A Reviewer’s Notebook – 1977/8

  It is easy to make what Represen­tative Marjorie Holt of Maryland has called “the case against the reckless Congress.” Year after year our so-called statesmen on Capitol Hill plunge us deeper into infla­tionary debt. The making of law is delegated to administrative agen­cies, with little subsequent care or interest in checking the monstrosi­ties that grow out of arbitrary and often unconstitutional decrees. Congressional pay raises are wangled without a true vote. And taxes are set without any regard for their im­pact on the production that is needed to pay for the bloated welfare state that has been foisted upon us.

But if Congress is generally reckless, we do have good men on Capitol Hill. As Edmund Burke might have said, there is no way of indicting an entire legislative body. Congressman Philip M. Crane of Illinois yields to nobody in his deep understanding of traditional American virtues and in his dislike of all the trends that have been undermining them since the Nine­teen Thirties. His The Sum of Good Government not only tells us what has gone wrong with the republic but offers a whole series of practical reforms that could be effected with­out waiting for crisis to overwhelm us. And over on the other side of Capitol Hill Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, a true Christian statesman, attacks what he calls “the weariness of soul” that has paralyzed much of the Christian West. He has put his analysis into a small but potent book, “When Free Men Shall Stand,” which also in­cludes constructive ideas about change that would have the full sup­port of Congressman Crane.

Phil Crane takes his title from Thomas Jefferson, who said “the sum of good government” consists of leaving men “to regulate their own pursuits” of industry and im­provement as long as they are “not injuring one another.” The Jeffer­sonian ideal hasn’t been honored since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House.

Coercion, of course, began even before the Twentieth Century. Phil Crane is particularly good in trac­ing the growth of the regulatory spirit, which was born in the Eigh­teen Eighties with the Interstate Commerce Commission. The orig­inal excuse for the ICC grew out of the theory that railroads were necessarily monopolistic, which, considering the navigable rivers, lakes and canals of America, was hardly true for at least the eastern half of the country. If there was ever any need for the ICC anywhere, in Dakota or Utah, it disap­peared with the coming of the auto­motive truck and the airplane. The Wright brothers and Henry Ford made travel regulation obsolete as long ago as 1903. But instead of in­voking a “sunset” law for the ICC, our non-Jeffersonian Congressmen extended ICC regulation to the trucking industry, with the full complicity of the Teamsters Union. For the air, we got the Civil Aeronautics Board, whose regula­tory practices have added greatly to the cost of air travel. In testimony before a U.S. Senate sub­committee, Dr. William A. Jordan, a professor of managerial eco­nomics at York University in Toronto, suggested that air fares in the U.S. might be cut almost in half if the CAB were to be abolished.

The Federal Communications Commission is another agency that has greatly outreached itself. It may be granted that some way must be found to allocate wave lengths to prevent TV and radio in­terference. But why should the FCC have the right to regulate program­ming, which should come under the free speech protection of the First Amendment? And why should reg­ulation of any sort be extended to cable television, which does not depend on the FCC for allocations to get its programs into homes?

The so-called Health Care Crisis is, according to Phil Crane, based on a completely erroneous analysis. If private medical practice has been doing such a bad job, how is it that the life expectancy of the average American has jumped from 49.2 years in 1900 to more than 70 years today? Tuberculosis and polio have practically been wiped out. Open-heart surgery is becoming common­place. Of the 3,084 counties in the U.S., only 132 lack doctors. Most of the doctorless counties are either within quick driving range of the metropolitan areas or have prac­tically no population at all. Phil Crane thinks that the “national­ized” health measures we have now are sufficiently costly without add­ing any more to them, and he makes his points clearly with specific reference to the breakdowns caused by socialized medical practices in England and Sweden.

If you want to know how the Federal budget could be cut to bring it into a noninflationary balance, Crane can show you how. But to keep Congress on a steady path, we need a return to the gold standard, which would allow in­dividuals to protect themselves against inflation-mad politicos. Crane also suggests that the Jobs Creation Act, as outlined by his congressional colleague Jack Kemp, is needed to stimulate capital for­mation, diminish unemployment—and yield more taxes at lower tax rates.

In foreign affairs, Crane would like to see us reject the phony “universality” of the United Na­tions. We should set up an associa­tion of nations that share ad­herence to the principles of free­dom of speech, freedom of the press, trial by jury, due process of law, free elections, and freedom of association. Such countries as Japan, West Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zea­land could be invited to join for starters. This was more or less Clarence Streit’s idea before it was Crane’s, and it is good to see it revived. But Crane, unlike Streit, would not make a federal structure of his association at the expense of national sovereignty.

Jesse Helms’ “When Free Men Shall Stand” parallels Crane’s book in many ways. But where Crane is specific, Helms tends to be general. He talks less about individual legislative proposals and more about philosophical and religious in­fluences. He is particularly good in relating the Bible, which he regards as the great source of political and economic wisdom for the West, to secular theorists. The Biblical parable of the talents is enough to prejudice Jesse Helms in favor of Adam Smith and the work ethic.

Although he sticks for the most part to the standard theory that the West owes its culture to the Graeco-Roman-Hebraic-Christian past, Helms reverts to an idea about the origins of our democracy that was popular in the early years of this century only to be forgotten. This is the idea that democracy came out of the German forest, beyond the territory controlled by Roman legions. “Along the banks of the rivers that poured into the North Sea,” says Helms, “lived .. . the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who practiced a form of self-government . . . it is from these rude barbarians, rather than from the Romans, that we gained the all-important concept of limited government . . . ”

The Angles, Saxons and Jutes took their tradition to England, where it survived William the Con­queror, known to my old friend Spencer Heath as William the Hitler.

ON THE SILENCE OF THE DE­CLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

By Paul Eidelberg

(University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts 01002, 1976) 127 pages.

Reviewed by Deidre Susan Fain

In this book, the author not only ex‑ amines the lines but also reads be­tween the lines of the Declaration to extract its full meaning. Particular emphasis is placed on the often mis­understood references to “equality” and “happiness” that have lately been perverted into justification for increased governmental interven­tion into people’s lives. Eidelberg rejects the leveling egalitarianism of the twentieth century as being in­imical to excellence and greatness, distinguishing it from “equality” in the Declaration’s sense, which he regards as the precondition for true individuality, liberty, and the ascendancy of reason. Equality, he writes, “encourages the thrust of in­dividuality in its quest for self-transcendence. It sustains liberty in the quest for effectiveness of pur­pose. And because it promises the rewards of merit, it energizes the pursuit of happiness.”

Professor Eidelberg expands “hu­man reason” to include not only the pragmatic rationality that teaches that twice two is four, but also a metaphysical reason capable of apprehending universal truths and distinguishing between “power” and “justice.” In addition to this metaphysical reason, “consent of the governed” must rely on “civili­ty”—that decent respect for others, and that moderation of the self which can be found in the tone and spirit of the Declaration. It is only through the possession of this me­taphysical reason, tempered by civility, that man can enjoy free­dom: “Freedom presupposes the self-directed activity of the meta­physical intellect on which men’s unalienable right to freedom of thought is ultimately grounded.”

In an especially erudite chapter entitled “The Declaration Applied: Relativism versus Universalism,” Eidelberg demonstrates the disas­trous effects of moral relativism on current political issues, and how far removed such a philosophy is from the universalist principles of the Declaration of Independence. He points out the undermining effect relativism has had on freedom, and on the ability of a free society to survive in a world dominated by tyranny. What the Declaration ex­presses, he argues, is a “genial or­thodoxy” which “instills a quiet but manly confidence in the power of reason to apprehend truths trans­cending the vicissitudes and diver­sities of time and place, truths of abiding and universal significance.” A “genial orthodoxy” provides a standard for judging between the merits of one society and another, between an American Revolution which produced a new form of liber­ty and present day “wars of libera­tion” which result in new forms of servitude.

Professor Eidelberg takes a firm stand on the side of liberty and in­dividuality. In his conclusion he points out that in pledging their “Lives . . . Fortunes, and . . . sacred Honor,” the signers of the Declara­tion affirmed that the principles of liberty were worth more to them than mere survival, that economic freedom is essential to indepen­dence, and that integrity of charac­ter undergirds all else. Through this eloquent book, the Declaration still speaks to us today.