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...
...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...
...Then what...
...Since leaving Exeter have you continued writing...
...Specifically, they derive from an executive order requiring that a given percentage of work on federal construction projects be awarded to minority businesses...
...That is why they love price controls—because they know they lead so beautifully to nationalization...
...Tom Bethell Capitol Ideas Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee wrote a book fingering CIA agents abroad...
...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...
...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...
...All the unpleasantness just happened...
...The moral, I must say, is a stark one...
...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...
...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...
...Taking the larger view, there is no doubt, of course, that the anti-Bakke forces are setting out in an unbelievably foolish direction...
...0 Whit Stillman Under the Condor —A Story From among the undergraduates of today will come the graduate students of tomorrow...
...Furthermore, it puts the planners out of work...
...His gestures seemed awkward...
...Already there is a heightening of racial rhetoric in this country...
...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...
...In legislatures, the majority prevails...
...In that country they apply the "pencil test" to determine whether a man is "colored" or "white...
...What will happen...
...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...
...Agonizing reappraisals about our relations with Iran, Korea, Brazil, and Argentina are now being made...
...of the latter, servitude...
...So what do they do...
...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...
...and for all I know there may even be a university somewhere that enrolls brains (thus putting higher learning before anything else...
...and awkward manner...
...the latter, civilization with all its weapons and its arts...
...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...
...Un-American is entirely too weak a way of putting it...
...A pencil is stuck into his hair, he shakes his head, and if the pencil doesn't fall out—too bad for him...
...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...
...yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe...
...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...
...The owners of oil and natural gas wells in the U.S...
...Poets write not in simple pursuit of artistic objectives," he told her over coffee, "but in an attempt to escape unease...
...The Justice Department responded by saying that if the traitor returned to the United States, he would not be prosecuted under the Espionage Act...
...Government regulation has a way of ending up like that...
...Jane asked...
...It will stay there a few years longer...
...Otherwise he would be perfectly content with the happiness itself, and not need to write a poem about it...
...Simply put, neither the geologists nor the economists agree on what that magic price must be...
...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...
...For Jane Repton of Quincy House, Harvard, depression, and the sense of promise it brings, came early in the fall of sophomore year...
...Therefore he calls himself "black...
...Helms was then further lectured on the New York Times Op-Ed page by Dick Clark, the trendy senator from Iowa...
...At this writing the House-Senate resolution of the energy bill has not taken place...
...If only—they sigh so hypocritically—if only Helms had refused to answer the questions put to him by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...During Freshman Week—two years ago—I was sure my ability to write poetry had entirely dried up...
...He was ordered out of Britain for maintaining contacts with foreign intelligence agents...
...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...
...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...
...It's just a matter of "divergent political systems and different values...
...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...
...Only then will they realize that Senator Russell Long, custodian of the "special interests," has been on their side all along...
...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...
...Believing it to be to their advantage, blacks want to play the racial game again...
...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...
...Only the actual sale price determines market value...
...One country with such procedures right now is South Africa...
...Is there no relationship between the Gulag on the one hand and the particular quality of "the competitive elements" between the U.S...
...supply planes en route to Israel during the Yom Kippur war...
...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...
...Liberal-minded "planners" love that garage, because they know there is a set of overalls waiting for them there, and endless opportunity to tinker...
...Americans some time after they do...
...Never mind...
...price controls will be imposed nationwide...
...At this price, and with the prospect of deregulation gone, gas-owners will decide that the time has come to sell...
...Perhaps it might be better to stick with the Civil Rights Act after all...
...This university, let us say, chooses to enroll jocks (thus building a winning team, keeping the money flowing in from the alumni...
...Judge Parker, get off the bench...
...However, if prices are legislated at about $2.00 (as Sen...
...George Will and Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post have been sensible enough to see this, but not many others have noticed the danger...
...George Will suggested that such boards may have to be presided over by a new Herman Goering...
...Let me make a prediction...
...One evening during the first weeks of school they took a break from their work to have cafe cappuccinos at the Cafe Pamplona...
...The stuff has been in the ground for millions of years," Edwards told me once...
...Liberals, arguing against Bakke, say something like this: Why shouldn't race be used as a criterion of admission to universities...
...He needn't have gone so far back into the past...
...Until I went to Exeter for ninth grade—or Lower Middle, as we called it there—I hardly wrote any poetry at all...
...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...
...In that way, then, what are now price ceilings will wind up as price floors...
...She habitually sat among the open poetry stacks so that she might periodically take a break to look through the shelves...
...Some poets stop writing completely when they get older...
...District Court Judge Barrington Parker, "You stand before this court in disgrace and shame...
...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...
...That is, universities may use race as a criterion...
...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...
...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...
...Simple...
...As you might know, the students at Exeter are advanced academically but extremely competitive, and sort of young—there was a lot of hazing...
...Can any libertarian disagree with such a system...
...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...
...This is because when sellers are not allowed to bargain at the marketplace, they do not bother to compete with one another...
...I simply do not believe that point of view...
...Then he was ordered out of France...
...I can understand that in matters of foreign policy, morality can sometimes be a matter of priorities...
...But depression carries with it the implication that something big is about to happen...
...those of the other, by the sword...
...that university enrolls blacks, Chicanos, etc...
...The thorny question of racial self-identification is already with us...
...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 American Spectator January 1978 19...
...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...
...The trouble with this analysis is that it is also applicable to any commodity that has been legislated out of the market system...
...That's when I started writing poetry...
...of Good Intentions, Washington, D.C...
...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...
...This is perfectly legal, to date...
...As Eliot Marshall has pointed out in the New Republic, there are now ethnic review boards operating within the Los Angeles school system...
...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...
...There are no evil men and evil designs in the Kremlin and there are no evil men and evil designs in Washington, D.C...
...Does that prospect appeal to our blossoming crop of racialists...
...Japanese students blow their brains out when they do not get into the college of their choice...
...and you get a ramshackle contraption that never gets out of the garage...
...Only then, in my far from expert legal view, will coercive government and libertarian principle meet head-on...
...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...
...The danger, they will find, is that it is a game at which two can play, however belatedly...
...The Zbigniew Brzezinski I knew at Columbia University in the 1960s knew all about evil men and evil designs...
...Finally, after a semester of the course, my writing talent had been honed into something hard and jewel-like...
...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...
...Ben Pasquali studied in the poetry stacks too, so from proximity they became friends, chatting occasionally...
...Every evening after study hall a group of students would pick me up and drop me in the dormitory laundry hamper...
...But I have not heard any statement that their violations of human rights can be excused because of "deeply rooted historical forces...
...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...
...and the USSR...
...Writing usually requires solitude, and that can mean hours of being alone...
...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...
...My discovery led me to an interest in literature...
...construing its purpose by reference to a currently fashionable theory of social justice...
...This realization led to a depression which, returning to the field of her secondary school success, she sought to express in poetry...
...Here Ben stopped and took a sip of his coffee...
...here seems to be an unnoticed paradox associated T with the Allan Bakke case, recently argued before the Supreme Court...
...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...
...But on rereading my compositions I realized that they still didn't make a bit of sense...
...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...
...For every study that shows prices must be deregulated, I can point to another study that shows that prices are already high enough...
...This is something I encountered personally, I'm afraid...
...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...
...He was fined $2,000 and told by U.S...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Executive branch enforcement of this order is already running afoul of lawsuits, which soon enough are likely to reach the Supreme Court...
...My whole theory of aesthetics, which revolved around the idea of beauty, was deeply flawed and probably worthless...
...Selfishness, by contrast, is rather a low-life way of solving the problem...
...In response to this, socialists will say that the "logical" response is to nationalize the mineral wealth...
...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...
...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...
...Having said as much, however, one immediately realizes that it is not may but must that the anti-Bakke forces have in mind...
...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...
...It is not the permissive "may" but the coercive "must" that conservatives fear...
...The most distressful implication of your speech is that you equate the U.S...
...I was familiar with poetry from before, but I had little awareness of the non-poetic kinds of writing...
...Not to put too fine a point on it, the step from racial to racist is perilously small...
...Her classmates' dinnertime discussions of their own accomplishments —which could have been shattering—were instead enjoyable...
...Is all the world's evil in Pretoria...
...What has gone wrong with this country...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Do blacks really want this...
...They may not bargain at the marketplace with buyers, but they may, in our "mixed" economy, decline to go to market...
...Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same...
...This has resulted in an artificial, government-induced shortage...
...Disconnect all those little motors, and replace them with the Fairness Office, Dept...
...So Tocqueville wrote in 1835...
...the conquests of the one are therefore gained by the ploughshare...
...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...
...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...
...Jackson has recommended) they will not sink lower than that, no matter how much new gas is brought out of the ground...
...Former CIA director Richard Helms refused to renege on his oath of office by revealing the extent of CIA "involvement" in Chile...
...There is merely adjudicated value...
...This has led to an "energy crisis" for the following very simple reason...
...I allude to the Russians and the Americans....The American struggles against the natural obstacles which oppose him...
...the adversaries of the Russian are men: the former combats the wilderness and savage life...
...In a sense, being depressed means being unhappy...
...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...
...But when Ben spoke all appearance of awkwardness disappeared...
...They keep the stuff in the ground...
...and the USSR...
...I know it sounds like a dreary thing to bring .up...
...in rather poor taste, let us say...
...So race review boards loom as a distinct possibility on the horizon, and with them all kinds of nastiness...
...As for their fellow-travelers among the columnists, send them a can of Raid...
...But Jane came away from her afternoons of work alone with a sense of achievement and of the passage of time...
...the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm: the principal instrument of the former is freedom...
...I couldn't think of anything, and remembered stories of successful young poets whose talent vanished as they got older...
...Is that how we are going to award construction contracts m the future...
...Economists should come up with a technical term for this, and probably have...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
