Correspondence
"Correspondence"
...C O R R E S P O N D E N C E I _9 _9 _9 _9 0 _9 _9 _9 _9 I I Q 6 0 _9 0 o o o o D # I _9 _9 _9 0 o _9 0 Q I o o o o Q I Q o o 0 o o 0 o o Q Q o 0 _9 _9 I o 0 o _9 _9 _9 I _9 Q _9 Q _9 Q _9 _9 _9 Q _9 _9 _9 o _9 _9 I o o o Q o o D o Q o Q o Q o o Q o o Q Q o o o o o I Q Q o o I o o Q 0 0 o o o 6 o g I 0 O 0 Q 0 I o I I o o o o o o g I 0 Q 0 Q 0 _9 I _9 _9 _9 _9 0 I 0 0 D _9 D D 0 Righting Marx I am grateful t o Arnold Beichman for his generous remarks about my rational opposition to all forms of totalitarianism, including every variety ofLeninism...
...He reads on...
...an effort to extend the legislation to include successful presidental candidates is beaten back under the t h r e a t of an administration v e t o . . , presidential aspirant .Jerry Brown launches his campaign for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination by calling for a constitutional amendment making Capricorn the national sign . . . birds sing, flowers bloom, the heavens shine, President Reagan leaves for his first vacation at Camp David . . . --Frank Bolger THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 37...
...Teddy Kennedy I I I I Volume 12, 1979 | #1 Jerry Brown | #2 Douglas MacArthur I I [- #3 IrvingKristol I I R #4 FTCvs Children'sTV I | r ! #5 Joseph Heller i | -- #6 Whittaker Chambers and | | Alger Hiss | i.~ #7 Tom Wolfe | | [" #8 Winston Churchill | #9 Boat People I | --_ #10 Franklin D Roosevelt | I #11 Norman Podhoretz I | ! ' #12 FidelCastro I I Volume 13, 1980 I I 1' #1 Khomeini | I I...
...These are the f i r s t free elections in Russia in 63 years and a great event in the history of our count r y . " Not being a Party member, Dmitri is confused...
...The spectacle of the tourists is wearying to Dmitri...
...it is subsequently nominated for an Academy Award...
...Around him are the hundreds of thousands of tourists, come to see the Olympics and, needless to say, his friendly neighborhood KGB agent_9 He puts his lunch bag down beside him, where sits, not surprisingly, a copy of Pravda...
...I would also like to point out that Mr...
...Douglas L. Saunders Marathon Shores, Florida n O Q Q O O Q O g Q Q I Q O q O O Q O Q O O m m Q O q g Q q O Q O O O Q Q 6 Q O ~ Q Q Q Q Q O Q Q Q Q @ O 4 m o o g o o m g Q e O D o . . . . . ~ 0 0 0 o ~ 0 g 0 g g 0 Q Q Q o I Q g Q Q 0 Q 0 0 O O Q ~ o ~ 0 O Q o Q 0 O Q 0 O O Q 0 O Q Q 0 g 0 0 g O Q D O ~ g 0 q g Q g Q Q Q 0 4 0 Q ~ 8 ~ Q ~ 0 0 ~ Q ~ 0 0 Q I S P E C T A T O R ' S J O U R N A L . . . . . . . . . ' ' ' ' ' ' ' . ' . . . . ' . . . ' . ' . . . • . . . . . . . . . . • . . . . . ' . . . . . . . . . . . . ' . ' . . . . ' . ' . . ' - . . . . . ' . ' . . . . . . . . ' . . . . . . ' . . . ' . . ' . . . . . . . ' ' . ' • . • • . . . . • . ' • • ' ' . ' • . . . ' . . . . . . ; . ' . . . . . . . . Faking I t One can easily imagine it...
...A completely socialized economy and completely free enterprise economy do not exhaust the alternatives...
...And yet, h a d n ' t the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Science and Culture that morning acted with the same cold inefficiency as every other morning...
...I regard the mixed economy of the Welfare State as preferable to either...
...An odd headline catches his eye...
...The great monetary contraction of the early thirties was caused primarily by the Federal Reserve System's adherence to the rules of the gold standard, inasmuch as the loss of gold reserves forced the Federal Reserve to reduce the money supply accordingly...
...What Dmitri doesn't know is that this is not an official Pravda, but r a t h e r a fake issue printed in Italy under the auspices of the satiric weekly, IlMale, and written not only by Maximov and Brodsky but also by Vladimir Bukovsky, who contributed "Critical Masses" to the August issue of this magazine, Leonid Plyushch, the mathemetician, and Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the poetess...
...Lenin was certainly the architect of Soviet totalitarianism, whose legacy passed to his legitimate heir, Stalin...
...I would suggest, rather hopelessly, the world's leaders consider carefully what their next action will be after the holocaust_9 The situation reminds me rather inadequately of the doctor who claims his operation was a success but the patmnt died_9 For another parallel there is the story about the traveling salesman who was helped off the train at a depot in the Deep South by the pullman p o r t e r who asked the salesman how the weather was up north...
...Who's going to clean up the mess...
...Couldn't you have gotten Andrew Greeley or Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...Bethelrs claim that, if we returned to the gold standard, we would no longer be subject to serious price level fluctuations, is not borne out by history...
...Why then, he asks, is capitalism in its classical or traditional form an unacceptable alternative to me...
...Bethell has never taken the time to study seriously the theory he dismisses in a few sentences_9 Friedman's real theory, clearly stated in 1956 in his article "The Quantity Theory of Moneyia Restatement," concerns money demand, not money supply...
...Betbell misrepresented me in that brief discussion as well...
...The agent does not seem suspicious, so Dmitri reads on...
...Bethelrs perspicacious thoughts on the state of the world, but his column "Sheer Gold" in the July Spectator raised my hackles...
...But it still remains true that what exists in the USSR today is far from the society Lenin describes in his brochure The Soviets at Work, as unacceptable as that may also be...
...Bethell's assertion that monetarist doctrine says that the money supply determines the level of GNP is a gross misrepresentation...
...In conclusion, I suggest that if Mr...
...The level of real GNP, the actual output of goods and services, is determined by relative prices and rates of return...
...the style is the same...
...Since the review states that Hitchcock wrote mostly about the American Catholic Church, and that he, the reviewer, "must leave it to American Catholics to dispute with him the accuracy of his diagnosis," why did you pick Lord Longford to review the book in the first place...
...2 Norman Mailer | I '. #3 John Connally I I " #4 Naderism i I r~ #5 John Anderson...
...An article by Vladimir Maximov...
...I | ; #6 GoreVidal | I EJ #7 Isaac Bashevis Singer I I -' #S Richard Nixon L. #9 Leonid Brezhnev | | ~. #10 HenryKissinger...
...Are there winners or losers...
...And why, pray tell, is one advancing upon Dmitri, as other agents are advancing upon other citizens with newspapers, h i s hands no longer in his pockets but held rigidly at his sides...
...He decides to catch up a bit on the news...
...Bethell was that supply-side economics had not been discovered in the 1970s...
...wiet citizens like Dmitri found their copies on park benches, around drinking places, and on buses in cities all over the Soviet Union...
...I I I | Volume 11, 1978 I I [] #1 Tenth Anniversary Issue I r. #2 Andrew Young I ~i] #3 SigmundFreud | | Li #4 Bakkeand the Legal Profession | I -I #5 William SloaneCoffin, Jr...
...And this final detail: Comrade Brezhnev and Comrade Suslov flee to Cambodia in search of exile...
...2) Beichman credits me with recognizing that " t h e r e is a totalitarian potential in any economy which is completely centralized and nationalized...
...I learned something about Catholicism in Britain from the review, but very little about Hitchcock's book itself...
...3) Finally, he challenges my denial that what exists in the Soviet Union is Marxism with the flat assertion that "what does exist in the USSR is the socialism of Karl Marx...
...Poetry by Joseph Brodsky...
...Men like Martin Feldstein, Michael Boskin, Norman Ture, Craig Roberts, and, of course, Arthur Laffer have been investigating supply incentives and constraints for going on ten years...
...He glances around, seeing the KGB agent placidly strolling, his hands in his pockets...
...Bethell that the Minority Members of the Joint Economic Committee were discussing supply-side economics in their dissenting views of JEC Reports several years before the Majority began to take the same approach...
...I never stated, or implied that theJEC had beaten the academic supply-side pioneers to the issue...
...If it is, then why are there KGB agents suddenly filling the park...
...In fact, almost all of Friedman's important work in monetary theory has been demand theory...
...The claim that Milton Friedman has promulgated a theory of monetary supply over the last thirty years shows Mr...
...Apparently the politicians and m i l i t a r i s t s are suffering from self-infatuation with these sophisticated schemes and exotic devices for the annihilation of humanity...
...His appointment at the Ministry of Science and Culture having been postponed yet again, a Soviet citizen (let us call him Dmitri) wanders through Moscow's dreary s t r e e t s , finally sitting on a park bench to eat his lunch...
...But.surely it isn't true, Dmitri continues to think to himself...
...Elections...
...The porter replied: "Sure glad we didn't win that War...
...Dmitri shakes his head in bafflement...
...The salesman told him it was awful, it was snowing and cold...
...Why, we would have had to occupy that land up there_9 I t ' s a bit u n s e t t l i n g to think we could be the victims of adults with the power, authority, and money to build and use such fiendish toys...
...11 Jimmy Carter | | ~ #12...
...This rediscovery of the classical school by modern supply-side pioneers is the leading advance in economic theory and policy in the 1970s, in that it forces Keynesian theory back into the real world...
...in her acceptance speech, Fonda thanks "the Freedom of Information Act for making this n e c e s s a r y " . . . former P r e s i d e n t Jimmy Carter signs a multi-million dollar deal to host a western anthology "IV series called "Plains, Georgia D a y s " . . . the New York Stock Exchange closes down 119 points, reacting to rumors that presidential aides have purchased a.copy of Why Not the Best~ . . , a ~)oung nymph from Grinnetl, Iowa, earns celebrity when she claims to have bedded with the newly sworn President, but she proceeds to publicly embarrass him and new "Tonight Show" host Hodding Carter III by announcing authoritatively that the new chief executive does not dye his h a i r . . . Muhammed Ali is kayoed in the first round of a title fight by the outgoing president's baby brother, who has since changed his name to Aboulhassan Bani-Carter . . . a team of Stanford scientists earns a Nobel Prize for its discovery that inflation is caused by depletion of the ozone l a y e r . . , the Senate passes an Election Reform Bill providing that the country dispose of nuclear wastes by injecting them into unsuccessful presidential candidates...
...Will the "winners" have been successfully defended...
...To begin with, it should be obvious that one can hold that...
...S u r e l y , " he writes, "Hook will not argue that the workers in the U.S...
...a taxidermist stuffs him with back issues of Proctology Today, and he is ritually displayed at trade c o n v e n t i o n s . . . J a n e Fonda, Warren Beatty, and Shirley MacLaine secure financial backing for a scathing and controversial documentary about the Central Intelligence Agency's secret plot to overfeed Cambodians...
...The actual claim is that the nominal quantity of money affects the nominal level of GNP...
...The supplies of these key inputs govern potential output_9 The pre-Keynesian classical economics of the 1920s and earlier was founded on this concept_9 My statement to Mr...
...He picks up the Pravda...
...Bethell wishes to bang the drum for a return to the gold standard, he should be prepared to study both monetary theory and history...
...Brezhnev and Suslov finding happiness with Pol Pot...
...Supply-side economics is the use of tax policy to alter the willingness to suppy labor or capital to the produc, tion process...
...Hadn't he seen their names vilified in this very paper...
...I hope he will not consider it churlish of me if I briefly reply to his criticism...
...As a monetary theorist of the Chicago persuasion I am greatly offended as re the total misrepresentation of the Chicago position on monetary economics...
...Not only is it historically false to identify Marxism with contemporary Communism, I believe it is strategically unwise...
...Will they be more secure...
...To identify Marxism with any variety of Leninism, Stalinism, or Trotskyism is to overlook the centrality of democratic values and principles in his conception of socialism...
...Furthermore, Mr...
...I main: tain the politicians and the brilliant strategists have a mental block about the usefulness of such actions...
...Simply use this form, or a | reasonable facsimile, and send with | I your check or money order...
...Much more can be said about the responsibility to historical truth by those who have been sobered, disillusioned, or shocked into a sense of reality by the transformation of their dream of a cooperative society into the Gulag Archipelago...
...I (Minimum order $3...
...Either would have added to the seriousness of your paper...
...I I I I Enclosed Is my check for...
...The reason is very simple...
...Weren't these writers attacked and expelled from the Soviet Union...
...Weren't these enemies of the State...
...I also told Mr...
...He suddenly feels frightened...
...What does anyone do a f t e r the radioactive dust settles...
...it had been rediscovered...
...Will the losers have anything the winners want...
...After a nuclear holocaust what does the perpetrator do next...
...Sidney Hook South V/ardsboro, Vermont Give Me Some New-World Religion In the August 1980 issue you carried a review ofJames.Hitchcock's Catholicism and Modernity by Lord Longford...
...He looks again at the front page...
...What goes on here...
...The Pravda logo is the same...
...And why does he have that terrible look in his eyes ? --JP . January 1981 Dogs bark idiotically in the distance . . . a two-headed, horned babe, covered with spikes of black hair, delivered to a woman of three-score and ten years amidst the din of a hellish thunderstorm, dies at b i r t h . . _ 9 three aged owls perched high upon a limb hum an ancient, mournful s o n g . . _ 9 the stony streets of the capital city run thick with rainwater _9 . . a line of taxi cabs snakes its way through the early morning rush of traffic . . . a special "In Memoriam" edition of the IUashington Post, Page One framed with an inch-wide black border, appears on the morning newsstands and sells out immediately . . . the national leadership of the American Civil Liverties Union announces a noon press conference at which 13 officials formally execute a secret suicide p a c t . . , in a fury of defencstration, State Department employees eject themselves from their eighth-story offices, leaving behind a note stressing that the action should not necessarily be taken as the willful action of a despairing clique, either voluntary, involuntary or with full cognizance thereof, or something like t h a t . . . Gore Vidal succumbs to a case of acute apoplexy...
...6 Barry Commoner I I "~ #7 Ronald Reagan I I I I Please rush me the back issues I checked above...
...The lead editorial reads: "The first decision of the provisional civilian government was to announce free elections...
...This convergence of views led to the supply-oriented consensus JEC An36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 nual Reports, which put the Minority and the full Committee well ahead of many Johnny-come-latelies in academia and the Administration...
...Russia has overcome the demons--no union, no socialists, no soviets, only republic...
...But wait...
...The Tenth Anniver- I sary issue is $2, all other back issues I I are $1.25...
...that is, it only affects the value of output and therefore determines the price level...
...Stephen J. Entin Joint Economic Committee Washington, D. C. Mter the Afterglow With reference to the article "How to Fail at Being S a f e " by C h a r l e s Horner (June 1980): What completely astounds me is the wild preoccupation with the s t r a t e g i e s of " F i r s t S t r i k e " and "Massive Retaliation," and the use of such devices as the MX missiles, nuclear bombs and chemical warfare gadgets...
...are social democ r a t s . " No, but I am prepared to argue that the independent, enlighti Send for your favorite back Issues I I today...
...he has seen them milling about all week...
...Beichman will not be able to find--nor will anyone else--a single line in which he identifies workers democratic rule (or the dictatorship of the proletariat) with the dictatorship of a minority party over the proletariat and every other group as well...
...I (please print) Name Address C i t y State Z i p _ _ I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ! P.O...
...It was on the work of these pioneers and others that the JEC discussions were based...
...Had he lived in Russia, Marx would have been the first victim of Bolshevik terror...
...Terrance V/albert Baltimore, Maryland That Old StandardIGold I usually enjoy Mr...
...1) He objects to my deriving the moral justification of Social Democracy from its commitment to the ideal of equal opportunity for all, on the ground that it is too "exclusionary" or narrow...
...Box 1969 | Bloomington, Indiana 47402 | ~ i J O i l l I i J i J i l l l ~ ened trade union movement is SocialDemocratic both in its domestic and foreign policy...
...the type is the same...
...Five thousand copies of the fake issue were smuggled into Moscow at the time of the Olympics by professional smugglers and tourists...
...Nor does his crime against the Russian people in bayoneting out of existence the democratically elected Constituent Assembly, whose convocation he had demanded under Kerensky, show that he took German gold to overthrow the Kerensky Provisional Government...
...A very persuasive case can be made out to those who are so conditioned that they can only respond to the Marxian idiom that the basic ideas of the mature Marx, as well as the early Feuerbachian Marx, are utterly antithetical to the regimes of political and cultural terror that prevail in all countries under Communist rule...
...Jerrold L. Goldblatt Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana Back to Supply Tom Bethelrs article on gold in the July issue touches briefly and erroneously on the matter of who first discovered supply-side economics, and Mr...
...Marx's main historical and political predictions have been falsified by events and still deny that Marx's vision of socialism ts incorporated in the institutional practices of the Soviet Union...
Vol. 13 • October 1980 • No. 10
