The Victims
Griffith, Wellington J. III
economic policy is an illusory figure. The best essay in the book, and the one readers will find most immediately relevant, is Gerald P. O'Driscoll and Sudha Shenoy's "Inflation, Recession,...
...Entertaining utopian hopes about conquering mankind's future destiny once and for all, the system promoted its own desacralization...it dismantled its institutions in the name of the mature individual who could take care of his own interests and knew what was best for him, it scorned patriotism, the nation's symbols, the need for authority...
...It is obvious from reading the criminal cases in The Vietims that judicial obsession with rehabilitation contributes directly to an increase in crime...
...crime who have been forgotten in the welter of banalities about the need to rehabilitate criminals as the victims of society...
...The Victims reprints Roberts' hilarious take-off on the Lone Ranger as a masochistic white man who insists he is to blame for the depredations of outlaws...
...in a column in the September 27, 1975 edition of the National Observer...
...In brief, the liberal-democratic system allowed itself to turn into a nonsystem, a nonnation, a dis-society...
...ACLU's campaign to punish society for the sins of the criminal received codification by the Warren Court during the 1960s...
...Unfashionable, unpopular but, I believe, profoundly true is Molnar's view that the crisis of authority in the liberal democratic states of the West can only be resolved outside the ideological, though not necessarily the institutional, framework of the present system...
...The author, Frank Carrington, is not only outraged about crime, he wants to provoke other law-abiding citizens into taking effective action to control crime before all of us are cringing behind bolted doors, too suspicious and afraid of others to help even victims of crime...
...Once more Professor Molnar displays the clearheadedness and prescience we have come to expect from him as an analyst of the cultural and political plight of the Western world today...
...It is a measure of Chief Justice Earl Warren's success in stripping the law-abiding of the law's protection that his successor, Warren Burger, greets night-time visitors at his door with a sixshooter...
...According to the Keynesians, a general rise in prices should occur only when the aggregate demand for all goods and services continues to expand beyond full employment...
...Authority and Its Enemies is no exception...
...The word 'society' is meant to refer to you and me...
...We can summarize Professor Molnar's position, though hardly do justice to the power of his argument and the wealth of his illustration, by saying that he holds that man is such that he only fulfills the demands of his nature through participation in social groups, that such groups have structural needs which must be satisfied if they are to accomplish their particular purposes (educational, economic, religious, etc...
...There is growing awareness within the legal system that punishment might not cure the criminal but it does protect society and discourage crime, which is the first consideration...
...and that authority, confidently exercised and readily accepted, is the necessary cement of all such vehicles of DavidLevy teaches sociology at Middlesex Polytechnic, in England...
...The individual analyses are of differing lengths and, in the respectful view of this reviewer, depths of perception...
...Too many judges simply deny the obvious truth that punishment reduces crime, a fact criminal behavior validates...
...AELE wants to restore the rights of the victims of Wellington J. C-re'frith III is a woodsman from Bean Blossom, Indiana...
...Bloomington, Indiana The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977 33 more profitable...
...But then, Thomas Molnar is never less than provocative...
...We are guilty...
...It is an intriguing application of Austrian business-cycle theory to our current economic woes, and an incisive criticism of the Keynesian (more government spending) and Friedmanite (constant growth of the money supply) nostrums...
...Yet we have managed to combine unemployment, sluggish growth with much unutilized capacity, and a continuing rise in prices...
...In Brian Crozier's terms, the restoration required is authoritarian without being totalitarian...
...Against this background, the modern Austrian understanding of the systematic, mal-allocative effects of government-engineered and manipulated monetary expansion offers an alternative vision of considerable persuasiveness and power...
...Man as we know him, the man you and I are, is so free of instincts that with almost every step he threatens the very community without which he could not exist and survive as a human being...
...The best essay in the book, and the one readers will find most immediately relevant, is Gerald P. O'Driscoll and Sudha Shenoy's "Inflation, Recession, and Stagflation...
...Whether or not prisons rehabilitate, the comforting fact is that a hood cannot mug people while he is locked up...
...Thus authority--and this is its first function--mediates between man's two basic needs: to be free and to be integrated with the group, and it mediates rationally because it is rational for man to live in the community of other men...
...Carrington quotes Negro leaders who have been reading the opinion polls and feeling the pulse of their followers...
...As the certainty of adequate punishment increases, the crime rate drops...
...The prevailing attitude in criminology is succinctly summarized by Edwin A. Roberts, Jr...
...Having denounced law and order the past 10 years as a euphemism for racism, liberal politicians are suddenly aware that crime in the streets most endangers their traditional constituencies: blacks and bluecollar ethnics...
...Whether a thug wants to rob a drugstore is unimportant as long as he doesn't...
...Carrington marshals facts indicating that only swift and certain punishment deters crime...
...By confusing pathological abuse of power with the salutary function of authority in society such men lead us to forget that, "Authority ...is...the natural price that the individual pays for membership in society, without which he would not be an individual, let alone a protected and integrated one...
...If the Augustan restoration fails, then the alternative is less a continuation of the status quo--since we do not have a status quo, we have a rapid degeneration--than the spread and victory of despotic ideology and method...
...It is Molnar's view that we are suffering from a crisis of authority resulting from the typically modern distrust of limiting institutions and mores...
...Since that time I have read many of his books and nes;er without interest or profit...
...Various studies indicate that as punishment has declined, crime has increased simply because it has become There ' "ty a! Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...34 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977...
...Carrington relates case after tragic case of people victimized by crime, because Supreme Court rulings have made it more difficult to collect evidence against criminals and easier for permissive judges to suppress the truth and turn loose the obviously guilty...
...This experience has caused uneasiness, to say the least, among the smooth-tongued wizards of macroeconomic policy...
...Author Frank Carrington would agree...
...If the state should be "a philosophy in action," then the state to which Thomas Molnar looks is one sure of its own legitimacy, as rooted in the necessities of human existence, and aware of its limitations both in what in can accomplish and what it is entitled to demand of its citizens...
...our humanity...
...In turn, Thomas Molnar examines the crisis of authority as it affects the family, school, church, courts of law, literature and art, the army and the state...
...This is the powerful view to which I have not yet heard a convincing answer...
...At the same time, it is the hoodlums who have been given queer and unusual protection from society's wrath by the Supreme Court...
...Molnar's own preferred solution lies in the possibility of what he calls an "Augustan" as opposed to a despotic restoration of authority...
...In particular, While I think that the examination of state authority could scarcely be bettered, the discussion of the interplay of censorship and the creative artist seems to me to raise more problems than it answers...
...ID40go0DQQQQOIo~Q00oQQ6Q0DQmi00O94tOI~mmiQQQ0OgoQQi~QQ~Qqgg00o6O0QBQgOO~DDI0OmI4Q0~0Q~e000m0BDQQ0QOQ~0D0Iq0Qge0DQ6QO0O~QQ0 Q0~0~t00OQQqQoi0~Q0m~QI BOOK REVIEW Authority and lts Enemies Thomas Molnar / Arlington House / $7.95 David Levy Six years ago I was introduced to the name and work of Thomas Molnar by a FinnishAmerican fellow student of mine at the London School of Economics...
...In a book, Le soaialisme sans visage, published earlier in 1976 in France and unfortunately not yet available in English, Molnar argued that the widespread demand for "socialism" through the world is best understood as a protest against this state of social disintegration...
...The liberal-democratic system wanted to do good by all, its initiators and theoreticians did not imagine that their system, too, would produce marginal people, discontented strata, rational opponents...
...Roberts writes that, "For many years it has been the fashion to say, and perhaps to believe, that 'society' is to blame for the extraordinary increase in crime...
...Before the reader comfortingly rejects a choice between such alternatives in the name of liberty and democracy, he should read Authority and Its Enemies...
...Here is a clear, understandable introduction to the Austrian theory of depressions--which refutes the virtually universally held notion that depressions are an "inevitable" outcome of unhampered capitalism--and an application of its insights to the current economic impasse...
...For his part Carrington is executive director of Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, which works to correct the current tilt of the legal system toward protecting criminals...
...Among others, the NAACP's departing leader Roy Wilkins says that, "Negro communities need to speak out and act against Negro criminals...
...Americans for Effective Law Enforcement is a legal counterpoise to the American Civil Liberties Union which maneuvers, with depressing success, to expand the legal rights of criminals...
...There is every indication that the public realizes the failure of rehabilitation...
...Behavior, says James Q. Wilson in T/sinking About Crime, is easier to change than attitude...
...Psychologists like Stanley Milgram and social philosophers like Theodore Adorno have taught us to believe that the exercise and acceptance of authority is an individual but socially induced sickness from which the enlightened social scientist, educator, or revolutionary is duty-bound to "liberate" us...
...Everybody is guilty except the hoodlums who kill and maim and rob and rape and mug...
...The same, I may say, is true for the book as a whole...
...In his latest work too, he points out that the socialism of those who answer this demand is "not the hypothetical socialism which...wears a human face, but a faceless one which dissolves what remains of protective institutions, abolishes the political space in which the citizens used to move freely, and imposes a monolithic structure, a regimented existence...
...QQQGi~gQg~OIIIQ00aQ00Q060iQO0Q0g6iiiQQ~gQg04QQ00QDQO0IQ00~Q0D~Q0~I4aOQQ~geDDoOUggIIQ0j00Og0QQQ4060a10OQ~IQQ00g0O0QOgDOQ00oO0~IQQ4oQgI0oBi~m000iO0IQ0 BOOK REVIEW The Viaims Frank G. Carrington / Arlington House / $9.95 Wellington J. Griffith III The Victims is not just another deadly boring recital of lifeless crime statistics...
...Even when the reader is forced to register disagreement, Molnar always gives him a strongly argued case to answer without fear of stating unfashionable and unpopular views...
...It is, instead, a gut-wrenching portrayal of flesh-and-blood human beings needlessly and cruelly victimized by a legal system that rewards criminals...
Vol. 10 • February 1977 • No. 5
