War, Politics and the Dollar
Eliot Janeway, a Wall Street analyst who has made some remarkably accurate market predictions by keeping one eye peeled for the state of the President’s relations with Congress, is a “chartist” with a difference. Where other analysts regard politics as an intrusion upon their subject that must be explained away as accident, Janeway turns things around: in his view markets are wholly dependent on power considerations, and the statistics of supply and demand are less important than, say, Lyndon Johnson’s habit of secretiveness, or the inability of Secretary of the Treasury Fowler to get Secretary of Defense McNamara on the telephone. In such a world, the so-called science of economics takes on a gossipy quality — but, in a time of galloping statism, an analyst whose sources are both good and talkative can score some tremendous coups.
Janeway’s new book, The Economics of Crisis: War, Politics and the Dollar (Weybright and Talley, $10.00), is a mixed historical and journalistic coup. It takes off from Randolph Bourne’s wholly repellent but wholly accurate observation that “war is the health of the state.” It follows from this that the peaceful development of countries is dependent on what has been done to expand the economy in wartime. War, says Janeway, can be a mighty stimulus to nation building, but the proviso is that it must be waged by men of reasonable intelligence who can be cold-blooded about the payoff.
Janeway himself is as cold-bloodedly realistic as Sancho Panza himself. His book is an explosively interacting multiple of four observations. The first observation is that America’s wars, prior to the one in which we are now engaged, have all been profitable. Observation Number Two is that Europe and Asia haven’t been as lucky in their wars, though there have been exceptions. Observation Number Three, taken from Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, is that imperialism lost its realistic sanction when it ceased to be a simple matter of looting. And the fourth observation is that wars are no longer needed as a gigantic prod to production provided that mass consumption can be stimulated by the political management of continental-size economies.
Profitable Wars
When he is exploring the implications of the first three of his observations, Janeway is entirely convincing. The American Revolution was mismanaged from a monetary standpoint, but when the soldiers were paid off in western land scrip it gave a mighty impetus to the westward expansion. The War of 1812 was something of a stand-off, but it did get the British and their Indian allies off our backs in the Detroit region, which meant that settlers could sleep in their beds. The Mexican War rounded out our continental shape, and the Civil War preserved the new geographical configuration for the continental market that grew up with the building of the railroads. The Spanish-American War, with its action in the Caribbean and the Philippines and the dash of the Oregon around Cape Horn, dramatized the need for the Panama Canal. And our three truly distant wars — World War I, World War II, and the Korean War—were forcing houses for the development of our technological economy.
Meanwhile, Europe and Asia suffered because of their inability to evade wartime destruction and tremendous casualties. Some of Britain’s colonial wars were cheaply fought, and Bismarck put the German Empire together by easy victories over Austria and Denmark. But the Franco-Prussian War proved a disappointment to the Germans, and the two world wars were devastating to all of their European participants.
Another Story in Vietnam
So Janeway lets his observations take him down to the present. It might be argued that, since the Vietnam War is far away, it can’t hurt us much. But this is a war that we are fighting alone. It is a costly war financially, but, curiously, it isn’t leading to any significant industrial expansion. The war is, at the moment of writing, too small to permit controls, but not small enough to avoid monetary inflation. Meanwhile, the Soviets feed just enough support to their North Vietnamese allies to keep our casualties mounting without costing the life of a single Russian soldier. By bogging us down in Southeast Asia, the Soviets have a free hand to adventure in the eastern Mediterranean. Janeway is certain that they will make the most of it.
Thus we have lost the edge in “crisis management” to Moscow. In Janeway’s estimation, it was McNamara who misled Johnson into thinking the Vietnam War could be won with a limited commitment. Johnson, in turn, was too secretive to take Congress into his confidence or to seek its advice —and he is now lost in the “jungles” of Vietnam and Detroit without the money needed to win on either the foreign or the home front.
Weak on Welfarism
The weak point of Janeway’s book is its treatment of the rise of the Welfare State. He speaks of “Bismarck’s Breakthrough,” and adds a few pages on Lloyd George’s “creative improvisations” which “translated” Bismarck’s social legislation into English. The inference to be drawn from this sympathetic treatment of Bismarck as a primitive Keynesian planner is that the human race is now in possession of social instruments which will allow it to feed everybody without resorting to the economics of war preparation.
To give Janeway his due, he is no devotee of the crude theory that “government investment” can solve all our troubles. He does not divide economics into “private” and “public” sectors. His particular brand of interventionism, though it is couched in neo-Keynesian language, is fairly close to Milton Friedman’s theory that the economy can be kept moving ahead in a state of dynamic equilibrium if the currency is expanded in a stable relationship to the increase in productivity. Janeway sees no virtue in the “public sector” as such, and he is all for increasing private fortunes provided they are profitably engaged. After all, if there is no flourishing private economy, the political managers would have no source of tax funds to take care of the strays.
The trouble with the Bismarck-Lloyd George theory of the social service state, however, is that it provides no assurance that a Jane-way or a Milton Friedman will ever be allowed to work the levers. Bismarckian “socialism” created a population that became all too dependent on state action and state commands — and it wasn’t much of a jump from Bismarck’s theories to Hitler’s National Socialism. Lloyd George’s England merged insensibly into the England of Beveridge cradle-to-grave planning, which certainly hasn’t proved compatible with industrial productivity.
As a hard-boiled reflection of “what is,” the Janeway insistence that politicians make the economic climate is all too true. But if there is no revulsion against the idea that economics must always be subservient to the compulsions of politics, the correct image for our productive system will remain that of the snake attempting to live by swallowing its tail.
A PRIDE OF PREJUDICES by Vermont Royster (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 361 pp., $6.95.
Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton
Readers of The Wall Street Journal need little introduction to this collection of essays by the editor of that outstanding newspaper. Many of these short pieces were selected from his occasional column, “Thinking Things Over,” which is an especially bright spot even in that sparkling editorial page. In these days when many of our “spiritual leaders” are busy picketing, marching, and inciting to riot, it is in such unlikely places as this that one finds searching thought about the human condition.
Royster is a throwback to earlier days of journalism when the informal essayist delighted, informed, and infuriated readers with his ruminations. He writes as a good conversationalist might talk on whatever topic comes to mind. Some event in the daily round supplies the inspiration, but the thought pursued leads far afield, reflecting the conceit that the reader’s interest is as varied, intelligent, and literate as Royster’s own. He writes, then, about what interests him, be the subject profound or trivial, philosophic or nostalgic, timely or timeless.
Royster once told an interviewer that he thought himself the most radical editor in the country, so out of step is he with the prevailing mood of the body politic. He opposes the inflationary financial policies of the national government and “the feeling that the government should feed our children, build our houses, provide for our old age, take care of us when we are sick, and bury us when we die.” At a time when statism is embraced by most of the molders of public opinion this is indeed a radical position.
When Royster faced the problem of deciding who was to review his book for The Wall Street Journal, he arrived at a very simple, yet daring, solution: he “reviewed” the book himself. Here was no self-praise or false modesty but as one man said, “about the most subtle mention of a book by its author I have ever seen.” In the closing sentences of the “review” Royster describes the contents of his book. You will find inside, he writes, “some little essays on sundry subjects done in a quaint, meandering style. There are personality sketches of public persons that are de rigueur for a practicing journalist; the passing thoughts on weighty public questions that an editor must offer to keep his license; the reportage on affairs as distant as Kansas and India by which a reporter tests his craftsmanship.
“But there are also, you should be forewarned, essays of no great point or purpose. Nostalgia can be pleasant self-indulgence but others may not be moved by remembrances of yesterday’s Depression or of wars past. The borderline between sentiment and sentimentality is very narrow, and therefore easy to step over when recalling a great-grandfather or dreaming over a grandchild.
“Finally, one man’s prejudice is another man’s anathema. Certainly not everyone today will share the belief, expressed therein, that our heritage from the past contains many values worth conserving in the twentieth century. Or amid the troubles of the present find comfort in the reminder that the Dark Ages lasted only five hundred years.
“So perhaps the best thing to be said of the book is simply that Alfred Knopf thought it worth publishing.”
Most of Royster’s “review” is taken up with praise for the outstanding job of book-designing and book-making done by his publisher. “It looks good on a coffee table,” he says “even if you never open it.” Indeed it does, but great would be the loss of anyone who neglected to look between the covers.
ON AGGRESSION by Konrad Lorenz, translated by Marjorie Kerr Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966), 306 pp. $5.75
THE TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE by Robert Ardrey (New York: Atheneum, 1966), 390 pp. $6.95
Reviewed by Gordon B. Bleil
Robert Ardrey here assembles a vast amount of material from the works of natural scientists and adds his personal interpretation —or more correctly, his extrapolation. The work is tightly focused on the single subject of territoriality.
Territory is any area of space which an animal or group of animals defends as an exclusive preserve, and territoriality is the inward compulsion to possess and defend such property. Ardrey notes in his introduction that only one book (a 1920 work) has been devoted entirely to territoriality and that one was about birds. But considerable material on the subject is tucked away in the pages of scientific journals.
Ardrey develops his thesis that man is a territorial animal linked firmly to his piece of earth, and he argues that male competition —human as well as animal — is primarily for possession of property, and only secondarily for possession of the female. This inquiry describes the physical behavior of many species, and also speculates on the emergence of values and natural morality among humans as concomitant phenomena.
Property as pivotal in affairs of men was acknowledged by our Founding Fathers and emphasized by political writers preceding them — as attested by the popularity of such slogans as “Life, Liberty, and Property.” Of late the private property principle has not only been ignored, but aggressively attacked in the flight toward nonproperty social structures… welfarism, socialism, communism, and the like. Ardrey roots man’s institutions in his biological heritage and challenges those who attribute our behavior solely to environment or culture, rejecting its hereditary basis.
Konrad Lorenz is frequently referred to in Ardrey’s work, but at the time Ardrey was writing, Lorenz’s work had not been translated from the original German. It has since become available in English.
Lorenz’s focus is on aggression which he defines as “the fighting instinct in beast and man which is directed against members of the same species.” A naturalist by profession and choice, Dr. Lorenz is also a doctor of medicine and a doctor of philosophy. From this solidly based vantage point he has considerable leverage on his biological materials and their human implications.
Somewhat less well structured and less readable than Ardrey’s work, due in part, perhaps, to the difficulties of translation, Lorenz nevertheless provokes reflection. Territoriality is one of the causes of aggression, but not the only one. Aggressive behavior in the animal kingdom has evoked a parallel development of reliable, inhibitory mechanisms which prevent a species from destroying itself. Man is unique in that he has developed enormous aggressive capabilities and destructive power without a parallel development of reliable, natural inhibitions.
Lorenz finds aggression healthy, innate, and ineradicable. His principal point is that the survival of mankind — considering the awesome destructive power now at our disposal — depends on our success in imitating the natural and reliable inhibitory mechanisms evolved by other organisms rather than trying to sweep aggression under the rug as immoral or curable. This tack will not work because aggressive drives are a necessary part of our nature.
Students of the free economy will be reassured to find effective natural principles at work in human nature itself, which are consistent with the ideology of competitive enterprise. We are better equipped to defend the market place, where competition is aimed at serving the consumer. If mankind eliminates competition or advocates its neutralization, at hazard is ultimate survival. It may be a sign of the times that concurrently with the progress of socialism highly competitive physical-contact sports, such as football, mushroom in popularity — a modern equivalent, so to speak, of bread and circuses.
Fortunately for the serious student, both works are heavily referenced and additional study in areas of particular concern is facilitated. Lorenz is slightly less desirable in this aspect than Ardrey because much of his source material, understandably, is in German. Both books are likely to become well-thumbed by those who want a better understanding of why we are and what we are.
