the abandonment of Israel." The two groupscould not possibly be more opposed to each other.7) Libertarians represent the spirit of youth: rationalistic,ideological, concerned with consistent principles, andtenacious advocates of a radical ideal. Neoconservatives aremiddle-aged both chronologically and spiritually. Badlyburned by the failure of socialist radicalism in their youth,they stress caution, ambiguity, and the fruitlessness of amoral, ideological, principled aproach to social matters. Ineffect, the neoconservatives view the spirit of youth asmisguided and sometimes pernicious; libertarians view the27

spirit of middle age as an irrational apologetic for injustice.Neoconservatives are thus, in a great many senses, differentfrom, and opposed to libertarians in ideas, approaches,policies and spirit. To make this clear think of how we wouldview a neoconservative world. This would amount to a polityin essential agreement concerning the ideas of an efficient,nonbankrupt, welfare state, replete with government"rigging" of the free market by regulations, and bolstered bya vigorously interventionist foreign policy.The last thing we need is an efficient welfare state; inefficientgovernment has the merit that it produces angertowards its assaults on liberty. Inefficient government allowspockets of liberty to emerge due to its inefficient monitoring.An efficient welfare state (assuming this is even possible,which is dubious) would be dedicated to weeding outthose who tried to work around its regulations. Furthermore,if it ever came to the point where fundamental dissentconcerning the idea of a welfare-warfare state was muted,The last thing we need isan efficient welfare state;inefficientgovernment hasthe merit that it producesanger towards its constantassaults on liberty.this would amount to a retrogression from the last ten yearsor so, when more and more Americans began pugnaciouslychallenging the proclivities of the Leviathan.Similarly, a more interventionist foreign policy is hardlywhat libertarians are aiming for. Insofar as neoconservativesare hostile to arms control and a less interventionist foreignpolicy, they are a genuine menace preventing us from reversingthe horrible legacy of Wilsonianism. An efficientwelfare state is bad enough; the maintenance of a deadlywarfare state posed to "prudently" intervene wherever its"interests" are "threatened" would be disastrous.Though a neoconservative triumph would be a dismalprospect for libertarians, there is something we can learnfrom them. Their stress on the importance of a moral foundationfor political judgments is terribly relevant for libertarians:We"have hardly worked out a satisfactory answer forwhy liberty is the highest political end. Further, some libertariansthemselves give unintended support to the neoconservativeclaim that such a position means the rejection orlack of concern with morality; i.e., that to favor maximumliberty is to imply that (almost) everything is morallyjustifiable. For instance, Walter Block, in his introductionto his now famous (infamous?) Defending the Undefendable,writes that the people he defends are "guilty of nowrong-doing"; they are not villians, he adds, because "they28do not initiate violence against non-aggressors." On the contrary,the fact that a person violates no rights doesn't show inthe slightest that he is not a moral vilHan or guilty of nowrongdoing; he may well have the moral sensibility of AndyWarhol. Block confuses the concept of not being guilty ofwrongdoing poLitically (in that one violates no rig-hts) andthat of being free of guilt in the realm of moralityproper..It probably would also be fruitful to enter a dialogue withthe neoconservatives and encourage them as they stumbletowards quasi-classical liberal positions, at least on "someissues. As the state's programs increasingly fail, asneoconservatives begin to see that virtually all welfare stateprograms are either bureaucratic or don't accomplish whatthey are supposed to do, they may well turn towards marketsolutions for social problems. Given their attitude towardsliberty, there will be limits on how far they could go in thisprocess; but as it occurs, we certainly ought to encourageand push them more towards freedom. This might involvean attempt to help the neoconservatives generalize some oftheir conclusions. As Kristol exposes the foibles of the "newclass," we could point out to him that this class differs onlydegree, not kind, from other state supported and supportingclasses. As Glazer comes to recognize more and more thesevere "limits of social policy" as attempted by the state, letus point out to him that this does not apply to the market'sability to promote social well-being. As Moynihan increasinglybecomes aware of the truth that socialism is "a distinctlypoor means of producing wealth," we should point out tohim that all statism restricts and distorts productiveenergies, including the sort he supports.But though we may carryon a dialogue, encourage them,and even learn from them, we must vehemently reject theclaim, as formulated by Kristol, that the neoconservativesare trying to breathe new life into the old traditions ofgenuine political liberalism. A practical support for somefree market policies, an interventionist foreign policy, a willingnessto suspend some liberties for stability, a sympathywith the notion of a state elite, do not a renewed classicalliberalism make.Libertarians are the legitimate heirs of the classical liberaltradition; our ideology is a radicalized version of classicalliberalism, stripped of its contradictions, inconsistencies,and compromises. While it would be wrong to say a victoryfor liberty is inevitable, it would be a colossal blunder tothink we can speed up that happy day by making allianceswith that cautious and in many senses antilibertarian groupof intellectuals known as the neoconservatives.Again and again, whether we contemplate the conservativesor the neoconservatives, the liberals or the remnantsof th antiwar left, we must inevitably come to the same conclusion:Ifwe are to achieve our goals of a full respect for individualliberty, a severe limitation on coercive governmentpower in all spheres (economic freedom, civil liberties, andforeign policy), we must do so by building our own independentideological movement, a movement ferociously dedicatedto advancing the libertarian vision. It may seem a slowprocess, but in the long run it is the only path to liberty inour time.March 1978

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In defense ofISOLATIONISMby BruceBartlettThroughout the past year, a stormy debate hasraged over Soviet-American relations: a fiercecrossing of verbal swords between those who seeAmerica as confronted by an expanding sphereof Soviet power, menacing world peace andfreedom, to be countered by escalating Americandefense spending, and those who, seeing nosuch threat,'believe that Soviet-American rapproachementis possible and welcome, based ondetente, mutual arms reduction and nonintervention.30This debate differs radically from those that have comebefore: Today, those in favor of a more militant foreignpolicy are extraordinarily well-organized, well-financed,and willing to go virtually to any length to achieve theirends. The spearhead of this drive is the "Committee onthe Present Danger," which numbers among its boardmembers a host of establishment liberals from bothparties, including most of those who have been agitatingfor a'more aggressive American foreign policy literally fordecades. Daniel Yergin, in his excellent article "The ArmsZealots" (Harper's, June 1977), comments that the Committee"has consciously modeled itself on groups ofdistinguished laity that campaigned before World War IIfor preparedness and, after, for the Marshall Plan."March 1978

One of the strongest allies of this arms coalition is Commentarymagazine, edited by Norman Podhoretz. It wasCommentary that fired the biggest gun in the currentdebate by publishing Richard Pipes' article on "Why theSoviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a NuclearWar," which summarized the conclusions of PresidentFord's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board "Team B"study of Soviet strategic objectives more than a year ago.The wide support evinced for the arms coalition is partlydue to the relative lack of opposition which it faces.While every issue of Commentary carries new, hawkishscare stories about the Soviet arms build-up, the evils ofdetente, or the consequences of appeasement, and virtuallyevery other major magazine has picked up the lead­Norman Podhoretz, for example, recently moved over toHarper's with his appeals for more defense spending in"The Culture of Appeasement" -those capable of refutingthis view have been all too silent and, even more importantly,ill-organized. Aside from Daniel Yergin's excellentarticle, the few major criticisms include EarlRavenal's "Towards Nuclear Stability" in the Atlantic(September 1977), Richard Barnet's "Promise of Disarmament"in the New York Times Magzaine, and Barnet's"The Present Danger" in the November issue of LibertarianReview.Recently, however, a major voice on the subject ofAmerican-Soviet relations, George F. Kennan, has risen toanswer the naive dogmas of the "arms zealots." In hislatest book, The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities ofAmerican Foreign Policy (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1977),Kennan presents perhaps the most important noninterventionistanalysis of American foreign policy offered sincebefore World War II. It is important because GeorgeKennan cannot be dismissed out of hand, and hisqualifications are unquestionable: Having entered theAmerican foreign service fifty years ago, he has heldseveral crucially important foreign policy posts, and haswritten a dozen books on foreign policy subjects, includingAmerican Diplomacy, 1900-1950, Soviet-American Relations,1917-1920, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1941, andtwo volumes of his Memoirs. After gaining his initial fameas one of the principle architects of the doctrine of containment,Kennan has moved progressively toward anoninterventionist position in foreign policy questions.Kennan's book was written during the winter of 1977.As he writes:It was a time dominated by an intensive debate in Americanopinion over the question of how to deal with the Soviet Union.On the outcome of this debate there seemed to hang the entirefuture of American policy and of world events. This appeared tobe a real and crucial parting of the ways: one road leading to atotal militarization of policy and an ultimate showdown on thebasis of armed strength, the other to an effort to break out ofthe straitjacket of military rivalry and to strike through to amore constructive and hopeful vision of America's future andthe world's.Bruce Bartlett is a congressional aide whose column "ThePublic Trough" is a regular LRfeature. He has written forReason magazine and many other periodicals.Libertarian ReviewIn 14 chapters devoted to the broadest questions ofpolicy and strategy, from a penetrating critique of thenecessary inner conflict between the requirements of ademocratic form of government and the consequences andrequirements of global interventionism, to an analysis ofthe nature of Soviet-American relations, Kennan showswhy a large-scale and systematic move in the direction ofnoninterventionism is both necessary and proper.It is perhaps understandable, then, that he hasearned the wrath of the defense establishmentand its intellectual apologists, and has drawn avicious assault from the pen of "Edward Luttwakin the November 1977 issue of Commentary,"The Strange Case of George F. Kennan." It is avindictive review which reminds one of the vileblitzkrieg conducted against Charles A. Beardfor questioning the conventional wisdom on theorigins of World War II. In particular, one isreminded of Samuel Eliot Morrison's "HistoryThrough a Beard," which appeared in theAtlantic shortly after Beard's death. (RonaldRadosh has recently done an exceptionally finejob of reviewing the case of Charles Beard andother postwar critics of intervention in hisProphets on the Right.)Luttwak launches his attack by evoking the old codewordfor noninterventionism: isolationism. Instantly, oneis supposed to imagine that Kennan is calling for cuttingAmerica off from the world completely, ignoring reality,sticking his head into the ground like an ostrich, and allthe other hideous myths about "isolationism" that havebeen so carefully perpetuated for the last forty yearswhenevera person questions the prevailing assumptionsabout American. foreign policy.Luttwak is at least very open about his own points ofview. He says thatit is the balance of power alone that will unfailingly determinewhat can be protected and how securely.... It is the relativemilitary strength, economic leverage, and social influence of theUnited States as compared to its antagonists that defines thescope of American protection, influence, and access.George Kennan, on the other hand, argues persuasivelythat expanding the scope of American "influence" has notproduced greater security for the United States, but ratherhas created more and more risks of military involvementin areas which have no relationship to American security.The Korean War, the Vietnam War, and any number oflesser engagements since World War II - costing thousandsof lives and billions of dollars- are ample proof ofKennan's assertion. Consequently, Kennan advocatesthe reduction of external commitments to the indispensableminimum. And I would see this minimum in the preservation ofthe political independence and military security of WesternEurope, ofJapan, and-with the single reservation that it31

should not involve the dispatch and commitment of Americanarmed forces-of Israel. ... In order to concentrate ourresources and efforts on these essential tasks, we would . . .ruthlessly eliminate ulterior commitments and involvements thatwould distract us from their performance. This would involvethe abandonment of several obsolescent and nonessentialpositions: notably those at Panama, in the Philippines, and inKorea. It would involve the restoration to our Western Europeanallies, who are the proper bearers of it, of the responsibilityfor shaping the future relationship of Greece and Turkey toNATO and for working out with the governments of those twocountries the disposition of NATO military facilities and garrisonson their territory. American facilities and garrisons wouldno longer be maintained there.With respect to the so-called Third World, Kennan advisesthat we should "not overly concern ourselves forwords and reactions of the governments of this area,remembering that the best we can expect from them, overthe long run, is their respect, not their liking or theirgratitude."To this, Mr. Luttwak replies:George Kennan32If the United States continues to allow its relative military powerto decline as compared to that of its antagonists, and principallythe Soviet Union, sooner or later it may well be forced to retreatinto Mr. Kennan's restricted perimeter, if not beyond. But thereverse does not obtain; if the United States were to abandon allbut Western Europe and Japan, this would not allow it toreduce its military power with impunity, as Mr. Kennan seemsto believe. On the contrary, the industrial democracies undersiege would probabl~' "leed much more military power than theynow have, merely to survive.In a nutshell, Luttwak and the other members of thearms coalition are saying that more defense spending andmore allies automa6cally guarantee a better defense.They seem incapable of seeing two sides to the coin: thatmore defense spending and more far-flung commitmentsby the United States may in fact create.the very conditionswhich necessitated that spending and those commitmentsin the first place. In other words, a smaller defense mayindeed be a better defense.Kennan, because he is a historian, understandsthat much of what passes for proof of communistimperialism is actually Russianimperialism-which is a very different thing. Heknows.. that Russian emperors coveted EasternEurope for centuries before it finally cameunder Russian domination after World War II.Indeed, the Crimean War was fought. by Englandand France for the very purpose of keepingRussia out of Eastern Europe. Moreover, itshould be remembered that Eastern Europe isthe route through which Russia had been invadedthree times in the twentieth centuryalone. The point is that when it was handed theopportunity to get that which it had coveted forso long-a buffer zone and expansion of itssphere of influence-Russia naturally sought toput Eastern Europe under its control. Russianimperialism had absolutely nothing whatever todo with communist ideology.But if one disregards the Russian conquests in EasternEurope, there is relatively little evidence remaining ofcommunist imperialism. There are occasional minor interventions,in Africa and elsewhere, but these arenowhere near the scale of a great many American interventionssince the Second World War. Those remainingcountries which are presently under communist dominationwere not "conquered" by the Soviet Union, or putunder communist domination by outside military might,but rather were subject to large-scale, domestic, communistrevolutionary activity, often in the face of Sovietopposition. But this places the "threat" of communist expansionby means of a nuclear war into an entirely differentlight. Since the communists have never expandedby such means before, why should anyone think they shalldo so in the future?March 1978

The idea is almost never seriously consideredthat the Soviet Union may be building all thosemissiles and submarines not for offensivemilitary purposes, but for defense against us.The answer usually given is that the Soviets must bebuilding all those missiles and nuclear submarines forsomething. Unfortunately, the idea is almost neverseriously entertained that they may be building theirweapons not for offensive military actions, but fordefense-from us, from those allies which we have, overthe past few years, armed to the teeth, and from China.Imagine yourself in the place of the Soviet Union, surroundedby American military bases which circle theworld, with the United States admittedly spending billionsof dollars more for military spending every year, and witha hostile power to the south-China. Would it be unreasonablefor the Soviet Union to fear attack?There are a great many things which might be offeredin proof of this, among them the fact that a considerableamount of Soviet military spending is clearly defensive,not offensive. It is a well-known fact, for example, thatthe Soviet Union spends a very large portion of its militaryspending on civil defense, especially the kind most likelyto be useful, not in a confrontation with the UnitedStates, a major nuclear power, but with China, an admittedlyminor nuclear power. Moreover, the biggestshare of the Soviet Union's armed forces are not poised onthe edge of Western Europe, preparing for some sort ofblitzkrieg against the West, but rather on the border ofChina. If there is this sort of fear of China, whichhistorically has not been very aggressive in its foreignpolicy, is it unreasonable for the Soviets to have an evengreater fear of the West, which is the avowed enemy ofcommunism, and has shown itself more than a little interventionistover the years?Furthermore, the evidence frequently cited by supportersof increased defense spending that Russian nuclearweapons have a greater throw-weight, or megatonnage,ignores the obvious point that this is more likely to be theresponse of a country preparing for a second-strike, ratherthan a first-strike against a presumed opponent. TheUnited States, by stark contrast, has always and continuesto emphasize accuracy in its weapons- the sort of thingwhich one would emphasize if one were preparing for afirst-strike, rather than a defensive second-strike.Lastly, there is considerable debate over the fact thatthe Russians undoubtedly spend more of their gross nationalproduct for "defense" than the United States does.However, we should take into account here two facts:Libertarian Reviewfirst, that the Soviet Union has less than half the GNP ofthe United States- so it is natural to expect the proportionspent on the military will be higher- and secondly,that since the Soviet Union has a totally state-controlledeconomy, a great many things are done by the governmentin the name of "defense" which are done in Americaunder another name. For example, Soviet soldiers are frequentlydrafted for the purpose of garbage collection andother municipal tasks, and are often sent into the fieldsfor the harvest. Thus, in the context of a state-controlledeconomy, the existence of a large armed force may notnecessarily imply that there is greater preparation for war.After all, the United States Army Corps of Engineers hascarried out various public works projects for nearly 200years. The analogy between this activity and much ofwhat passes for defense spending in the Soviet Union is adirect and precise one.Given these facts, a pruning of the defense establishmentin America and a unilateral reduction in somenuclear weapons might very well yield great benefits interms of reducing tension and the likelihood of war withthe Soviet Union. As Earl Ravenal has detailed, this couldbe accomplished with no appreciable loss of strategicdeterrence, and might even make America better equippedto withstau"d any possible attack. Ravenal specificallyemphasizes the case of land-based nuclear missiles, whichmake the territory of this country a particularlyvulnerable and likely target in the unlikely event ofmilitary confrontation.This brings us to another point raised by Kennanwhich Luttwak chose to ridicule: the effectof more and more defense spending on theAmerican economy. In particular, Kennanpoints out the inflationary nature of mostdefense spending, which has been noted bySeymour Melman in The Permanent WarEconomy.Kennan notes that not only is inflation harmful to theeconomy in itself, but is especially harmful if we are infact losing ground to the Soviet Union in terms ofweaponry. As Kennan puts it:Even if it were true that we were rapidly being overtaken and33

The expansion of the public sector, which theconservatives hate almost as much as they hatecommunists, is largely the consequences of thepolicies conservative themselves advocate.left at a disadvantage by the rate of development of the Russianarmed forces ... we ought to recognize that the reason for this,if carefully examined, would turn out to lie less in the pace anddimensions of the Soviet effort than in the wildly increasing expensivenessof our own. Considering the rate at which the costsof national defense are now being permitted to rise in this country,we can hardly expect to keep up such a competition exceptat enormous, steadily increasing, and finally almost prohibitivecost to our economy as a whole.... If the protagonists of heavymilitary spending really wished to find the shortest path to thecorrection of what they see as a growing disbalance to ourdisfavor in the relative strength of Soviet and American forces,they would do well to give more attention to our own inflationon the military budget, and less to the effort to convince (he restof us of the menacing intentions and fearful strength of ourSoviet opponents.Of course Luttwak recoils in horror at this assertion.But rather than refute its logic he launches into one ofthe most vicious tirades against the chief proponent of thisview, Seymour Melman, that has ever seen print. Luttwakwrites:Mr. Kennan is obviously unaware that his authority is not adisinterested scholar driven to write by some late discovery, butrather a full-time critic of the military establishment, willing toattack any defense project on economic, environmental,diplomatic or moral grounds interchangeably, and who wouldno doubt oppose defense expenditures just as strongly even if bysome miracle their effect were to be·deflationary.Of course, Melman's motives are totally irrelevant tothe soundness of his analysis. And Melman certainly is notthe first person to point out that one of the worst featuresof the rise of a military state is the effect it has on thedomestic economy. Felix Morley used to emphasize thispoint constantly in his writings. (See his chapter, "TheNeed for an Enemy," in Freedom and Federalz'sm; see alsothis author's essay, "Why We Still Have a War Economy,"Reason, April, 1977). And more recently, Jonathan R.T.Hughes, a conservative professor of economics at NorthwesternUniversity, wrote in his book, The GovernmentalHabz't:Each war inflated the economy and gave the federal spendingmechanism a scope it did not previously have. The historical expansionof the federal sector has been mainly achieved by a fewshort bursts of wartime spending, not by a steady rise related tothe country's population growth, or the GNP it produced. Aftereach war there were expanded interest payments, new veteransbenefits, as well as the actual growth of government costs. Oncea new plateau of expenditures was achieved the gains were held.34For this reason alone, those who proposed some abatement offederal expenditures in the post-Vietnam War period had littlereason to hope. The tax system ensured self-financing of governmentexpansion.The expansion of the public sector, which conservativeshate almost as much as they hate the communists, is thenin very large part the direct consequence of the policiesconservatives themselves advocate, leading to all the attendantevils of which we are well aware, such as inflation.There is much more in both the Kennan book and theLuttwak eassy, but there is one final point to be madeabout George Kennan.Despite the fact that his principal fame derives fromwriting one famous essay about the Cold War back in1947, which developed the idea of containment, Kennanalways has been, for the most part, in the revisionistcamp. His most important work in this respect is Amerz'­can Dz'plomacy, 1900-1950, which is little read today.He writes, for example, with reference to the worldwars:When you tally up the total score of the two wars,' in terms oftheir ostensible objective, you find that if there has been anygain at all, it is pretty hard to discern.Does this not mean that something is terribly wrong here? Canit really be that all this bloodshed and sacrifice was just theprice of sheer survival for the Western democracies in the twentiethcentury? If we were to accept that conclusion, things wouldlook pretty black; for we would have to ask ourselves: Wheredoes all this end? If this was the price of survival in the first halfof the twentieth century, what is survival going to cost us in thesecond half? But plainly this immense output of effort andsacrifice should have brought us something more than just survival.And then, can we only assume, some great miscalculationsmust have been made somewhere? But where? Were they ours?Were they our Allies?All this is not to say that George F. Kennan is a libertarianor anything like it, but he is a remarkably astuteobserver of foreign policy whose writings reflect a verystrong trend of noninterventionism and revisionism, andwhose qualifications in this area are beyond repproach.This is why he is feared so greatly by the "arms zealots"like Edward Luttwak. Let us only hope that Kennan' isnot cowed by the viciousness of Luttwak's attack on him(and the other attacks that are likely to follow) and continuesto write and speak out on the important issues facingAmerican foreign policy. If he does, he can be a verystrong voice for rationality.March 1978

I Books and the ArtsFaithless, lawless, and kinglessby Robert R. CookeSociety Against the State: The Leader asServant and the Humane Uses of PowerAmong the Indians of the Americas, byPierre Clastres, translated by RobertHurley in collaboration with Abe Stein.Urizen Books, 186 pp., $12.95.Ever since the first European contact withthe Indian societies of North and SouthAmerica, Western observers have consideredthese societies to be anthropologicalcul-de-sacs-dead-end culturesthat failed to mature past Stone Age levelsbecause they were in some way "unable" tocreate true political organizations, Le., thestate. What political power there wasexistedonly in rudimentary form; thus thefact that historians and· anthropologistsconsidered these societies as inferior wassimply a matter of definition. To be sure,the Incas and Aztecs developed visible,familiar state structures, but the rest ofpre-Columbian America was a morass ofsocietal failure, groups unable to "progress"beyond their archaic, anarchicforms.The basic premise of the history we havebeen given by our schools, literature andpopular entertainnlent for untold centurieshas been the state as bulwark and source ofsociety. But recently the flood of statismproduced by two world wars seems to havecrested-may even be ebbing-and an intellectualresistance is emerging. If we donot confine our vision to strictly politicaland economic issues, we find both in otherdisciplines and in other countries counterpartsto American libertarian ideas. TheNouveau Philosophes of France, for example-AndreGlucksman, Bernard-HenriLevy and others-are challenging the fundamentalMarxist dogmas of Europeanstatism. Now, this translation of PierreClastres' La societe contre l'etat makesavailable to American readers a book thatmay be the first anarchist classic in the fieldof anthropology.Society Against the State is a discourseof power, both general and particular.Clastres provides the raw material for thisbook from his own records (he lived withtribes in Paraguay and Venezuela) andthose of other observers since the 16th cen-Libertarian Reviewtury concerning leadership and politicalpower in American Indian societies (especiallythe tropical forest cultures-thenomadic Guayaki, the sedentary Tupi­Guarani farmers-but occasionally venturingas far afield as the Apaches underGeronimo). Clastres underscores the observationswith his classification of these"peoples without history" as societies :'instruggle against the state."The Indian societies discussed byClastres were and are (those few that survive)purely voluntary associations.Political power did exist, in the sense(employed by Clastres) of there beingorganized social functions; but powerresided in the community as a whole. Themost singular aspect of the chiefs of thesetribes is that they had no coercive power; achief performed several functions, but hadno authority to enforce anything, in peacetime(war created a special case). The chiefwas effective in his office only as long asthe consensus omnium lasted; the moment"his" (or "hers"-women were sometimechiefs) people judged him to have oversteppedhis assigned role, his powervanished-for the people ceased to followhim.Indian societies were stateless by design,not chance. Both political infrastructureand individual psychology were intendedto reinforce each other to defeat any attemptto impose coercive rule.The Indian understanding of power isprofound: "It is in the nature of primitivesociety to know that violence is the essenceof power. Deeply rooted in that knowledge35

is the concern to constantly keep powerapart from the institution of power, commandapart from the chief." (Emphasisadded)Philosophically, the Indians held thatboth power and nature were limits on thedomain of culture, which "apprehendspower as the very resurgence of nature"and sees "the principle of an authoritywhich is external [to culture] and thecreator of its own legality [to be] achallenge to culture itself."But, just as culture negates nature, somay it negate power: "Thus effective elaborationof the political function, coercivepower, is possible only if it is in some wayinherent in the group"-Le., a part ofculture. The Indians realize fully that thebasis of culture is exchange, exchange ofgoods and ideas. They defeat power, then,by removing its perquisites and duties fromthe realm of exchangeable values; for example,the chief must recite daily a speechto which no one pays any attention, so thatno ideas are. exchanged. With the ruptureof exchange, the political function ceases tobe a part of culture and thus becomes impotent.The individual psychology that makesthis work is deeply ingrained, especially bythe rite de passage, a process both awesomeand horrible to European observers. TheIndian societies have no written law; in theinitiation into adulthood (endured by bothsexes), the law is inscribed in the memoryof each person by ordeals of physical torture,in rites undergone voluntarily, eveneagerly, borne with incredible stoicism. Inthese "societies of the mark" both the lawand membership in society (they are thesame to Indians) are written in pain on eachbody. This primitive law, a prohibition ofpolitical inequality, says to each member ofsociety: "You are worth no more thananyone else; you are worth no less thananyone else . . . You will not have thedesire for power; you will not have thedesire for submission. "By each individual'sacceptance' of personal agony, and by therememberance thereof, a·more monstrouscruelty-the state-is rejected.Even granting the existence of workinganarchic societies, some critics will remainunimpressed: What, after all, is proven bythe example of scattered tribes of Indians,barely eking a living from the forest?To this, Clastres makes two telling rejoinders,one demographic, one econolnic.Because of recent American studies of Indianpopulations, as well as his own calculations,Clastres agrees with the estimationsof P. Chaunu, in the Revue Historique,that the population of pre-ColumbianAmerica was not 8 or 13 or 40.million peoplebut rather "80 and perhaps 100 millionsouls." Even excluding the Incan and Aztec36populations and a number of societies withstate-like organizations, we must concludethat around the year 1500, a small but substantialportion of the human race lived instateless societies. On the economic side,Clastres argues that Indian societies wereactually "affluent": They worked but a fewhours a day, spending most of their time inpursuit of happiness, and enjoyed diet andhealth certainly superior to that of theirEuropean contemporaries. The absence ofcapital accumulation, however we mayjudge it, was from choice, not incapacity.After following Clastres through the Indiansocieties, seeing the reality of culturesthat deny the state even the opportunity togain a toehold, one wonders with theauthor, What caused the collapse in othersocieties of social structures acting as barriersagainst power in other societies?Clastres produces several hypotheses, butthese are only suggestions. He evinces littleinterest in showing how cultures failedagainst the state; he desires instead to exploretheir successes.I should like to have read such an account,Clastres' view of the origins of thestate, judging from the insights demonstratedin this work. As he died in a car accidentin Paraguay this past summer, at theage of 43, Society Against the State muststand as his chief contribution to politicalanthropology. Yet there is one major flawwith the book: The inadequacy of thistranslation is a serious matter. TheAmerican edition has many internal stylevariations, and numerous Frenchphrases-perfectly good constructions inthe original-are translated awkwardly,even literally, into disagreeable or meaninglessEnglish forms. I strongly suggest tothe publisher that, for the second edition, abetter translator or a bilingual copyeditorbe put to work."Faithless, lawless, and kingless," the Indiancultures of the forest were to the Europeanconquerors, soldiers, and priests whoclaimed the sanction of a murderous godand an intolerant state for their actions.Thus, power ever seeks to disguise itself,exalting its own qualities, denigrating itsfoes. And, although new studies of stateand power are removing their mystique,we too often accept unwittingly the judgementof power upon its vanquished (andvanished) enemies. Pierre Clastres' achievementwas to brush aside the deceits ofpower, to uncover a society, strange andprimitive to our eyes,' whose people valuedtheir liberty above all.Robert Cooke is the manager of Laissez­Faire Books and associate editor of thenewsletter of the Association of LibertarianFeminists.Aproblernofdefinitionby Percy L. Greaves, Jr.The Inflation Swindle, by Ernest J. Oppenheimer.Prentice-Hall, 190 pp., $8.95.For years the politicians of both majorpolitical parties have told us they are opposedto inflation. Yet inflation goes onand on. As the swindle continues, the damageit does to our misdirected economybecomes ever more difficult to correct oreven alleviate. Nevertheless, it is the rarepolitician who will propose that ourgovernment and its agencies stop their constantcreation of the newly-manufactureddollars they sneak into the pockets andbank accounts of their favorite voters.As our inflation fails to fade away aspromised, it has become a subject of deeperand deeper concern to more and more ofour citizens, particularly the retired, theunemployed, and the nonunion workers,who find it ever more difficult to meet theirdaily needs. A sighing majority seem toswallow the official line that the trouble lieswith greedy businessmen who keep askingfor higher and higher prices. Others seemto believe that inflation is the result of someact of God, beyond the control of humansor their governments. Still others acceptthe Marxian fallacy that inflation is an inherentweakness in capitalism itself.As time passes, a few members of oursociety are beginning to question some ofthe sleeping pills handed out by theEstablishment spokesmen and trumpeted inthe mass communication media. One suchperson is Ernest J. Oppenheimer, whoholds a Ph.D. in international relations andhas done time at a leading university and atthe State Department. Annoyed by the factthat inflation and taxes had forced him "toaccept a negative return" on his speculationin government securities, he started in 1970to ask some questions and look for theanswers. His first' discovery was that thiscondition of perpetual inflation has beengoing on since 1940. So he "set to workdeveloping a procedure that would rectifythis error."His findings were so startling to him thathe started writing articles for financialpublications. He has now published hisconclusions in a book entitled The InflationSwindle. For an amateur economist whohas probably never heard ef the AustrianSchool, he has come up with a number ofsound conclusions-as well as a largernumber which are not so sound. Hisgreatest weaknesses are his acceptance ofsome of the basic fallacies which contributeMarch 1978

to our present inflation, and his recommendations,which would make matters worserather than better.First, the good news. By reading AdamSmith and studying the facts available tohim, Oppenheimer now has no doubt thatour government is not only the main culprit,but is also the main beneficiary of inflation.He has found out not only how thegovernment uses· the Federal Reserve systemto monetize its debt, but also how thatdebt can be manipulated into roughlyseven times as many new dollars-by usinggovernment securities as a fractionalreserve for the dollars the government thuscreates and pumps out through the bankingsystem. He does not seem to be aware thatprivate debt is also monetized in a similarmanner. For the present, the latter is thelesser of the two evils.He is also able to tell us that inflationfouls up accounting and interest rates,while creating illusory business profits(which the government taxes and thus reducesavailable capital). He realizes thatthese Keynesian policies have not preventedrecessions or mass unemployment.He verifies his own experience that inflationpenalizes savers. And he is justifiablydisturbed at the legal limitations placed onthe interest rates that savings institutionscan pay savers. At one point he states thatsavings are the source of all loans. This is,of course, the way it should be. Unfortunately,our government sanctions and obtainsloans of money which no one hassaved and which has been created solely bylegal legerdemain. He makes much of thefact that inflation is fraudulent and thusimmoral.Oppenheimer's book contains manykind references to the free market. Theauthor recognizes the desirability ofmarket-determined interest rates, free fromall government manipulations and controls.He has rightly concluded that if ourinflation is not soon stopped, our wholesociety will be in serious jeopardy. As hestates it, "The most important prerequisiteto correct action is to understand as fully aspossible the nature of the problem.... Theproblem must be tackled directly throughpolitical means, to force the government toreturn to financial orthodoxy and constitutionalprocedures. Our main energies asresponsible citizens should be directed tothat task, rather than being dissipated byfruitless endeavors to outwit inflation." Tothis we can say, amen.When it comes to his own understandingof inflation and to his suggested remedies,he is on shakier ground. Perhaps hisgreatest weakness is his acceptance of thevery popular fallacy that government canand should maintain a so-called "stableprice leve1." Accordingly, he repeatedlyLibertarian ReviewGold and Silver517-351-3466Price counts. At Liberty Coin Service we have been offeringinvestors the lowest prices on gold and silver coins since1971.Consider, the following price chart. All are actual prices,including commissions, quoted by telephone during the firstweek of January of 1978.u.s Silver Coins [per $1,000 face]Jan. 2 Jan. 3 Jan. 4 Jan. 5 Jan. 6LCS 3550 3460 3495 35101;)BrambleQ) 3700 N/A 3600 3600C1)Numisco.52 3650 3536 3608 3624IPMC 3684 3603 3653 3645South Africa Kruger Rands (price for 20 coins)LCS 3645 3570 3615 36101;)BrambleQ)C1)3690 N/A 3680 3640Numisco .52 3708 3625 3677 3677IPMC3768 3682 3736 3742Liberty Coin makes the following claim: Our prices arelowest. And we invite you to call our competitors andcompare. Then call us. You will save money.Of course, service counts too. And Liberty Coin Service offersfast rei iable service. All orders are processed the dayreceived. Normally, shipment is made within 24 hours of ourreceipt of good funds.And we publish a monthly "Report to Our Clients" thatkeeps you informed of the precious metals situation. It justmay be the only letter around that isn't hard sell. We thinkyou can make up your own mind.And when you do make up your mind, we think you will dealwith us at Liberty Coins. Because price and service count.For further information, write or call for our "Gold and SilverInformation Packet".300 Frandor Ave.• Lansing, Michigan 48912(517) 351-472037

suggests, as his chief remedy, that thegovernment issue what he calls "inflationproofed"bonds. He is also an advocate ofall forms of indexing. He does not seem torealize that such indexing merely shifts theinflation burdens, while reducing the incentives(for the groups that have temporarilybenefited) to fight the real evil-inflation ofthe quantity of money.He apparently picked up this idea froman unfortunate article of Alfred Marshall,the teacher of Keynes. He seems to think ita simple thing to tie some easily manipulatedpurchasing unit to a cost-of-livingindex. Similar ideas have been advanced byIrving Fisher, the Monetarist School, and,more recently, by Nobel Prize winner F. A.Hayek, who now endorses private moneyor moneys based on complex commodityindexes. So perhaps he may be forgiven.The problem is not quite so simple,however. As Oppenheimer admits, "in adynamic, innovative society with an everchangingstream of goods and services, itshould be acknowledged that a perfect indexcannot be constructed." What he doesnot seem to realize is that an index alwayshas to be the result of value judgments as towhat to include and exclude and whatweight to assign to each item. Those whomake the decisions are thus forced to selectan index which will hurt some and helpothers. As the stream of goods and servicesshifts, new decisions must be made constantly,always at the expense of some whowill protect the justness of their injury.The Carter administration has recentlybeen busy with statistical index "revisions"or up-datings which tend to show theirregime in a better light. Such politicaleconomic manipulations which vainly attemptto create prosperity are the veryheart of our inflation problems.The very idea of a listable price level" is autopian dream that cannot be fulfilled. It isonly imaginable in a stagnant "evenlyrotating economy" that repeats itself with acertainty impossible in reality. It should beremembered that such a dream was the visionof Franklin Roosevelt when he brokeour government's promises to redeem itsbonds and dollars in a specified quantity ofgold. As FDR stated in 1933, "When wehave restored the price level, we shall seekto establish and maintain a dollar whichwill not change its purchasing and debtpayingpower during succeeding generations....We are continuing to movetoward a managed currency."The Federal Reserve system became theengine of inflation in World War I. For-. tunately, at that time there were limitationson the degree to which it could inflate.When these limits were approached, a reasonablyfree economy forced a correction.Roosevelt and his successorss removedthese limitations one by one, until Nixonremoved the last on August 15, 1971. Allthese actions were taken with the plea thatthey were needed to provide a "stable pricelevel," prevent recessions and provide fullemployment. As Ludwig von Mises hadforewarned, these efforts obviously havefailed.Oppenheimer does not like gold as amonetary standard. He thinks history hasshown that government can inflate withgold as well as with paper. It is true thatYOUR OPPORTUNITY TO HEAR THE GREAT FREE MARKET ECONOMISTLUDWIG VON MISISANNOUNCING THREE IMPORTANT TALKS-NEW ON CASSETTE TAPE.On October 10, 1973, Ludwig vonMises died at the age of 92.Acknowledged leader of the AustrianSchool of Economics, Mises was, in the words of one scholar, "perhapsthe most articulate, consistent and courageous defender of liberty and thefree market that modern times have known." Among Mises' many pathbreakingworks are The Theory of Money and Credit, Planning for Freedom,Omnipotent Government, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, and the monumentalHuman Action.Now, AUDIO-FORUM has acquired rights to three of Mises' mostImportant talks. Recorded on the spot. each captures all the intellectualexcitement of the occasionLiberty and Property. With a forceful style and superb use of language,Mises outlines the nature, function and effects of capitalism. Hedemolishes many of the myths surrounding the Industrial Revolution, showswhy political freedom is impossible without economic freedom, points outthe differences between government and the market, and demonstrateshow social ism destroys freedom.The Spirit of the Austrian School. In this informal. spontaneousdiscussion, Mises looks back at the early years of the Austrian School ofEconomics. He recalls his students at the time, many of whom have gone onto become world-famous economists, philosophers and intellectuals.Why Socialism Always Fails. Mises describes the nature of societybased on the principle of socialism, and contrasts it with society under theprinciple of free market exchange. He exposes the weaknesses of socialism,tells why many people unwisely advocate it, and outlines how the freemarket helps men achieve their goals.These three tapes are available exclusively from AUDIO-FORUM. Theymay be ordered individually, or as a complete set for just $28.65. a 20%discount.Yes. Ludwig von Mises is gone. But his masterful achievements live on. Inthese recordings, his penetrating thoughts and eloquent style are as vividand alive as ever. For the individual who places human liberty among hishighest values, they are truly "must listening."Whether you order one cassette, two, or all three. you're protected byAUDIO-fORUM's unconditional money-back guarantee: If you're dissatisfiedin any way, simply return the tape or tapes within three weeks and we'llsend you a prompt and full refund.Clip and mail the coupon today.• ~u~m~~a~t~~w':~e~t:s~l~W~O~~:··.o ALL THREE TAPES AT A 20% DISCOUNT, $28.65 I0 Liberty and Property, tape 400, $12.950, The Spirit of the Austrian School, tape 900, $12.95I ICJ Why Socialism Always Fails, tape 155, $12.95I understand that if I'm not completely satisfied, I may return the recording(s)within three weeks and receive a full refund.IName_IAddressI City State Zip II 0 Enclosed is my check or money order for $ Io Or, charge my:0 VISA (BankAmericard) 0 Master Charge' 0 American Express .1Card number_Expiration date ~I Signature BUDIC.':aAUm'.1~901 N. 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governments have clipped coins, reducedreserve requirements, and ended goldredemption. These things, however, haveoccurred because a negligent electorate permittedthem. Governments cannot inflatethe quantity of gold. Governments cannotprint gold. Under present conditions, theThe Establishmenthas befuddled theissue by changing thepopular definition ofinflation to signifyone of the resultsof their increaseson the quantityof money-namely,higher prices.market left free would undoubtedly choosegold as its money. As regards money, thesole function of government ought to be todefine the monetary unit and then let thecourts enforce the laws against fraud.If we are to solve the inflation problem,we first must understand the term in itsonly meaningful sense-an increase in thequantity of money. This is the historicaland dictionary meaning that both presentsthe problem and points to the solutionstopincreasing the quantity of money.The modern Establishment has befuddledthe issue by changing the populardefinition of inflation to signify one of theresults of their increases in the quantity ofmoney-namely, higher prices. Unfortunately,this is not even the most importantconsequence of an increase in the quantityof money-the misdirection of the economyin a manner that must inevitablybreakdown.This change in the popular definition ofinflation is not without serious consequences.When people define inflation ashigher prices, as Oppenheimer does, thereis a natural tendency to think that businessmenwho raise prices are responsiblefor inflation. The cure is thus thought to beprice controls. Now businessmen, likeworkers and everyone else, are alwaysseeking higher incomes. They would like toraise their prices with every sale. Whydon't they double their prices every month?They simply cannot get such higher prices.In times of inflation, however, when thegovernment is pumping out newly-createddollars, they can ask and get higher pricesbecause there are people who can and willLibertarian Reviewpay these higher prices. They are the firstrecipients of the newly-created money. Fewpeople understand the legal processes. Stillfewer understand the dire consequences.When the quantity of money is inflated,some group must get its hands on the newmoney first. They spend it before prices goup. This means that those who follow themto the market place, with money they haveearned or saved, find fewer goods and servicesavailable. They then bid up theprices. As this process continues, businesstends to produce more and more for thosewho spend the newly-created money, andless and less for those who spend moneythat was earned in return for contributionsto the market. Inflation thus redirects theeconomy at the expense of the nation'sworkers and savers.Inflation can always be stopped at anytime. When the government stops increasingthe quantity of money, those who werespending the newly-created money mustreduce their purchases, and those who soldto them must look for new customers. Thisperiod is popularly called a recession ordepression, as business and workers mustshift their efforts and curb their appetitesfor higher incomes. If the inflation is notstopped in time, the result will inevitablybe runaway inflation, with the monetaryunit becoming worthless.Oppenheimer should be given greatcredit for his private search for an answerto inflation. If we are to save our civilization,many more people must follow hispath. All our citizens should open theireyes and minds to the simple facts of currentpolitical and economic life. There are anumber of good publications in print.Starting with Ludwig von Mises' TheTheory of Money and Credit (1912),brought up to date in reprints of a 1953 edition,Austrian economists have made availablea number of valuable contributions.This reviewer is, of course, prejudiced. Forthose seriously seeking to understand ourinflation and the solution to the corollaryeconomic problems of our age, he recommendsstarting with Murray Rothbard'sWhat Has Government Done to OurMoney?, then going to this reviewer'sUnderstanding the Dollar Crisis, and concludingwith Mises' recently-released Onthe Manipulation of Money and Credit. Ifenough people did that, the next Congresswould soon put an end to the inflationswindle-the political manufacture of moreand more dollars.Percy L. Greaves, Jr., a consultingeconomist and former student of Mises, isthe author of Understanding the DollarCrisis and Mises Made Easier.A festschrift ofinsultsby Tom G. PalmerMenckeniana: A Schimpflexicon, ed. byHaardt and Mencken, Octagon, New York,132 pp., $9.50.After many years of inaccessibility, SaraHaardt Mencken's unique tribute to herhusband is back in print. Menckeniana: ASchimpflexicon (from der Schimpf, an insult)is a collection of some of the mostvicious, ridiculous and unintentionallyhilarious attacks ever printed. The contributorsto this slim volume range fromfever-swamp bible-bangers to KKKers toprofessors of literature, and they damnMencken for every sin imaginable. Thesesins-real and imagined-include atheism,Germanism, libertarianism, Judaism, havinga foreign name, Bolshevism, Toryism,loose living, diabolism, vulgarity, rum andRomanism, and being the Antichrist in theflesh. These carefully selected insults, completewith authors and sources, are arrangedby topic, including zoological("polecat," "howling hyena," "maggot,"etc.); genealogical "hunnish," "a Negro byinclination if not by birth," "Neanderthal,"etc.); statesman; critic; writer; ex cathedra;as an American; and so on.Along with the predictably vitriolicreligious fanatics, from the ChautauquaYahoos of the Bible Belt to the orthodoxright reverends in their pulpits, we arepresented with a panoply of opponents ofcommon sense, free thought and freedomfromthe American Legion, to trendyVeblenites, to chiropractors, to single taxers,to republicans, to rotarians, to theAnti-Saloon League, to the ChicagoWorker ("one of [capitalism's] staunchestdefenders . . . tells many lies and manymore platitudes"), to one Rev. McConnell,writing in the Oklahoma City News ("ARadical Red. It's a wonder decent peoplehaven't risen up and lynched him.").The Schimpflexicon was the product ofSara Haardt's diligent search through thethousands of articles on Mencken and"Menckenism" which spewed forth from allover the country. The collection was arrangedby Mencken and Haardt and publishedby Alfred A. Knopf, Mencken's life-.long friend and the publisher of Mencken'sbooks and magazines, the Smart Set andthe American Mercury. The introduction,signed only "The Publisher," states: "Himselfgiven to somewhat acidulous utterance,he [Mencken] has probably been denouncedJ!lore vigorously and at greater39

length than any other American of histime, not even excepting Henry Ford,Robert M. LaFollette, Clarence Darrow,and Sacco and Vanzetti. Here there is roomonly to offer some salient specimens of thisanti-Mencken invective-mainly singlesentences or phrases torn from their incandescentcontext. Some were chosen fortheir wit-for there are palpable hitsamong them!-some for their blisteringferocity, and some for their charmingidiocy."The examples chosen for this cornucopiaof vituperation range from frustratingstupidity to blind hatred:e"Mencken is connected with the NewYork World, the attitude of which towardRomanism and Rum the reader shouldknow full well. From his name, he seems tobe a Jew, or at least a German, and recentlyin an Alabama daily he was sneering atGenesis." (Alabama Christian Advocate)e"A MONUMENTAL jackass. A liarsupreme. A bomb-thrower. His loyaltyduring the late war was questionable."(The Easton [Maryland] Star);e"When H. L. Mencken assails theRotarian of today he is attacking theAmerican people." (Rabbi Louis Binstock,the Charleston [W. Virginia] Gazette)For. his brilliant posthumous attack onone of history's most sanctimonious,puffed-up, demagogic wind-bags, WilliamJennings Bryan, ("If the fellow was sincere,then so was P. T. Barnum."), Menckenearned the lofty contempt of Iowa'sCascade Pioneer: "Of such a man thisbloodless vivisectionist would viciouslydismember with play of words and phrases40and destroy the memory of the honorableAmerican citizen as he lies dead, and strikeat him with the fell purpose of destroyingthe ideals of men who believe in somethingdearer than the beliefs of the Darwins andthe Darrows and the Menckens, and allthat tribe of scoffers and scorners, whoseek to make of the world as Godlesschaos."Then there was Professor Edwin Sim,writing in· the Santa Monica EveningOutlook, who took up the cudgel for theman who tricked us into war: "What can besaid of a man like Mencken who, in thepresence of the broken body and spirit ofthe still living Woodrow Wilson, couldrefer to him frequently as 'the lateWoodrow'?" What indeed? Only thatMencken had been legally barred from themails by Wilson's war censorship, and hadnot been taken in by his tenuous claim tocivility; that he saw Wilson for the wicked,little war-monger that he was, willing tosacrifice countless lives for his insipid yetfanatical Anglophilia.Octagon has, in recent years, reprinted averitable. treasury of Mencken. OtherMencken works which have been rescuedfrom inaccessibility and reprinted inlibrary editions (in the original type, printedon cream paper, bound in sturdy, redcloth) include Treatise on Right andWrong, Notes on Democracy, In Defenseof Women, A Book of Prefaces, The BathtubHoax and other Blasts and Bravos, andthe entire six volumes of Mencken's famousPrejudices. Republication of the Schimpflexiconis a fitting tribute, a festschriftwhich Mencken would have welcomed.The sky is falling!The sky is falling!byJeff RiggenbachLiterary Politics in America: The End of IntelligentWriting, by Richard Kostelanetz.Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 500 pp.,$5.95.Richard Kostelanetz, according to his owngenerously detailed description, "stands sixfeet tall, weighs 180 pounds and loves especiallyto swim and read." Also, presumably,to write and edit and compile.Literary Politics is Kostelanetz's eighthbook, not counting the fifteen or so he'sedited and the five or six he's compiled.And what with his contributing poems andstories and essays to periodicals, andwriting and producing and narrating TVprograms, and delivering lectures, andstaging "illuminated demonstrations of hiscreative work," it seems incredible that heshould find any time for swimming. In fact,when you reflect on Kostelanetz's tenderyears (he was born, he says, on May 4,1940), it seems incredible that he shouldhave found time even to emerge from hisapartment in recent years.But wait a minute. Maybe that's it. Maybehe hasn't emerged from his apartment inyears. Maybe that's his secret-the perspectiveon things which has enabled himto sustain such a tone of outrage for morethan four hundred closely printed pages,while arguing a thesis as nearly self-evidentas that taxation is theft or that involuntarymilitary "service" is slavery.Kostelanetz's thesis, put simply, is thatan American literary "establishment,".headquartered in New York, has beenworking actively for years to promote thereputations of its members, while keepingnonmembers, especially the young and innovative,out of print. This has been goingon, according to Kostelanetz, since the1930s, when certain Southern writers, all ofthem friends or acquaintances (and in somecases husbands and wives) of each other,launched what he calls an "invasion" of theAmerican literary community. In the nexttwo decades, they founded "a network ofmagazines sympathetic to one another,with overlapping lists of editors, contributingeditors, contributors, reviewersmagazinesin which the star critics were frequentlyquoted, both in the essays and inMarch 1978

THIRD EDITIONOF THISCLASSICSELLS FOR$20.00.IT'S YOURS~~ It rests with men whether they will make the properuse of the rich treasure with which this knowledge[of economics] provides them or whether they willleave it unused. But if they fail to take the best advantageof it and disregard its teachings and warnings, they willnot annul economics; they will stamp out society andthe human race. "- Ludwig von MisesWITH MEMBERSHIP IN THE CONSERVATIVEBOOK CLUB AND YOUR AGREEMENT TO BUYONLY 4 BOOKS OVER THE NEXT 18 MONTHSHUMAN ACTION is fascinating. The author, Ludwig vonMises, dean of free-market economists, is a cool logician, ou.rgreatest economic scholar, a passionate lover of freedom - andan equally passionate enemy of those who would take freedomaway from us.The book has nothing but scorn for the phony "compassion"of the Marxians and Keynesians - and Mises clearly shows howtheir theories actually spread suffering among the poorl One byone, he ~'eeps away the glib fallacies of Liberalism and socialism.For instance, how many of these fallacies can you effectivelyrebut?* Free-market economics was all right for the 19th century butit is useless in today's complex economy.* Capitalism was built on the broken bodies of exploitedworkers.* Businessmen have ravaged our natural resources in their lustfor profit.* Unemployment is caused by lack of "effective demand".* Unions have won rich benefits for their members.* Advertising is a device for defrauding the consumer andrepresents a net economic loss.* Minimum-wage laws help the poor.Mises answers these questions and hundreds more. He offersus a mountain of fresh insights, always in a crisp style, free fromclumping pe4antry. Among his major contriDutions: 1. A remarkableanalysis of inflation. How it starts. The evils it brews.2. Causes of the business cycle. 3. Effects of state interventionin the economy. 4. Irrefutable demonstration that free bankingleads to hard money.Human Action certainlr is not a book you will read over aweeken~. It is a classic 0 economic thoughf- meant to be thecompanion of a lifetime.'" massive-924 pages'" entirely reset'" revised by the author'" detailed 20 ..page index"An arsenal of fact and logic."..... Chicago DQ,ily NewsIfHuman Action • .. should become the leadingtext of everyone who believes in freedomtin individualismt and in a free-marketeconomy. U - Henry HQ,uitt"Dr. von Mises has made a tremendous contributionto economic thinking in a worldthat thinks only of economics."..... Vermont Royster"I think that HumQ,n Action is unquestionablythe most powerful product of the humanmind in our timet and I believe it willchange human life for the better during thecoming centuries as profoundly as Marxismh~ changed all our lives for the worse inthis century." - Rose Wilder LQ,ne". . . offers a combination of great scholarshipand the rare ability to make an abstruseeconomic subject interesting. u-Lawrence Fertig"The finest economic treatise of this generation."- Raymond Moley"Perhaps the most important economictreatise of our time. u - Wall Street Journalp" _ .._ .._ ..__....I {II CONSERVATIVE BOOK CLUBlIUI 165 Huguenot St., New Rochelle, New York 10801 IPlease send a FREE copy of the $20.00 Third Edition of Ludwig von Mises' Human- Action and accept my membership in the Conservative Book Club-the only bookclub expressly for political conservatives. I agree to buy 4 books from among morethan 150 to be offered in the next 18 months, after which I am free to resign atIany time. I will be offered books on politics, investing, social issues, religion,conservative ideas, Communism, history, etc. Membership entitles me to a free Isubscription to the Club BU'.letin, which brims with news of interest t.o conservatives.I am eligible to buy ClUb books at discounts of 20% to 50% plus shipping.If I want the monthly Selection I do nothing; it will come automatically about one month later. If I don't want the .selection, or I prefer one of the Alternates, II merely inform you on the handy form always provided. I'll be offered a newSelection every 4 weeks-13 per year. If due to late mail delivery I get a Selection Iwithout having had 10 days to decide if I want it, I may return it at Club expense.LR115 INAMEI ADDRESSII CITY/STATE ZIP I-------------_.~~_.._~-~_..__..~I

the ads, and their contributions featuredover those by a supporting cast." They concoctedand promoted a "reinterpretation ofthe intellectual and literary traditions toemphasize (and often resurrect) appropriatepredecessors for themselves." Theydisplayed "decided penchants for mentioningeach other in the same breath with thegreatest figures of Western literature andfor measuring both earlier or contemporarywriters against . .. [their own]ideology."Of course, all this posturing and selfpromotionwould have come to nothing ifcertain of the Southern writers (notablyWilliam Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren,Erskine Caldwell and Carson McCullers)hadn't won some measure of popular acclaimand academic acceptance. "In theevolution of an establishment," Kostelanetzwrites, "collective success beginswhen the group's stars earn recognitionoutside their immediate sphere (where acclaimhad previously been guaranteed),when its pet 'ideology' gains increasing acceptance,when its academic colleagues arechosen as professors in the major universities.. . and so forth."By the early 1950s, the Southern literaryestablishment had seen its "most toutednovelist" win the Nobel Prize, and itscritics and poets "establishedas professorsat first-rank universities, their textbooksbest-sellers, their essays and poems frequentlyanthologized." But a new generationof readers with a different taste inliterature was now buying books. And bythe mid-1960s, there was a new, Jewish,literary establishment, with Saul Bellow asits William Faulkner and Irving Howe as itsAllen Tate.By "literary" writing, I should quicklypoint out, Kostelanetz does not meanpoetry, fiction, and literary criticism."Literature" he says "is simply that writingwhich. is appreciated long after its firstpublication, as well as that writing whichemerges from distinctly 'literary' traditions.'Intelligent writing' particularly includespoetry and fiction, and also criticismthat is more substantial and consideredthan glib reviewing, and, to a lesser extent,other serious non-fiction expository formsthat inhabit a realm between special knowledgeand the general interests of the educatedpublic."Thus Kostelanetz includes writers like IrvingKristol and Daniel Bell in his threepagemembership list of "The New YorkLiterary Mob." And his profile of how theSouthern and Jewish literary establishmentswent about establishing themselvesmay be applied with equal justice to evensuch predominantly nonliterary groups asthe intellectual elite of the libertarian42movement. There are the magazines withthe overlapping lists of editors and contributors;the publishing, reviewing, promotingand advertising of each other'sbooks; the reinterpretation of modern intellectualhistory; the resurrection ofneglected precursors (like Nock, Tucker,Spooner and Stirner); the tendency to mentioneach other "in the same breath" withthe greatest figures in Western thought;even the "eccentric who pursues idiosyncratic,often contrary extremes, and yet remainsloyal because no one else willpublish him," and whose "waywardnessand intellectual indulgences" are "oftencited by group spokesmen as evidence oftheir'openness'."The same profile fits the science-fictioncommunity in this country, for all thatscience-fiction is ordinarily (if erroneously)thought of as subliterary. As far as I cansee, the profile fits all groups of intellectualswho have interests, ideas, and personalfriendships in common, and who winsufficient support from readers to "establish"themselves with those readers. Havingestablished themselves, they are motivatedto stay established. And like the most successfulcompetitors in any other market,they make use of advertising and publicrelations to secure their positions, and theyrefrain from knowingly helping their com;.petitors. Typically they become conservativeand resistant to change.But none of this is new. It is the way ofthe world. How could anyone live to be 34years old (Kostelanetz's age when the originaledition of his book was publishedthree years ago) without having observedthis pattern in human affairs? Unless ...but my original hypothesis is surely toofanciful; surely Kostelanetz has been out ofhis apartment; surely he has experiencedlife. Even if he hasn't, surely he has readsome of the judgements rendered on thisself-same issue by the elder statesmen ofearlier literary generations. George Moore,for example, in 1925: " ... each generation,dissatisfied with the literature thatpreceded it, is inspired to write anotherliterature . . . a literature which seems tothe writers more permanent than the literaturetheir fathers wrote, but which isdestined to pass away as silently. Of thepassing of literature there is no end; theworld is littered with dead literature aswith leaves...."Or James Branch Cabell, in 1928: "Fromthe beginning, it would seem, all reallymatured opinion has been at one on thepoint that the younger generation wasspeeding post-haste to the dogs. Since thecommencement of recorded literature,oldsters everywhere, in every known era,have drawn a snarling comfort from thispronouncement, just as pertinaciously, andjust as pathetically, as the world's currentyouth has always been positive that, whenonce everybody over fifty was disposed of,the human race was bound for themillenium...."But if Kostelanetz has read such judgements,he hasn't inferred from them thatcontemporary literary politics is only thelatest act in an ageless, endless drama. Farfrom it. "All pertinent discussion of whatto do," he writes, "must begin by acknowledgingthe imminent death of literature.. .." 'That's w hat the oldergeneration-the establishment-has accomplished.And as for the youngergeneration, "No writer born after 1939 hasbeen an initiator of the type of literaryscandals this book describes."Maybe Kostelanetz. should spend moretime. swimming and less time writing -andediting and compiling. Maybe he shouldtry public pools, where he'd meet peopleand have a chance to observe them interactingwith each other. Kostelanetz has alarge talent. Informed by a somewhat morerealistic attitude, he could go far.leff Riggenbach teaches criticism at UCLAand practices it in a number of magazines,including LR.Protectionism(Continued from page 6)Take this path one step further: A disintegrationof world trade along these linesnot only would lead to acute economic sufferingaround the world but also would intensifythe likelihood of war. One needs tothink back only a few years to the oil embargoof 1973-4, when world trade virtuallyground to a halt and American policymakersbegan to talk seriously about invadingthe Middle East to get oil, to get awhiff of what might ensue.Thus prospects for free trade are notbright. As Macaulay once said, "Free trade,one of the greatest blessings which agovernment can confer on a people, is inalmost every country unpopular."There is always the possibility that thetraditional liberal support for free trademay hold-although some prominent freetraders in Congress (like RepresentativeCharles Yanik, chairman of the Trade Subcommittee)have called openly forquotas-and that groups with vested interestsin free trade, like farmers and otherexporters, may offset the pressure for protection.In the end, though, the most importantbeneficiary of free trade is the consumer.If this fact can be made clear to theAmerican people, then we may yet avoid atrade war.March 1978

Busting theantitrust trustby D. T. ArmentanoThe Antitrust Paradox, by Robert Bork.Basic Books, 462 pp., $18.00To mention the subject of antitrust is toconjure up images of good governmentbattling bad business monopoly, all in thename of the consumer interest. Theseimages are widely believed to be accurateby the public, but they are simply not correct.Indeed, the antitrust vision is so overwhelminglyaccepted that the Congress islikely to expand the scope of the antitrustlaws themselves and approve legislationthat would allow the "break up" of supposedlyconcentrated American industries.Antitrust is a sacred cow almost withoutprecedent in public policy.Now it is certainly true that few membersof the general public really understandantitrust theory or have ever read an antitrustcase. But who could reasonably expectsuch behavior? There are many areasof our lives that are too complicated (costly)for direct investigation and so we relyon experts or specialists to make the complicationscomprehensible. If a trainedacademic economist tells you, for instance,that a particular business arrangement extendsand expands monopoly power fromone market to another, and thus injuresconsumer welfare, you are very likely toaccept his judgment. You are even morelikely to "believe" if almost the entire communityof academic economists chimes inwith agreement. And you certainly willbelieve if prominent and respected justicesof the Supreme Court sanction such atheory in case law for sixty years. Thetheory may be entirely incorrect but it is,nevertheless, legitimate because it has beensystematically legitimized by the peoplewho (should) know and by the people whocount. Indeed, over time the theory and thelaw tend to build up a social immunity toany serious criticism and the matter is, forall practical purposes, settled.In the area of antitrust theory and lawthis immunity is wearing off, fast. In recentyears scholarly articles highly critical ofantitrust theory and court decisions haveappeared in leading law journals. In addition,respected economists such as HaroldDemsetz and Yale Brozen have been increasinglycritical of conventional theoriesof concentration and of tRe empiricalstudies that claim to justify the atomizingof much of big business. Finally, JohnLibertarian ReviewMcGee's In Defense of Industrial Concentration(Praeger, 1971) and my own TheMyths of Antitrust (Arlington, 1972) werehead-on, systematic assaults on antitrusttheory and history. The criticisms wereclearly building for a final confrontationwith the conventional wisdom that wouldbring the entire controversy out into theopen.Robert Bork's The Antitrust Paradoxwill shake the smug paradigm of orthodoxbeliefs to its very foundations. No longerwill it be possible to ignore the critics of existingantitrust policy or dismiss theirarguments as fanciful and their facts ascontrived. Indeed, the Bork book is sowell-argued and persuasive, so comprehensivein its scope, so penetrating in its depthof analysis, and so remarkably clear that itcannot help but shift the burden of proof tothe establishment economists and lawyers.This is the most important antitrust bookof the last twenty years and even the mostenthusiastic advocate of regulation willhave to come to grips with its argumentsand facts.The modus operandi of Paradox is bothsimple and straight-forward: First, demonstratethat the only legitimate concern ofantitrust legislation is to insure that consumerwelfare is maximized; and second,demonstrate that our present anfitrustpolicies-excepting the prohibition against"naked" price-fixing-are not consistentwith that legitimate purpose. A good partRobert Barkof the book is devoted to demolishingarguments that consumers must be protectedfrom price discrimination, or exclusivedealing, or (most) mergers, oroligopoly, or even monopoly if attainedthrough internal growth rather than combination.Bork is convinced that consumersrequire no such alleged protection, thatsuch prohibitions tend to perpetuate or increaseinefficiency, and that the laws tendto protect high cost firms at the generalconsumer expense.Many lay readers of this book may notunderstand or be entirely convinced by therelentless logic, sound though it may be;what will convince them is the absolute andobvious nonsense of the leading antitrustcases. And it is the knowledge of how antitrustreally works in practice-as Bork socorrectly observes at the start of his bookthatis so necessary for public understanding,debate, and eventual reform.There are some important and subtle discussionsin The Antitrust Paradox thatdeserve to be highlighted. One such significantdiscussion is Bork's analysis of exclusionarypractices and alleged "barriers toentry" in the market. Both ALCOA and theUnited Shoe Machinery Corporation werechided by the court because they engagedin certain business practices that "excluded"competition. And mergers are frequentlystruck down by the courts on theargument that they tend to create barriersto the entry of new competition and, thus,restrain trade in violation of the law. YetBork correctly argues that all such exclusionsand (most) barriers are in actuality efficienciesthat some firms have institutedwhile others have not. Not to understandthis-and most industrial organizationtheorists do not-is to turn antitrust on itshead, to end up employing the law to attackthe very market arrangements that advancecomsumer welfare. As Bork correctlyconcludes, "Until the concept of barriersto entry is thoroughly revised, it will remainimpossible to make antitrust lawmore rational or, indeed, to restrain thegrowth of its powerful irrational elements."Bork closes his book with his own suggestionsfor reform. He would have antitrustlaws that only:• prohibit "naked" price-fixing andmarket division agreements between competitors;• limit horizontal mergers that createvery large market shares (those that leavefewer than three significant rivals in themarket);• and prohibit "direct" predation,employing governmental processes, thatare designed to drive rivals from a marketor delay the entry of new competitors.All the rest of antitrust should be aban-43

doned since its costs far outweigh any conceivablebenefits to consumers.Although it is destined to become a classicin its field, there are some difficulties in TheAntitrust Paradox that ought not to beneglected. The most important difficultyfor the professional economist is Bork'scomplete reliance on the standard neoclassicalprice models of (pure) competitionand (pure) monopoly. If these price modelsare both correct and relevant then Bork'sanalysis and conclusions are inevitable. Ifthese models are wrong-headed, or, worse,irrelevant, then Bork's analysis and policyconclusions may not follow at all. Further,Robert Bork's newbook will shake theSlllUg paradiglll oforthodox beliefs toits very foundations.No longer will it bepossible to ignorethe critics ofexisting antitrustpolicy or dislllisstheir argulllents asfanciful and theirfacts as contrived.since the real economic world never resembleseither price theory model, one importantquestion remains: What conclusionsare to be drawn unambiguously concerningresource allocation in all real-worldmarkets?These difficulties are most apparent inBork's discussion of price-fixing. NonancilIaryprice-fixing and market division areto be per se illegal since their intent or effectis to reduce output, raise prices, and thusmisallocate scarce economic resources.This conclusion follows from the puremonopoly model where, relative to purecompetition, the monopolist produces lessand charges more. But output in all realmarkets (imperfectly competitive, monopolisticallycompetitive, or oligopolistic) is"less" then it would be under purelycompetitive equilibrium conditions. Thusthe fact that production in the real world isless than it would be under pure or perfect44competition proves nothing at all aboutconsumer "welfare".Nor does the presence of "output restriction"by itself prove anything. If demanddeclines for a product or service, then outputought to decline also. Bork repeatedlyassumes-trapped within his own staticmonopoly model-that "garden-varietyprice-fixing restricts output producing adead-weight welfare loss to consumers."But, in fact, this is almost never the actualcircumstance of any price-fixing agreement.If Bork had actually developed thehistory of such conspiracies more systematically,he would have discovered thatthe "agreements" were resorted to in timesof severe recession and business uncertainty.The outputs were inevitably restrictedby buyers and not by sellers. Monopolystyleoutput restriction was neither the intentnor the achievement of sellers in thesecases.Nor, of course, were the price-fixers ableto sustain any real agreement. With no effectiveway to enforce the conspiracy, andwith significant output outside the cartel,the agreements proved almost totally ineffectual.Certainly, they were not able toboth restrict output and raise prices, althoughthey may have been able to moderateslightly the severity of the price decline.Yet Bork's per se rule would outlaw all suchattempts, and perhaps give rise to moreformal and lasting agreements throughmergers or even government participation.Bork repeatedly maintains that horizontalmergers ought not to be made illegal perse, even though they admittedly snuff outan existing competition, since the integrationof productive facilities "may" createefficiency and often does not "control themarket." Mergers may create economies,to be sure, but here we are talking aboutmergers that arise solely because priceagreements are illegal. Indeed, such amerger might tend to produce diseconomies,but still be preferable to bankruptcy.Yet while Bork is willing to trust the freemarket in almost all other areas, and willingto admit that the business structuresthat survive tend to be the most efficientones, he balks at extending these same presumptionsto price agreements.Thus, there are some difficulties with theBork book, and some of them are serious.Nonetheless, The Antitrust Paradox is awork of great skill, insight, and understanding.It should go a long way towardilluminating the murky underworld of antitrustand serve as an important beacon thatwill guide us out into the light.D. T. Armentano is professor of economicsat the University of Hartford, and theauthor ofThe Myths of Antitrust.The moralityofneoconservativisrnby Tibor MachanThe Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism, by Daniel Bell. Basic Books,301 pp., $12.95What is it that unites prominent intellectualsof both the Right and Left in theirunashamed distrust of freedom? Apparently,those who believe that the human spiritis a fragile thing, and those who fear thatwe mere humans have not been given a sufficientdose of the will to survive andflourish (in the material sense) both findcapitalism to be a dangerous system.Neoconservative prophet Daniel Bell,one of the keenest observers of our epoch'ssocial dra'ma, has gathered his fears-mostinitially published, in somewhat differentform, in The Public Interest, Commentary,Encounter, Daedalus and SocialResearch-into one imposing volumewhich details his qualms about the moraland cultural basis of capitalism. His highlyabstract, even abstractionist, analysiscarefully takes capitalism to task; but, asanyone who is familiar with the basictenets of neoconservatives such as Bell, IrvingKristol, Nathan Glazer and othersshould expect, Bell's criticisms all followfrom one principle: his own, false conceptionof the nature of capitalism. Take awaythis illusory foundation and the entireelaborate structure falls of its own weight.Professor Bell's central thesis, in his ownwords, is that "in the liberal ethos that nowprevails, the model for a cultural imago hasbecome the modernist impulse, with itsideological rationale of the impulse quest asa mode of conduct. It is this which is thecultural contradiction of capitalism." If thiskernel of insight seems a bit obscure atfirst, perhaps a look at the functioning ofthe neoconservative mind would be enlightening.The entire work can be read as an indictmentagainst what Bell and his colleaguescall hedonism, what they identify as thenecessary value assumption underlying thecase for capitalism. A more complete overviewof the history and application of thisnotion than is possible here is presented byDaniel Shapiro in his two-part series on"The Neoconservatives" in this and theprevious issue of Libertarian Review, so Iwill concentrate on the philosophicalunderpinnings of Bell's work.Bell tells us that capitalism "is aneconomic-cultural system, organized eco-March 1978

nomically around the institution of propertyand the production of commodities, andbased culturally in the fact that exchangerelations, that of buying and selling, havepermeated most of the society." But is thisdefinition sound?Capitalism is organized around the institutionof private property-a crucial factapparently overlooked by Bell. In his characterization,this vital aspect is lost. Indeed,most noncapitalist systems are alsoorganized around the institution of propertyper se, in that socialist economies arequite property-conscious. Property merelyconsists of valued items. The legal frameworkthat specifies rights to such itemsdetermines whether the socioeconomicsystem is capitalist, socialist, communal orwhatever. In Bell's analysis, many of hisconclusions hinge on his definitions.But if we amend Bell's definition ofcapitalism to focus on private property, thesecond half of his definition, concerningthe cultural basis of capitalism, seems to bea curiously bland stew, lacking thenecessary ethical and political ingredients.Could a private property system really bebased culturally "in the fact that exchangerelations . . . have permeated most ofsociety"? Of course not, because theprivate character established for propertymust give priority to self-responsibility.Aristotle was perhaps the first to point outthat the crucial flaw in communism is whatGarrett Hardin has called "the tragedy ofthe commons," that widespread neglectpermeates the economy because individualresponsibility is absent. Capitalism has abuilt-in ethical factor that Bell simply hasoverlooked:Even beyond this peculiar exclusion ofthe concept of private property, there areother factors relevant to capitalism whichescape Bell's notice. Above all, capitalismhas forced us to emphasize voluntaryhuman relations. This may not be an impressiveachievement in the eyes of thosewhose major concerns are order and tranquility,and, indeed, Bell fails to mentionthe ethical significance of an economicsystem under which individuals must takethe responsibility for their own actions.Individuals are daily faced with choices,where a discernable (although not easy)alternative is possible between the better,the not-so-good, and the worst. Whateverthe intellectuals say and pass on to futuresociologists to analyze, this is still the cruxof the moral life. And it is this moral lifethat capitalism, through its singular emphasison the sanctity of the individual andhis or her voluntary actions, helped alongmore than any other system has done.Of course, Bell has an answer of sorts tothis structure of morality, in another themethat flows throughout the book as a mis-46placed undercurrent. "What holds one toreality," he asks, "if one's secular system ofmeanings proves to be an illusion?" He offershis own response: "I will risk an unfashionableanswer-the return in Westernsociety of some conception of religion."This statement presents its own problems.Bell claims that secular systems ofmeanings have proven to be an illusion.Yet he has considered only one system,reductive materialism-perhaps the mostpoverty-stricken of all secular systems.There are thinkers sprinkled across thehistorical landscape who excel the reductivematerialists by lightyears:Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the BritishIdealists, and, more recently, Ayn Rand,Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, and MartinBuber come to mind.But over and above what may bedismissed as a problem of bad phrasing- asacrifice made for purpose of conciseness­I am concerned that Bell is unfair to thenaturalist-as against supernaturalistimpulse,and holds out too rnuch hope forus via the route of religion. Look, for exampleat the Hellenic age, in which the kindof religious attitude we are familiar withfrom Judeo-Christian faiths was clearly absent.Did that secularism provide the membersof those cultures with meanings thatproved to be an illusion? At the heart of thequestion of returning to religion lies thequestion about the truth of religion,specifically of theism. In our times, whenthe mere declaration of an answer fromsome source of absolute authority will notsuffice, we must confront this question inways possible for all of us to grasp. Theassuring counsel of the chosen few simplywill not suffice. Plainly put, a good, soundanswer is needed. And here Bell is of nohelp at all. Bell looks us over, in the fashionof a microbiologist taking a close look at a"culture", but we are given very little withwhich to help our predicament.But when it is openly lamented, throughoutBell's book, that "Western society lacks... civitas, the spontaneous willingness tomake sacrifices for some public good," Belloffers us very poor reasons indeed. So it isnot surprising that many remain skepticalabout how just is the constant demand forsacrifices.Worth noting is Bell's serious and fullyjustifiedconcern with the value postulatesunderlying much of capitalist social theory.The main spokesmen for capitalism todayare two renown Nobel Prize-winningeconomists, F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman.Both are essentially moral skeptics.Hayek does not believe that an ethicalsystem should be provided in support of hisclassical liberal or libertarian policies. Indeed,he thinks that there may be a contradictionbetween support of liberty andsupport of any particular ethical position.Milton Friedman believes, in turn, thatliberty is incompatible with the idea thatanyone can know what is the right way toact, in any universal sense.Many others who defend the free societyand market have very similar views.Perhaps underlying this impulse towardskepticism and relativism is the commonsenseaversion many have toward thekind of slave morality Nietzsche saw asthe essence of Christianity.It may be worth noting, in conclusion,that certain recent developments inphilosophy are pointing toward somethingfar more hopeful, yet fully consistent withsecular liberal politics, than Bell's ownreflections in this book. For example,David L. Norton's Personal Destinies: APhilosophy of Ethical Individualism(Princeton University Press, 1976), is abrilliant, erudite, philosophically robustand immensely inspiring argument for thesort of individualism that does not debaseman to the status of an undifferentiatedatom (or rat), but ascribes to each personthe fullest possible potential for human excellencein this life. With a little imaginativeethical reflection, Bell might havebeen able to do the same.I have been somewhat argumentativewith Daniel Bell's work-which, incidentally,should speak in its support, at leastfor its capacity to raise the importantethical and political questions of our age. Iam generally unsympathetic toward histendency of denouncing capitalism; but tothe extent capitalism has existed, I am fullyconvinced that through it, on the whole,human beings could lead better lives, notjust materially (although that counts for agood deal), but also spiritually, regardingthe development of their intelligence, artisticsensibilities, scientific knowledge,personal qualities, and whatever else contributesto the good life of man here onearth.Perhaps capitalism should be condemnedfor doing all this because thereby it haspaved the road to heaven with all sorts ofpowerful temptations. As for me, I will beever grateful, for without that bit ofcapitalism still left about us, I would probablybe a prisoner in a Soviet camp, a peasantin a Hungarian village, or just plaindead from the disease of individualism in acollectivist system.Tibor Machan is a professor ofphilosophy at SUNY at Fredonia, senioreditor of Reason magazine and editor ofReason Papers. He is the editor of TheLibertarian Alternative, a collection ofessays on libertarianism, and the author ofThe Psuedo-Science of B. F. Skinner andHuman Rights and Human Liberties.March 1978

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