A Reviewer’s Notebook – 1970/4

It is forever being rediscovered that the American Revolution and the French Revolution were not birds of a feather. But the dif­ferences, which were profound, have not been communicated to the young. It is not only the Yippies, the Students for a Democratic Society, or the Black Panthers who try to make the American Revolu­tion the spiritual ancestor of a thousand anarchic or collectivistic rebellions that have occurred since the Declaration of Independence in 1776. How many times have we heard it said, by Peace Corpsmen or whoever, that we should back the agrarians here, or the social­ists there, because they are in “our tradition” of antipathy toward despotism? The assumption is that we should always be for rebellion for rebellion’s sake, in the man­ner of the New Leftist defendant in Chicago who lectured Judge Hoffman for being an incarnation of King George III.

The fact is, however, that we have never had a revolution in America. Our war of independ­ence was, as Peter Drucker pointed out a long time ago, an essay in counterrevolution, de­signed to save, or restore, a status quo founded on the English Com­mon law, the Magna Carta, and the various petitions and declarations of right, that were, presumably, the possessions of any freeborn Englishman no matter on what side of the ocean he happened to resid. It was King George III who was the revolutionist.

Peter Drucker and Isabel Pater­son told us this in the nineteen forties, Russell Kirk said it over again in 1953 in his The Conserva­tive Mind, Samuel Eliot Morison always believed it, and now Anne Husted Burleigh gives it a vibrant documentation in her biography of our second President and great­est advocate of “liberty under law,” John Adams (Arlington House, $7).

A Rebel in Spite of Himself

This is a book that wrestles with tough distinctions very much as its hero, a ruddy, compact, puritanical, Braintree, Massachusetts farmer and lawyer, wrestled with them through a long lifetime as a rebel malgré Mrs. Burleigh knows how to take off on pleasant and flavorsome passages, as when she writes about John Adams’ re­turn after ten year’s absence in Europe to his Braintree fields to help move stone fences, inspect the orchards, and transact for new salt marsh acres along the shore south of Boston. But the circum­stances of history necessarily made John Adams’ long life a pro­gression of duties, disputations, and defiances, and there isn’t room or time for too much dalliance by the wayside. I would have wel­comed more about the tartly re­freshing Abigail, Adams’ wife, or about his sons, especially young John Quincy, but if this had be­come a “life and times” sort of job it would have had, willy nilly, to expand into ten volumes.

The Advocate and Philosopher

Cleaving to the main thread, Mrs. Burleigh focuses her atten­tion on Adams, the advocate, and Adams, the political philosopher. The men who made our Revolution had a most difficult job: they had to risk unchanging passions and, at the same time, maintain the in­struments of law necessary to keep freedom from degenerating into anarchy, and anarchy from breeding despotism. The idea was to preserve and to give new form to what was every Englishman’s birthright. Like others in the party of liberty, Adams did not want to split off from England. He wanted to bring the British parliament to an admission that, as long as the colonists were not represented in Westminster, they should, as freeborn British citi­zens, be permitted to tax them­selves. The colonists, according to the Adams view, owed their al­legiance not to parliament but to the King.

A Beclouded Issue

The trouble was that the King himself had taken over parliament, so the distinction between duty to the legislature (in which the citi­zens of Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York were unrepre­sented) and duty to the Crown was meaningless. As a matter of plain fact, the American patriots had more friends in the House of Commons and even in the Lords than they had at George III’s court. Chatham and Burke and Fox and Shelburne tended to agree with John Adams that the King’s party in parliament had forgotten that the Commons itself had once revolted against taxation without representation. If the King could not be appealed to as a defender of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg colonial Britishers against parliamentary usurpers, then legality itself de­manded armed resistance.

So the die was cast, largely be­cause John Adams’ rigorous logic could not be dodged by the group of men in Philadelphia who were determined to hang on to their British rights. By this time John Adams had begun to talk more about natural rights than the rights of Englishmen. He had come to see that he must base his political thinking on the nature of man, not on the accidents of his­torical development in one small island off the northwest coast of Europe.

Natural Law

Mrs. Burleigh has, inevitably, to come to grips with two varying eighteenth century conceptions of natural law. The French revolu­tionary philosophers did not go to human history to discover what was distinctively and naturally human; they tried to base their theories on the new sciences. Adams took the older tack, one that would have been understood by the Roman stoics, or St. Thomas Aquinas, or the Greeks themselves. He knew there was a moral sense in man that tran­scended physics. Even while he was performing his diplomatic duties for his newly fledged na­tion in London and the Nether­lands Adams was busy working up an answer to the Frenchman Tur­got’s theories that a simple de­mocracy, with the executive, legis­lative, and judicial functions united in a single assembly, was the appropriate governmental form for a free people. In three volumes Adams proved to his own satisfaction—and incidentally to his fellow patriots—that an all-powerful unicameral legislature would quickly degenerate into a tyranny of the majority, with fac­tion despoiling the propertied and all pursuit of virtue coming to a halt along with the efforts of the individual family to achieve self-reliance. The first of Adams’ three volumes came out in time to affect the deliberations at the Federal Constitutional Convention in Phil­adelphia. It had a big influence.

The Presidential Years —and Beyond

Adams, an indifferent politician in the party sense, had a rather miserable time as President. He was never easy in his own mind about enforcing the Alien and Sedition laws which the extreme Federalists had forced upon his Administration, he didn’t relish a standing army (he preferred naval defense for a commercial repub­lic), and he distrusted the clamor for war with Franc. He threw away a second term in the White House by his moves to end the “quasi-war” with the Paris revolu­tionary regime, thus splitting the Federalist Party and guaranteeing the victory of Jefferson’s Republi­cans in 1800. Adams had the last word in his battle with the Hamil­tonians when he appointed John Marshall, the most powerful Fed­eralist in the South and an enemy of the Alien and Sedition laws, as Secretary of State, and he managed to get his peace with France on American terms.

But after the death of George Washington in 1799, there was no cement to hold Federalists to­gether. The Jeffersonians were to rule for a generation until John Quincy Adams was to become President, the only instance in U.S. history of a son following the footsteps of his father into the White House.

Most books about John Adams—see Catherine Drinker Bowen’s John Adams and the American Revolution, for example—are con­tent to deal with facets of a life. After all, Adams lived for ninety-one years, and there is reason be­hind Mrs. Bowen’s contention that the “whys” of such a span cannot be explained in a single volume. But Mrs. Burleigh really carries it off. There is much that she leaves out, but the marrow is all her.

 

MAN vs. THE WELFARE STATE by Henry Hazlitt (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1970, 225 pp., $6.00)

Reviewed by Bettina Bien

Oblivion is the fate of most news­paper commentaries, by burial in dusty library archives or by re­duction to microfilm. However, at least one economic journalist —Henry Hazlitt—writes commen­taries which deserve a better fat. He discusses political policies on the basis of fundamental economic principles which do not change. Government programs may pass out of existence, be amended be­yond recognition, or forgotten in the rush of new legislation, but his columns are usually so basic that they would still appear fresh and up-to-date years later if re­published then with minor changes in statistics, names, or program titles.

Henry Hazlitt is well known to FREEMAN readers. His Economics in One Lesson, first published in 1946, has become a classic, an eco­nomics “best seller.” Libertarians should cheer this new compilation of his writings.

When Mr. Hazlitt pinpoints the merit or error in an economic problem, it all seems very simple. His ability to puncture the ab­surdities of interventionist political policies with a single telling thrust is apparent when he talks of minimum wage laws: “We can­not make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him less. We merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and opportunities would permit him to earn, while we deprive the community of the moderate serv­ices he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage we substi­tute unemployment—[Thus] it ought to be obvious that minimum wage laws hurt most the very peo­ple they are designed to ‘protect’.” How can anyone comprehend this brief statement and still advocate minimum wage laws? Yet politi­cians continue to boost the hourly wage rate employers must legally pay workers hired for almost every kind of work. On February 1, the Federal minimum hourly wage for many unskilled jobs was raised to $1.45, up from $1.30. As Mr. Hazlitt points out, this extra 15¢ cost per hour of labor hired must keep some persons from starting new enterprises or ex­panding established ones, with a consequent loss to consumers of additional goods and services. Those who might have earned a pittance now face a greater likeli­hood of indefinite unemployment and dependence on the benefac­tion of government welfare officials, with inevitable loss in mo­rale.

Mr. Hazlitt explains that mone­tary problems are a product of the welfare state. “The truth is,” he writes, “that no solution of the monetary problem, national or in­ternational, will be possible until inflation is stopped, and that it will not be stopped as long as we have the welfare state.” To pro­mote “prosperity,” government of­ficials reduce the interest rate to make it easier for businessmen to borrow. But this tactic fails in its objective for “the lower interest rate encourages more borrowing, which tends to raise the rate again. And the increased amount of money and credit starts push­ing up prices and wages. This forces businessmen to borrow still more, if they want to continue to buy even the same volume of in­ventories and employ even the same number of workers as be­fore, to do the same volume of business.” Ignorance of this com­monsense truth permitted a “boom stimulated by easy credit and cheap money” to set the stage for the 1929 stock market crash. Ig­norance of this simple common­sense explanation persists today among most monetary “special­ists.”

Mr. Hazlitt describes prices as “indispensable signals” which “must tell the truth about supply and demand.” Inflation distorts price relationships and so inter­feres with the calculations of both producers and consumers. Legal controls on “prices” upset calcu­lations also. So do “voluntary re­straints” and government “guide­lines,” for they “falsify the signals and disorganize and unbalance production. Monetary inflation is a dreadful thing. But what does immensely more harm than the in­flation itself is the attempt to con­ceal or suppress its consequences through price and wage controls.”

Again and again, Mr. Hazlitt illustrates his basic thesis—that the welfare state destroys incen­tive. The need to work, produce and take care of oneself, as is ex­pected in a free market, provides the incentive for increasing pro­duction, thus improving everyone’s welfare. Government programs re­quiring “that the people who work must be taxed to support not only the people who can’t work but the people who won’t work” weaken incentives all around. Everyone is discouraged from putting forth his best effort. Producers who face taxes on earnings slow down. The “incentive” of could-be producers to qualify for government hand­outs is substituted for the incen­tive to work and be independent. This in turn stimulates the incen­tive of politicians to garner votes by offering increased government largesse to those who opt to be­come nonproducers.

In discussing the impossibility of such a situation, Mr. Hazlitt refers to John Kenneth Galbraith’s thesis of “private” and “public” sectors. Hazlitt prefers the terms “voluntary sector” and “coercive sector” as more descriptive—the voluntary sector “made up of the goods and services for which peo­ple voluntarily spend the money they have earned,” the coercive sector “made up of the goods and services that are provided, regard­less of the wishes of the individ­ual, out of the taxes that are seized from him.

“And as this [coercive] sector grows at the expense of the volun­tary sector, we come to the essence of the welfare stat. In this state nobody pays for the education of his own children but everybody pays for the education of every­body else’s children. Nobody pays his own medical bills, but every­body pays everybody else’s med­ical bills. Nobody helps his elderly parents, but everybody else’s eld­erly parents. Nobody provides for the contingency of his own un­employment, his own sickness, his own old age, but everybody pro­vides for the unemployment, sick­ness, or old age of everybody else. The welfare state, as Bastiat^¹ put it with uncanny clairvoyance more than a century ago, is “the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of every­body else.” The effect of such a State on incentives—to produce, not to produce, and to compete for votes with offers of higher gov­ernment handouts—becomes ob­vious.

The book concludes with two very practical chapters—”The Task Confronting Libertarians” and “What We Can Do About It.” Mr. Hazlitt quotes his friend and mentor, Dr. Ludwig von Mises: “Everyone carries a part of so­ciety on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsi­bility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruc­tion. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battl. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of every­one hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.”

The problem is to displace the visions of instant utopia-via-the­-ballot-box with voter understand­ing of the dangers inherent in a State by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else. Unfortunately there is no “instant understanding.” It takes time and effort to persuade people that the State is not “a shadowy entity that apparently gets its money out of some fourth dimen­sion. The truth is, of course, that the government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from someone else.”

—FOOTNOTES—

^¹ Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), French deputy and economic journalist.

 

DESIGN WITH NATURE by Ian L. McHarg (Garden City, New York: The Natural History Press, 1969, 197 pp. illustrated, $19.95)

Reviewed by Dayis Muth.

A reader favorably motivated by this review will face one real prob­lem: getting hold of the book. Not only does it cost twenty dollars but the bookstores can’t keep it in and the libraries can’t either. The second edition scheduled for April certainly won’t last long, so timely is the appearance of a major new work on human environment.

Handsomely laid out, intelli­gently organized, passionately written, and almost defying brief analysis, Design with Nature is the product of a discerning and vigorous mind as it attacks one of the great challenges of our era —how to keep man and nature in balance.

While study of the question goes on apace, Ian McHarg’s book, synthesizing and introducing the total “ecological view,” may be the cream of today’s utterances. It is a magnificent, poetic effort, offered simply as “a workman’s code… an ecological manual for the good steward who aspires to art.”

As it becomes accepted, McHarg is sure this view can revolutionize—rehumanize—the American city and landscape. Through sheer truthfulness it is “able to perform prodigies of work.” By consider­ing nature as guide and ally rather than mere raw material or enemy, it places pollution, the vanishing wilderness,¹ ugliness, and urban misery all in manageable perspec­tive, and offers workable remedies.

That the author should present this ecological view without driv­ing for large-scale governmental action is part of what merits atten­tion. For McHarg (not without the occasional firebrand hurled over the wall) stays impressively within his competence. He glances at eco­nomics and politics—and his im­pact is such that we should reckon with these glances—but he leaves economic and political concerns largely to his readers.

Whether the public energy, gal­vanized by such men as he, will be channeled into frantic legislation and freedom-shriveling Federal programs, or into more enlight­ened individual and community ef­forts, we are probably at the point of witnessing. Or deciding. If lib­ertarians act on the alarm-signals, thinking through applications of a sound attitude toward nature, en­vironment, and man’s responsi­bility to man in this context, the swelling only-Big-Government-is big-enough-to-do-it forces may be outwitted. Reading Design with Nature will give us impetus.

Ian McHarg, 48, a black-haired, bearded Scot, is founder and head of the University of Pennsyl­vania’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Plan­ning, the vanguard of ecological planning in this country. He is also principal in a Philadelphia firm that enables him to combine theory with far-ranging practice. Already widely known by his writ­ings and television appearances, he is a man in every way equipped to be enormously influential.

Neither in depth nor in detail does his vision lack acuity. He pre­sents ecology in terms as funda­mental as religion and as micro­scopic as bacteria. He delivers a piercing rejection of the “Judaeo-Christian, man-centered theology” that conceives man’s dominion as trampling down nature, and searches for a religious concept to support an operating balance be­tween man and nature. Having adopted a “quietly deferential” pantheism as his own working hy­pothesis, he defines man’s place as within, not above, organic nature: privileged part—and partner—and not conqueror. To him, “subdue the earth” is a sacrilegious phrase.

He would have us understand nature as process; recognize and cooperate with the self-regulating quality of our earthly inventory as did (intuitively) the handful of great eighteenth century archi­tects who designed the English countryside, and as do (philosoph­ically) designers of the Japanese garden tradition.

With devastating logic McHarg points out the irrationalities of most of today’s city planning. “The problem,” he says, “is to ap­ply ecological planning principles and test them against the demands of metropolitan growth and the market mechanism.” And this he and his associates do, where they are called. Skillfully mapped and reasoned case-studies, as well as choice photographs, fill the book. One walks step by step through the Staten Island Study, the Com­prehensive Landscape Plan for Washington, D. C., the Potomac River Basin Plan, the Richmond Parkway Plan, the Plan for the (Baltimore County) Valleys. One sees the ecological method brought down to earth—or up from it.

Seven postulates are applied in a regional planning situation: (1) Development is inevitable and must be accommodated; (2) un­controlled growth is inevitably de­structive; (3) regional character­istics should govern development; (4) observing conservation prin­ciples can avert destruction and ensure enhancement; (5) a given area can be planned so as to ab­sorb all prospective growth with­out despoliation; (6) planned growth is more desirable than, and as profitable as, unplanned; (7) public and private powers can join in realizing a sound plan.

McHarg’s philistines are the fragmentary zoners and planners, rapacious shortsighted developers, highway commissioners with their “narrow purposes,” government engineers, parking authorities, ir­responsible industrialists, impa­tient sellers of land, and any others ignorant of the natural processes they affront and blind to all but the short run. Human so­ciety, not to mention nonhuman, suffers the blight and waste ac­cumulating from their Goliath un­awareness.

His David is the landscape arch­itect-regional planner trained in ecology who can be retained by city or county government, by private industry or by private real-estate syndicate. Through teamwork and exhaustive study this artist-scientist produces detailed map-transparencies show­ing every characteristic (both tangible and cultural) of the chosen geographic region. At length he holds up a harmonious plan, “an interfusion of open space and population,”—varied, practi­cal, apolitical, and aesthetically pleasing, in which natural proc­esses help with the housekeeping and beauty is self-perpetuating.

A degree of public understand­ing is needed (as friends of liberty know) to achieve and to maintain rational victories over haste, self­ishness, and ignorance. Such un­derstanding, reasons McHarg, will make it possible to incorporate sim­ple ecological lessons into common­sense ordinances and enforce them.

Still, as the libertarian’s head turns back and forth between the self-enforcing laws of nature and proposed new human laws, he senses that great caution is re­quired:

Those who are unaware that gov­ernment is society’s legal agency of coercion, and who, in consequence, be­lieve that it is simply a committee arrangement to accomplish certain social goals, will not be concerned with the problem of government’s lim­itation. To the contrary, they will thrust new functions onto govern­ment.²

Boundary-dissolving environmen­tal problems and thoughtless hu­man behavior seem to suggest new work for government. But if we keep clear on what are appro­priate government functions at each level, what are appropriate areas for intergovernmental cooper­ation, and what threatens to go beyond these into baneful central­ized economic and social planning, we can keep from neglecting our hope of government’s limitation.

Taking the premise that gov­ernment’s proper role is to inhibit destructive actions, invoke a com­mon justice, and keep the peace, one can only recall the saying of the poet that new occasions teach new duties. Control through city or county ordinance of now-ap­parent public hazards arising from improper use of air, water, or land would appear to be a legitimate government function—as would adjudication by the courts of indi­vidual damage cases.^³ That re­gional planning councils should gather the information on which this regulation is based would seem to be the logical corollary. Such councils are usually advisory, non-enforcing, and locally funded (at least in part); they are, however, empowered as the receivers and expenders of Federal planning grants under various departments of the Executive, with whatever authority those imply.

There is no easy formula, the way things stand. To remain a pure-minded libertarian amidst environmental crises may take a rather careful combination of sev­eral ingredients: (a) responsibil­ity for the consequences of one’s own uses of air, water, and land; (b) support of community and re­gional planning endeavors so as to keep them cooperative, voluntary, and local; and (c) highly selective endorsement of those elements in national policy which line up with proper use of the police power.⁴

In all three ingredients the con­cept of private property remains crucial. It undergoes something of a moral broadening when “down­stream” and “crosswind” effects of one’s use of his property are conceded to be part of the respon­sibility and cost of ownership. Not that the public claims all resources or has a right to dictate what a man does with his own land. Rather that each man has a moral obligation, implicit in law, to be sure that his uses are wise and do not harm others even indirectly. Private pleasure and the general good will be less at odds when both are measuring against a long-range standard, and ecology can help to make that standard ex­plicit.

If we are solving environmental problems regionally and voluntar­ily, perhaps the national clamor can be contained, and attempted macro-solutions for these prob­lems can be forestalled.

Without passing judgment on Ian McHarg’s theological position, one finds great utility and inspiration in his views. By his own compas­sionate outlook he illustrates the actual nature of man’s dominion over the earth: not arrogant, self-centered, and callous, but self-con­trolled, humble, aware.

—FOOTNOTES—

^¹ For valuable discussions of conser­vation per se, see THE FREEMAN, July, 1962, “Who Conserves Our Resources?” by Ruth Shallcross Maynard; and Essays on Liberty, Vol. XI “The Greatest Waste,” by Paul L. Poirot.

² From “What Can We Know?” by Edmund A. Opitz, FEE School Lecture, July, 1963.

^³ See “Unknown Costs of Pollution,” by Howard Callaway, THE FREEMAN, No­vember, 1969.

⁴ How diffcult this last may be under our present thriving conception of na­tional government is suggested in Chap­ter 1 of Leonard E. Read’s 1969 book, Let Freedom Reign, “The Pollution Problem.”

 

THE POLICE: DAMNED IF THEY DO, DAMNED IF THEY DON’T by Herbert T. Klein (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 252 PP^., $5.95)

Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton.

A young friend of mine was stranded in an unsavory neighbor­hood during the wee hours of the morning. Someone had siphoned gas out of his tank, and on his way home his car stopped. Imagine his relief when a cruiser happened along and the police drove him to a service station and then back with a can of gas. Is this a rare experience, being helped by the police? Not at all, but perhaps we need reminding that a large part of police work is helping citizens in distress, and it is one virtue of Lt. Klein’s book that it emphasizes all the good and necessary acts performed by the police: looking after lost or strayed children, di­recting traffic near schools, help­ing deliver babies, administering first aid to the sick and injured, assisting stranded motorists, giv­ing directions to lost persons, and so on. When we stop to think about it, haven’t most of us been in situ­ations where we were very glad indeed to see a shining badge or blue shirt or blinking red light?

This book doesn’t offer any sen­sational exposes, but it does give us an insider’s view of how the police force of a large city oper­ates, its successes and failures and frustrations. And it has some wise words on juvenile delin­quency and parental responsibil­ity, riots and welfare, and police responsibility and authority. Drawing on twenty-five years ex­perience with the New York Po­lice Department, Lt. Klein has a fund of stories to illustrate his points.

One of his contentions is that while there may be a few cops who are crooked or brutal or ineff¹cient, the great majority do a good job, especially when one considers the nature of the policeman’s role. Re-fleet a moment: We expect police­men, although regularly in contact with outlaws and outcasts, and subject to peculiar temptations, to keep themselves morally spotless. We expect them to be calm and objective no matter what the prov­ocations. They have always had to bear the abuse of lawbreakers, but today the police are also abused by politicians, public officials, and even some law-abiding citizens. Years ago, writes Klein, a police­man could make an arrest in, say, Harlem, and not only suffer no in­terference from local residents but even be offered assistance in han­dling the accused lawbreaker. No more.

This is not a healthy situation. When we assault policemen, whether verbally or physically, we contribute to the chaos that fills the vacuum left by the decline in law and order. People can hardly function, let alone thrive, in a con­dition of chaos; so there will al­ways be a demand for order. The real question is not order vs. no order, but what kind of order? The order of a self-governing peo­ple who respect the law, aware that its equitable enforcement pro­tects every man’s rights? Or the order imposed by a Napoleon who is not bound to respect anyone’s rights? One is the static order of a slave camp; only the former is proper to a nation of free people.