Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Ralph Nader and the Return of the Shakers Ralph Nader, LL.B., is neither a scientist, a philosopher, an economist, nor an epicurean. He sleeps but four...
...Are wage-earners gladly going to live in suspense over the fate of their banks, their insurance systems, their transportation investments...
...after all, the press has always had a weakness for the purely weird--weird stories having the surest chance of snagging readers...
...What these hagiographers judge to be his unseemly qualities I blush to think...
...Advocates of democracy and liberalism have held that their society encourages intelligence, sentience, and responsibility, that is to say, a sturdier and better Homo sapiens than the poor waif slouching under the enlightened rule of an autocrat...
...That Citizen Nader wishes to scotch business is clear for all to see...
...Instead we hear ceaseless diatribes against the infamies of businessmen, as if they were not consumers themselves...
...He sleeps but four h~urs a night, goes for days sustained solely by an occasional cookie or banana, and practices strict celibacy midst a catastrophe of file cabinets and yellowing newspapers in his legendary eighty-five-dollar-a-month Washington, D.C...
...Yet Citizen Nader holds to this belief with a devotion not dissimilar from that shown by those who believe that the world is controlled by a handful of fat bankers barricaded somewhere in the Alps...
...Actually, his consumerism does not so much display a love of the consumer as it betrays a truly virulent hatred of the producer...
...Mexican food also resides in a limbo of scholarly speculation...
...But his seduction of liberalism would nearly defy rational explanation were it not for the fact that liberalism through the years has been increasingly susceptible to Puritanism, self-destruction, and a petty disrelish for business...
...Can laborers train themselves for jobs that may suddenly disappear by edict of this necromancer of the public interest...
...He even botched his "Congress Project" --an astounding matter, that, considering the dysfunctional wrecks tottering about on Capitol Hill...
...Quadrangle / $12.50 Seth Cropsey Elmo Zumwalt was appointed Chief of Naval Operations in 1970...
...Having dutifully considered the volumi- " David Sanford's Me andRalph is a refreshing break from this drivel...
...how innocent pedestrians and small buildings might survive in a world populated by them is a mystery consorting with an enigma...
...Doubtless American business can stand some examination, but shoddy, diffuse reports ,steeped in economic and political mythology are no service to anyone other than our nation's perpetual malcontents...
...In sum, most of his insights are misperceptions, and when he actually does come up with an intelligent insight his solution is wrong...
...Rarely does one hear him sermonize on how the lowly consumer is fleeced by taxation and inflation...
...The Nader cosmos J~ unlike that of any American demigod save possibly the relatively limited cosmos of some of our religious loons...
...If the Great Emancipator from Plains, Georgia does not publicly sever his connection with the Atlantabased multinational menace, it will go hard for him at Nader, Inc...
...One of his dearest dreams is to eliminate smoking from federally regulated areas...
...His zealotry on behalf of something as impalpable and protean as the public interest gives no hint as to what he might attack next...
...And even less often does he have at it with labor unions...
...The tests that we usually apply to labor leaders, businessmen, and politicians simply are not applied to Citizen Nader...
...In too many matters of choice and tolerance Citizen Nader has opted for coercion...
...Consider his discovery that regulatory commissions fall into the hands of those they are meant to regulate...
...But Wonder Bread is sinister stuff, and on Coca-Cola Citizen Nader is eloquent and adamantine...
...Anyone familiar with Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom knows this, but no serious individual would then turn around and offer Citizen Nader's solution, to wit, establishing super-regulatory agencies to oversee our present regulatory agencies...
...Rickover favors a smaller Navy composed of much larger ships whose underlying mission is submarine-based strategic bombardment and the projection of essentially amphibious power...
...Careful reading of his prescriptions for automotive safety suggests that Citizen Nader believes automobiles are meant to be run into concrete walls...
...I suggest it as an excellent antidote...
...The anti-Rickover corner argues the strategy of confronting the Soviet navy at its weakest point--its problem of supply...
...And history has always gone to those who ask people to believe"--Also sprach not Der FLihrer or Chairman Mao, but one of the most renowned reformers ever to rise up in the Great Democracy...
...Not only is Citizen Nader subversive to freedom and a pluralistic society, he is also subversive to- stable institutions...
...The efficient production of goods and services is beyond the pale to Citizen Nader, as are sleep, reflective thought, careful research, prudent discourse, courteous manners, tolerance...
...Next to him even the ghost of San Clemente appears unexceptionable...
...for so long as the common folk are free to choose one value over another, for instance cheapness over safety, life will be full of treachery...
...The suspicion arises that the courses taken by each man are dictated more by allegiance to their respective "unions" than by genuine policy differences...
...For that is another of Citizen Nader's ingratiating qualities...
...BOOK REVIEW On lVatch ElmoR...
...that afflicted--and continues to afflict-the whole Navy, though the surface Navy was and is the greatest sufferer, can be described in one word...
...For me the answer has been shouted aloud by his public record...
...He is congenitally litigious, especially toward those who take issue with his causes and speak their minds...
...There are some discomforts attendant here--individuals will have to make their Qwn choices--but I prefer the discomforts of freedom to the securities of serfdom...
...The four years he served as CNO, 1970-1974, were also the final years of Richard Nixon's Presidency, and, as Zumwalt describes them, they were years of disagreement...
...The qualities one is most likely to encounter in the upwardly mobile Naderist are bloodshot eyes, insomnia, chronic stomach disorder, a choleric disposition, anti-intellectualism, mild jacobinism, and no sex--in brief many of the qualities once characteristic of the Shakers...
...Free citizens must live with some reasonable expectations for the future...
...Zumwalt's dispute with Rickover is instructive...
...and what is the character of a man who sleeps four hours a night, snoops into the private lives of his employees, follows a teenager's dietary habits while lecturing the whole nation on health, and in the end laments that we Americans are given to thinking rather than believing...
...Today he speaks ominously of scrapping the capitalist system, and in favor of what...
...His seduction of the press is perhaps somewhat understandable...
...If I have percipiently read Citizen Nader's five lovey-dovey biographers," the aforementioned qualities are his most ingratiating...
...He is a hybrid of William Jennings Bryan and John Brown...
...That liberals have missed the import of Citizen Nader's critique, does not speak well for them...
...That these reports constitute one of his chief product lines does not speak very well for engineering or quality control at Nader, Inc...
...apartment...
...continues to roll, manned often by college students and other amateurs, a last holdout against the child labor laws...
...Who could afford such monstrosities is a mystery...
...Nor do intelligent students of our economy believe that it is increasingly controlled by two hundred giant corporations, a yahoo allegation that has been around for years...
...Delicacy prevents me from uttering the word, delicacy and anxiety about waking up to an army of libel lawyers...
...For over a decade he has fussily scampered across America, tirelessly scolding citizens for their economics, their technology, and their government...
...As dismaying as it might be to Citizen Nader, I personally prefer thinking persons to believers...
...Are people m be free to choose chiropractors over medical doctors...
...Zumwalt, Jr...
...Not content with the reasonable practice of segregating smokers on airplanes, he would have them totally eliminated...
...Yahoo A/legations So much for his famed reports, but what of his theories and insights...
...There never has been anything quite like him in this vast and diverse Republic...
...He argued with Admiral Hyman Rickover over the kinds of weapons the Navy ought to have, with Richard Nixon over the kind of discipline it ought to enforce, and with Henry Kissinger over nearly everything...
...His researches are almost always flyblown and often promptly refuted once the shock of his canards has worn off...
...Himself a surface sailor, Zumwalt implicitly admits that his disagreement with Rickover, an old submariner, is a reflection of that intra-service rivalry...
...He completed his term, wrote this memoir of his four years in the Navy's highest post, and ran for Senate from Virginia...
...That he has no established expertise in any of these fields is obvious...
...If any corporation in America ever turned out such a lemon as his report on the perils of the Volkswagen, it would soon be on the road to bankruptcy with Naderists yapping all the way to the grave...
...It is unclear exactly what his judgment of the domestic pizza pie might be...
...No research has ever proven that in a relatively free market advertising can continue to coerce consumers to purchase goods that do not satisfy them...
...Road and Track, an automobile magazine written mainly by disinterested engineers, found the Volkswagen report selective, tendentious, and in parts arrantly erroneous...
...If this is his position on a discomfort as trivial as smoking how can one conclude he would be more tolerant of graver inconveniences ? Would he tolerate Mennonites cluttering the public roads with their horse-drawn vehicles...
...Hardly ever does he defend the consumer against the costly, inefficient beadledom of big government...
...I prefer the first edition...
...No one knows...
...Insofar as I am able to make any sense of them at all, those for which he is esteemed were all hatched long ago by such various eminences as Milton Friedman, Frank Knight, Karl Marx, and C. Wright Mills...
...This is reinforced by the The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 31...
...too much research on market concentration, for instance by economists Paul McCracken and Harold Demsetz, has demonstrated its error...
...The Department of Transportation found it full of malfunctioning "facts...
...The free and democratic society is an evolutionary step up from the paternalistic tyranny he favors...
...Zumwalt minces no words in recounting his quarrels...
...His decade of prosperity is one of the most preposterous success stories in American history, more absurd even than the career of Henry Wallace...
...So long as our democratic society tolerates diversity and resists the standardization that Nader's regulatory commissions and bureaucracies demand, safety, health, and reform will be thwarted...
...This requires a considerable number of primarily surface vessels...
...What Zumwalt objects to is the lobby Rickover has built up in favor of a nuclear-powered navy, a lobby that has been fortified by Rickover's enviable skills in political suasion and his position at the Atomic Energy Commission (now at the Energy Research and Development Administration...
...Soon or late liberals are going to have to ask themselves what manner of ideologue this Citizen Nader is...
...Nonetheless Citizen Nader continues to sound off on a breathtakingly wide range of issues, a consumerist who is celebrated for not consuming, a champion of the ecosphere who sulks when his staff breaks from its seven-day work week for a visit to the beach, an activist disdainful of intellectuals and political philosophy who finds meaning and inspiration in what every sly pol recognizes as sheer bromide: "the public interest...
...Yet the production line at Nader, Inc...
...Rickover...
...On the matter of his liberalism and.his devotion to progress he spoke volumes recently when he lamented in the New York Times Magazine that "We ask our people to think instead of asking them to believe...
...Even his fabled report on the pathetic Corvair failed to hold up under scrutiny...
...continued on page 31) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) nous complaints Citizen Nader has lodged against American business and American government I believe that he is discomfited by something far deeper than pollution, corruption, and booby-trapped cars...
...the logic of his proposals casts doubt on the possibility it will ever improve...
...Originally he set out to reform the Corvair, then it was General Motors, then all corporations, then health care...
...What is most interesting about this internal squabble is probably not what the author intended...
...Soon he wanted to deregulate air fares but to regulate other industries...
...Thoroughly detailed is the evidently vigorous contest for recognition and funds among the Navy's three "unions"-aviators, submariners, and surface sailors...
...Such turbulence is intolerable to a liberal society...
...A final malady," he writes, Seth Cropsey is assistant editor of The Public Interest...
...Hot dogs are malum in se, and God does not will that mankind sit to the fore of the internal combustion engine, but rather that he sit astern it and always tightly swaddled in a seat belt, preferably of the advanced inertia variety...
...It is proudly claimed t h a t he refuses to employ such bounders and feels it his right to inquire into the smoking habits of potential employees...
...Bah, and bah to his belief that the American people are enthralled by the wizards of Madison Avenue...
...His ideal auto would incorporate the characteristics of a Mercedes Benz 450SEL with those of an XM1 Tank...
...Freedom and tolerance are at issue here...
...Yet these reports are not that much different from his other reports...
...Character is a prelude to action...
...Citizen Nader's record as a civil libertarian is poor...
...Citizen Nader is the latest edition in American Puritanism...
...Will investors venture their savings in enterprises that may be banned tomorrow...
...Even if Coca-Cola surrenders tomorrow, the conspiracies of General Motors are shut down forever, and Lake Erie becomes a health spa, Citizen Ralph will not be able to shake himself loose from the coils of the publi~ interest...
Vol. 10 • December 1976 • No. 3
