Capitol Ideas
Bethell, Tom
"Capitol Ideas" - Economist, 2 April 1977, pp. 64-65, which published an admittedly incomplete list of these Gulag institutions.) Is there no relationship between the Gulag on the one hand and the particular quality...
...and awkward manner...
...Liberals, arguing against Bakke, say something like this: Why shouldn't race be used as a criterion of admission to universities...
...Her classmates' dinnertime discussions of their own accomplishments —which could have been shattering—were instead enjoyable...
...One evening during the first weeks of school they took a break from their work to have cafe cappuccinos at the Cafe Pamplona...
...I couldn't think of anything, and remembered stories of successful young poets whose talent vanished as they got older...
...This has resulted in an artificial, government-induced shortage...
...One country with such procedures right now is South Africa...
...Former CIA director Richard Helms refused to renege on his oath of office by revealing the extent of CIA "involvement" in Chile...
...Agonizing reappraisals about our relations with Iran, Korea, Brazil, and Argentina are now being made...
...George Will and Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post have been sensible enough to see this, but not many others have noticed the danger...
...Then he was ordered out of France...
...price controls will be imposed nationwide...
...The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided exertions and common sense of the citizens...
...He needn't have gone so far back into the past...
...in rather poor taste, let us say...
...It's just a matter of "divergent political systems and different values...
...the latter, civilization with all its weapons and its arts...
...My whole theory of aesthetics, which revolved around the idea of beauty, was deeply flawed and probably worthless...
...Never mind...
...Do blacks really want this...
...that university enrolls blacks, Chicanos, etc...
...How can it be so filled with termites and death-watch beetles, gnawing away at the national heart of oak, while at the same time masquerading as moralists...
...I can understand that in matters of foreign policy, morality can sometimes be a matter of priorities...
...of the latter, servitude...
...This is surely the The American Spectator January 1978 17 case, because affirmative-action programs emanating from another tentacle of government are coercive, not permissive...
...It will stay there a few years longer...
...More recently, in 1977, we have seen new contracts for new natural gas in Texas, in intrastate market, begin to go for about $1.60...
...For every study that shows prices must be deregulated, I can point to another study that shows that prices are already high enough...
...The "magic" price that Jackson seeks does not exist for any commodity outside the market, because "price" means an agreement between buyer and seller, and when the seller is told he is not allowed to participate in that agreement (as when price controls are in place) then there is no price...
...Then what...
...The trouble with this analysis is that it is also applicable to any commodity that has been legislated out of the market system...
...That this is not the same thing as price is shown when a divorcing couple must sell their house in order to divide its value equally...
...The stuff has been in the ground for millions of years," Edwards told me once...
...But many legislators (and others) today seem to believe that in the field of energy value can be adjudicated by notions of fairness and other moral considerations, rather than by the marketplace...
...If that happens, thenour dear old legion of well-intentioned, moonstruck liberals will take to the hustings once again and argue, this time, for deregulation of natural gas on behalf of consumers, just as they have recently done with regard to airline prices...
...Economists should come up with a technical term for this, and probably have...
...If this is circumvented by the Supreme Court, and racialism is reembedded in the Constitution, as it was in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), then I suppose the reluctant legislatures will finally get into the act, as they perhaps should have already...
...And they are right, in a way, too, or would be, if it were not even more logical not to have imposed controls in the first place...
...The American Spectator January 1978 19...
...But then I thought to myself, 'Heck, just because I have no ideas shouldn't mean that I can't still write.' So I started writing without having anything to say and discovered the fascination of simply putting words down on paper, one after another, even if they didn't mean anything at all...
...and for all I know there may even be a university somewhere that enrolls brains (thus putting higher learning before anything else...
...They may not bargain at the marketplace with buyers, but they may, in our "mixed" economy, decline to go to market...
...Is there no relationship between the Gulag on the one hand and the particular quality of "the competitive elements" between the U.S...
...My discovery led me to an interest in literature...
...Having said as much, however, one immediately realizes that it is not may but must that the anti-Bakke forces have in mind...
...There is merely adjudicated value...
...Judge Parker, get off the bench...
...He was fined $2,000 and told by U.S...
...This university, let us say, chooses to enroll jocks (thus building a winning team, keeping the money flowing in from the alumni...
...0 Whit Stillman Under the Condor —A Story From among the undergraduates of today will come the graduate students of tomorrow...
...This is because when sellers are not allowed to bargain at the marketplace, they do not bother to compete with one another...
...and the USSR...
...the price by then would have increased nearly tenfold in less than five years, and owners will conclude that the disparity between the government-set price and the world market price is not worth bothering about...
...So what do they do...
...Only then, in my far from expert legal view, will coercive government and libertarian principle meet head-on...
...Perhaps it might be better to stick with the Civil Rights Act after all...
...But when Ben spoke all appearance of awkwardness disappeared...
...So Tocqueville wrote in 1835...
...What will happen...
...those of the other, by the sword...
...yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe...
...construing its purpose by reference to a currently fashionable theory of social justice...
...In a sense, being depressed means being unhappy...
...But on rereading my compositions I realized that they still didn't make a bit of sense...
...Disconnect all those little motors, and replace them with the Fairness Office, Dept...
...Executive branch enforcement of this order is already running afoul of lawsuits, which soon enough are likely to reach the Supreme Court...
...the adversaries of the Russian are men: the former combats the wilderness and savage life...
...Already there is a heightening of racial rhetoric in this country...
...Otherwise he would be perfectly content with the happiness itself, and not need to write a poem about it...
...Selfishness, by contrast, is rather a low-life way of solving the problem...
...Liberal-minded "planners" love that garage, because they know there is a set of overalls waiting for them there, and endless opportunity to tinker...
...Such a person, in fact, has a very good claim to being called "black" (even though he may look "white," as many of Louisiana's technical "blacks" do), because he is precisely the one who was discriminated against in the past...
...Following dinner Jane studied in Lamont Library, jotting down in her notebook any ideas or phrases which occurred to her for possible use in future poems...
...Poets write not in simple pursuit of artistic objectives," he told her over coffee, "but in an attempt to escape unease...
...Tom Bethell Capitol Ideas Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee wrote a book fingering CIA agents abroad...
...That's when I started writing poetry...
...As you might know, the students at Exeter are advanced academically but extremely competitive, and sort of young—there was a lot of hazing...
...To take a hypothetical example, a man who was declared "black" under Louisiana's segregation code (by virtue of having one black great-greatgrandparent) may not now appreciate being called "white" by the federal government because he only had one black grandparent...
...For instance, Senator Jackson, who said: Many people believe, as an article of faith, if you deregulate the wellhead price of natural gas, thus allowing substantial price increases, plenty of gas will be available...
...It is not the permissive "may" but the coercive "must" that conservatives fear...
...However, if prices are legislated at about $2.00 (as Sen...
...This is perfectly legal, to date...
...At this writing the House-Senate resolution of the energy bill has not taken place...
...I simply do not believe that point of view...
...His gestures seemed awkward...
...the conquests of the one are therefore gained by the ploughshare...
...All the unpleasantness just happened...
...If only—one feels—they had said what they really meant: We were denied another tasty meal, another chance to drag the flag through the mud...
...Is that how we are going to award construction contracts m the future...
...Un-American is entirely too weak a way of putting it...
...At this price, and with the prospect of deregulation gone, gas-owners will decide that the time has come to sell...
...Japanese students blow their brains out when they do not get into the college of their choice...
...Some poets stop writing completely when they get older...
...Taking the larger view, there is no doubt, of course, that the anti-Bakke forces are setting out in an unbelievably foolish direction...
...That is why they love price controls—because they know they lead so beautifully to nationalization...
...It seems extraordinary that, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act so recent, those who call themselves "liberals" would want to reintroduce the principle of divisiveness into American life...
...This has led to an "energy crisis" for the following very simple reason...
...George Will suggested that such boards may have to be presided over by a new Herman Goering...
...For example, however much Israel might have been anti-colonial, could it have helped Mozambique or Angola in their struggle against Portuguese colonialism in 1973, when Portugal was the only NATO country which permitted refueling of U.S...
...Therefore he calls himself "black...
...Because of the stigma of "McCarthyism," there is a widespread reluctance to state the obvious about America today: There is an ugly stain of anti-Americanism spreading across the landscape...
...There are no evil men and evil designs in the Kremlin and there are no evil men and evil designs in Washington, D.C...
...Not to put too fine a point on it, the step from racial to racist is perilously small...
...Ben Pasquali studied in the poetry stacks too, so from proximity they became friends, chatting occasionally...
...In legislatures, the majority prevails...
...But it is a good bet—with the Senate having voted, to its credit, to deregulate natural gas, and the House having voted to impose a ceiling "price" of $1.75 per thousand cubic feet (mcf)—that they will agree on a compromise ceiling price for new gas of about $2.00 per mcf, and that price controls will be extended to the intrastate market (i.e...
...Only then will they realize that Senator Russell Long, custodian of the "special interests," has been on their side all along...
...Let me make a prediction...
...But as Professor Edward Mitchell has pointed out, opinion on this subject is a more reliable litmus test of ideological direction in the Congress than any other single issue...
...He will be happy to confirm that the holders of mineral rights in Louisiana are, in many instances, wisely staying away from the marketplace in which they have no bargaining power...
...Writing usually requires solitude, and that can mean hours of being alone...
...But I have not heard any statement that their violations of human rights can be excused because of "deeply rooted historical forces...
...Americans some time after they do...
...He was ordered out of Britain for maintaining contacts with foreign intelligence agents...
...So race review boards loom as a distinct possibility on the horizon, and with them all kinds of nastiness...
...Is all the world's evil in Pretoria...
...She habitually sat among the open poetry stacks so that she might periodically take a break to look through the shelves...
...Every evening after study hall a group of students would pick me up and drop me in the dormitory laundry hamper...
...But depression carries with it the implication that something big is about to happen...
...Since leaving Exeter have you continued writing...
...Can any libertarian disagree with such a system...
...Simply put, neither the geologists nor the economists agree on what that magic price must be...
...here seems to be an unnoticed paradox associated T with the Allan Bakke case, recently argued before the Supreme Court...
...Poetry, Jane thought, though she did not mean this in an unkind way, was probably Ben's way of compensating for his short stature Whit Stillman is a reader in the trade-editorial department at Doubleday...
...During Freshman Week—two years ago—I was sure my ability to write poetry had entirely dried up...
...Anyone who doubts that this is happening in the oil states today is invited to telephone Governor Edwin Edwards at the Governor's Mansion in Baton Rouge, La...
...and you get a ramshackle contraption that never gets out of the garage...
...All sorts of studies have been made by both economists and geologists of what price will be necessary in the future to produce various amounts of natural gas...
...If only—they sigh so hypocritically—if only Helms had refused to answer the questions put to him by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...So it is time to tell those ghastly Senators, such as Frank Church Tom Bethell is Washington editor for Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...
...But Jane came away from her afternoons of work alone with a sense of achievement and of the passage of time...
...As Senator Schmitt of New Mexico pointed out in the debate, the intrastate (free market) price of natural gas has in some instances 18 The American Spectator January 1978 already sunk below President Carter's "fair" price of $1.75 in response to market competition...
...I think that this is a proposition with which conservatives could agree, because the argument is phrased in what might be called the "permissive mood...
...I allude to the Russians and the Americans....The American struggles against the natural obstacles which oppose him...
...This realization led to a depression which, returning to the field of her secondary school success, she sought to express in poetry...
...That is, universities may use race as a criterion...
...A happy poem, for instance, is not just the product of an author's high spirits but of the uneasiness he feels in his happiness—that it won't last, that he can't properly share it, or maybe that he feels it is undeserved...
...The recent Senate debate on the deregulation of natural gas revealed that a good many senators do not understand the meaning of the ,word "price...
...Here Ben stopped and took a sip of his coffee...
...The most distressful implication of your speech is that you equate the U.S...
...As Eliot Marshall has pointed out in the New Republic, there are now ethnic review boards operating within the Los Angeles school system...
...As for their fellow-travelers among the columnists, send them a can of Raid...
...Does that prospect appeal to our blossoming crop of racialists...
...Only the actual sale price determines market value...
...A '5' in the English advanced placement test allowed me to enter an upper level expository writing course in which I could work on perfecting my literary technique...
...and Dick Clark, who have had so much fun in front of TV cameras at the expense of their country: Get yourselves a one-way ticket to Cuba...
...A pencil is stuck into his hair, he shakes his head, and if the pencil doesn't fall out—too bad for him...
...The danger, they will find, is that it is a game at which two can play, however belatedly...
...Freedom...Servitude...Have the two countries so changed in 143 years that they are indistinguishable from each other in terms of their rulers, their codes of domestic and international conduct and behavior...
...The Zbigniew Brzezinski I knew at Columbia University in the 1960s knew all about evil men and evil designs...
...Jane asked...
...Government regulation has a way of ending up like that...
...For a moment I thought you might be reviving that old nostrum about the "convergence" of the two political systems, something which you and your colleague, Professor Samuel Huntington,effectively disposed of 15 years ago in your joint book Political Power: USA/USSR...
...Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same...
...Specifically, they derive from an executive order requiring that a given percentage of work on federal construction projects be awarded to minority businesses...
...Furthermore, it puts the planners out of work...
...And I hope you will not pay much attention to Senator Frank Church's demand that we should end a "petulant and self-defeating policy" towards Cuba, which I hope is not merely in the grip of "philosophical pressures...
...I know it sounds like a dreary thing to bring .up...
...In that way, then, what are now price ceilings will wind up as price floors...
...I was familiar with poetry from before, but I had little awareness of the non-poetic kinds of writing...
...Let me end this letter with a passage from Tocqueville's Democracy in America, part of which you quoted in your coauthored book: There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world, which seem to tend toward the same end, although they started from different points...
...In response to this, socialists will say that the "logical" response is to nationalize the mineral wealth...
...I don't know what their reasoning was, or even if they had any reasons, but the whole experience made me feel kind of uneasy...
...The market system works so well, when it is allowed to work, because it is the "clutch" that engages self-interest (the little motor inside all of us...
...It has been argued," Schmitt said, "that there is no elasticity of supply, that is, that the supply of natural gas will not increase with an increase...in the price of new natural gas....In 1976 [in Texas] we could see the beginnings of a drop in price as the new supply produced by these wells became available, and the price in 1976 was about $1.75...
...In the same way, Archibald Cox argued for the University of California, a university ought to be "free...to take into account the fact that a qualified applicant is black, Chicano, Asian or native American in order to increase the number of qualified members of those minority groups...
...They keep the stuff in the ground...
...Or, if only he had testified in secret session (as though there weren't a hundred other termites lurking in the bureaucratic woodwork, ready to leak such testimony to the press...
...This is something I encountered personally, I'm afraid...
...Simple...
...Believing it to be to their advantage, blacks want to play the racial game again...
...of Good Intentions, Washington, D.C...
...Schools already may take into account such matters as whether applicants are the sons or daughters of alumni, whether they are good athletes, whether their parents have given money to the school, and so on...
...The owners of oil and natural gas wells in the U.S...
...Jackson has recommended) they will not sink lower than that, no matter how much new gas is brought out of the ground...
...Finally, after a semester of the course, my writing talent had been honed into something hard and jewel-like...
...These conversations were actually given a heightened value, since she might later turn them into verse, or perhaps their value would be indirect, with the spoken idiom influencing her writing generally...
...It was then that she realized—deep inside somewhere—that having gotten into a highly selective college in no way distinguished her from any of her classmates...
...Helms was then further lectured on the New York Times Op-Ed page by Dick Clark, the trendy senator from Iowa...
...the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm: the principal instrument of the former is freedom...
...The Justice Department responded by saying that if the traitor returned to the United States, he would not be prosecuted under the Espionage Act...
...District Court Judge Barrington Parker, "You stand before this court in disgrace and shame...
...and the USSR...
...know very well that they could sell their oil and natural gas for much more than the government says they may, because they only have to read the newspapers to see what price Arabs and other fortunate foreigners are getting for the same commodity...
...The thorny question of racial self-identification is already with us...
...The moral, I must say, is a stark one...
...Until I went to Exeter for ninth grade—or Lower Middle, as we called it there—I hardly wrote any poetry at all...
...With the exception of the Bakke case, the most important "issue" to be debated in Washington in recent weeks has been the deregulation of natural gas...
...In that country they apply the "pencil test" to determine whether a man is "colored" or "white...
...For Jane Repton of Quincy House, Harvard, depression, and the sense of promise it brings, came early in the fall of sophomore year...
...supply planes en route to Israel during the Yom Kippur war...
...What has gone wrong with this country...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
