The Spirit of Enterprise

...and Roy Godson, authors of Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Statecraft, deem it appropriate that the two terms be used interchangeably...

...Espionage, it is well to note, does not fall into the category described here...

...Don't believe it for a moment...

...on the other, those who defended it only for its immense material benefits...

...But disinformation is another mat'Reviewed by Curtis Cate in the October 1983 American Spectator...

...Yet until governments like Mr...

...With the history, education, and wealth of experience of their countries, Europe's leaders are sitting atop a gusher of untold riches, if only they had the good sense to loosen the cap...

...Realizing that many of the 300,000 physicians across the country probably were faced with similar problems, Codina looked to his friend the computer for an answer...

...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...

...Who could imagine, for example, James Buckley's vigorous defense of the free market at a Mexico City Population Conference taking place before the publication of Wealth and Poverty...

...Time and again, with an eloquence borne of passion, Gilder hammers away at his theme: Opportunity is in the eye of the beholder...

...Europeans have understood is that they have paid dearly for the years of hostility they have shown toward commerce...

...Here I fear he is most vulnerable to attack...

...With regard to the semantic issue, some authorities hold that disinformation, defined in the Russian language dictionary of the Soviet Academy of Sciences as a "false, inaccurate announcement [made] with the aim of confusing someone," is but one component in a larger Active Measures arsenal...

...Even now, in the restrictive atmosphere of Europe, immigrants are providing services no native would dream of doing...

...Then he was adopted by a New Jersey family...

...economy's turnaround so incomprehensible to its economists...

...In the surge and pulse of America's present economic boom, only Gilder appears to have a handle on its underlying reasons...

...On my own block in Brussels, the only food store open past 7:30 p.m...

...It should also be said, however, that many of the most effective ones do...

...Today, at age 35, Armando Codina is vice president of the Miami Chamber of Commerce, a director of the Catholic Boystown camp that took him in twenty years ago, a member of Vice President George Bush's Task Force on Crime, and a volunteer active in other civic and business efforts...

...Gilder cites literally dozens of other entrepreneurs in his book...

...The austerity of the prose, the economy of words, the classic beauty of the images, call to mind the finest passages of Caesar's Commentan'es, Generations of present and future historians will read and weigh every word of these revelations...

...the successful are the "heroes of economic life...

...Contemplating the generation of young conservatives that is coming along after my own, 1 am sometimes reminded of Ripley's dramatic formulation for the growth of the population of China: If the Chinese people were t o march, four abreast, past a given point, they would march on forever...

...It is probably the most rationalized collection of Western economies around...

...Adding insult to injury here is the fact that many of E u r o p e ' s immigrants--the Turks in Germany, for instance--were invited in when there was a shortage of labor...

...G i l d e r speaks at great length about faith toward the end of his book...

...There is John Masters, an unemployed 47-year-old explorer working out of a borrowed room in Calgary, later to discover the largest gas basin in North America...

...As Gilder points out, the life of the entrepreneur, with its attendant risks, discipline, and militant hope, is a life that "springs from religious faith and c u l t u r e . " A hedonist free-market society will soon run through the spiritual capital on which it depends...

...But they don't...

...There is Milos Krofta, a Yugoslavian immigrant who would transform a youthful concern for clean water into a multinational firm...

...there is, too, Jose Pinero, a Cuban who arrived in Miami penniless and yet became one of the thousands of other successful refugees who restored the lustre to a tired American city...

...S h u l t z and Godson are pioneers...

...The typography has been modernized for ease of reading...

...is run by Turks...

...Dezinformatsia demonstrates that certain methods of deception are central--not incidental-elements of Soviet statecraft...

...True, "big business" (itself an abstraction) is not going to be on the cutting edge of creativity, but it does have its role: an important one, too...

...Today Gilder has followed up Wealth and Poverty with another groundbreaker, The Spirit o f Enterprise...

...In no way does this detract from the primacy of the entrepreneur...

...The myriad idiocies of the Common Market need no detail here, but consider for a moment the European atTHE COMPLETE WAR MEMOIRS OF CHARLES DE GAULLE 1940-1946 "A literary masterpiece...

...Armando Codina is typical_9 One of the 14,000 children evacuated from Cuba in Operation Pedro Pan, he arrived on America's shores with just two words of English: "hamburger" and "Coke...

...Rusher concludes: _9 . . Reagan's victory [in 1980] can be said to mark the point at which the conservative movement achieved a political maturity equal to the intellectual maturity it already possessed...

...On the basis of an $18,000 loan from the Small Business Administration, Codina launched the Professional Services Corporation...

...How ironic that such special treatment is reserved for foreign concerns...

...John Simon 0-306-80205-8/viii + 427 pp./$9.95 titude toward immigrants and how it reflects the anti-people climate of the continent...

...In the subsequent pages of this book the give and take of commercial life, hitherto deemed tawdry and mundane, is revealed in all its earthy splendor...

...scholarship...

...Many rank-and-file members of such groups--the World Peace Council, for example--do not realize that their activities are orchestrated by the Soviets, or by Moscow's domestic surrogates...

...The doctor, who wasn't even sure what was owed him, referred Codina to his nurse...

...With this book, he has moved from the textbook where businessmen William McGurn is editorial features editor o f the Wall Street Journal/Europe and European editor o f The American Spectator...

...Unfortunately, understanding what one has done wrong is not the same thing as understanding what is right...

...rubric of "Active Measures"--a KGB term translated directly from Russian--or "Dezinformatsia" (disinformation...

...So full and rich is Glider's world vision, that it cries out for this kind of book...

...and slowly but steadily young conservative journalists and academicians are entering and rising through those long-hostile ranks...

...On top of working hard and knowing how to listen, they had to have respect for even the lowliest part of their operations...

...He then set about to design 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 a software package that would organize all the doctor's necessary information in an easy and coherent way...

...it has ',public interest" lawyers testing its contentions in the courts...

...At the root and origin of all great 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 empires of industry can usually be found a perspiring entrepreneur, often frustrated and fatigued, struggling over a machine that won't quite work...

...But for the public at large, and even for U.S...

...This was not empty arrogance...

...All those big businesses, from Standard Oil to McDonald's, themselves are traceable to some entrepreneur...

...But thanks in large measure to high-level defectors-Stanislav Aleksandrovich Levchenko, a former KGB officer responsible for intelligence activities in Japan...

...First he was sent to an orphanage...

...At first, the business's only customers were a few associates of the doctor whose offices Codina had used when he was working on his design...

...Europeans do not see this, or at least they do not see its magnitude...

...With its circular flows of purchasing power, its intricate interplays of goods and moneys, all modern economics, in fact, resembles a vast mathematical dram~i, on an elaborate stage of theory, without a protagonist to animate the play...

...The astounding variety they come in is the factor that gives human existence its charm, those surprising talents and tastes of even the most ordinary people that often make us smile and sometimes leave us in awe...

...Ladislav Bittman, formerly a ranking Czech intelligence official...

...Shultz and Godson interviewed both Levchenko and Bittman in great depth...

...What the...

...it has formidable research institutions developing its analyses of every conceivable issue...

...Trying to define an entrepreneurial triumph by squeezing it into some equatioh is akin to trying to define the Mona Lisa by its length, width, and number of pigments: The result is not really false, but it is hardly true...

...The story of the entrepreneur is the story of his struggle to bring these talents to the market...

...But souls, always come with people wrapped around them...

...Bigness is part of their success, just as it is for those entrepreneurs in these pages...

...The other thing to consider is that each entrepreneurial success, though occurring within some definite shared pattern, is nonetheless always by nature unique...

...At that time, our understanding of this area of endeavor amounted to roughly zero...

...the edited interviews appear as appendices in Dezinformatsia...

...like Codina, they are impossible to drop neatly into some fixed category...

...in contrast to the static economies' preoccupation with the moment, a capital~t people is future-oriented...

...The father of capitalism himself, Adam Smith, hadn't ever gone so far, limiting his celebrated baker to at best an accidental virtue...

...If that sounds a tad too Horatio Algerish for twentieth-century tastes, probably it was meant to...

...That is why economists are so unnerved by it and why they keep to their warnings that it is not going to last...

...Just as Adam Smith--a moral philosopher by trade--would be horrified to hear some of the things that have been attributed to him, so too might Gilder be horrified that many who read 0nly The Spirit of Enterprise might see him as a sort of twisted Calvinist, measuring a man's moral worth by the sizeof his bank account...

...Barron's "recent work, KGB Today: The Hidden Hand,' a successor volume to KGB: The Secret Work oJ Soviet Secret Agents, established him as one of the foremost students of Soviet intelligence in the free world...

...John Barron, a senior editor at Reader's Digest, is one such journalist...

...Here are his first lines, taken from the opening paragraph: The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw: a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalists...

...Even Francois Mitterrand, a Socialist party president who started out with" three Communists in his government, came to Silicon Valley and began muttering tax relief...

...During the campaign to block the deployment of American nuclear missiles in Europe late last year, a Soviet diplomat is alleged to have boasted to a Dutch journalist: " I f Moscow decides that 50,000 protestors should take to the streets of Amsterdam this week, then 50,000 there will be...

...Ed...

...That is not too surprising: He had been predicting it all along...

...It is in KGB Today that the full, fascinating, and distressing stories of Levchenko and other major defectors are recounted...

...In 1965, at age 17, Codina took a job as messenger boy at Jacksonville's American National Bank...

...Above all, they had to be willing to take that ultimate risk, to have confidence that "the crowd is always wrong...

...If the past is any clue, the European governments will simply replace their disastrous policy of ruining businesses with the equally loathsome policy of getting in bed with them, i.e., trying to lure fat conglomerates to their countries with an enticing package of government subsidies and benefits (witness the U . K . ' s experience with John DeLorean...

...recovery with awe (using terms like "economic miracle...

...As Mr...

...After ten months of labor, Codina came up with a package, still with no guarantee that anyone would ever...

...No one disputes the fact that both "we" and "they" undertake espionage...

...W. Jackson Bate, Harvard University 0-306-80219-8/xxviii + 354 pp./$10.95 AGAINST THE AMERICAN GRAIN Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture by Dwight Macdonald New introduction by John Simon "Dwight Macdonald is that rate-no, unique-critic who combines the highest, most uncompromising standards with an ease and felicity of expression that everyone, high and low, can thoroughly enjoy...

...it has seasoned political managers ready to manage their campaigns...

...N 101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 43 quickly the great physical means of production--the contested tokens of wealth and resources of nature-dissolve into so much scrap, ruined concrete, snarled wire, and wilderness...

...dollars...

...Blackmur here wrote one of the great set pieces of recent American literature, We are lucky to have this book...

...In one sense, it just doesn't matter whether conservatism wins or loses some particular future election: The point is that conservatism is unmistakably on the playing field at last, as one of the two major contestants...

...We in the West know precious little about these techniques...

...Much of this has happened in Europe over the past two decades, albeit in a nonviolent way...

...At present, the governments of France, Belgium, England, Holland see in their immigrants (many of them from former colonies) a tremendous burden...

...In that the entrepreneur is much like the driven members of other professions, be they poets, painters, athletes, or teachers, all those for whom "good enough" isn't quite good enough: The larger point, of course, is that the driven members of any group define that group: Art flourishes because of creative artists and business thrives because of creative businessmen...

...In Augustine's adaption of Platonic philosophy, the "forms" underlying all things were no more than "ideas" in the mind of the Creator...

...they forget that America's success is an immigrants' (again, people's) success...

...The reason is that Europeans still do not grasp the entrepreneurial source of American wealth, so mesmerized are they by numbers and the physical means of production...

...THE SPIRIT OF ENTERPRISE George Gilder/Simon and Schuster/S17.95 William McGurn When he published his best'selling Wealth and Poverty some four years ago, George Gilder thrust himself into the center of the heated debate over the worth of the American economic system...

...Ask Katy-she'll know," he told Codina...

...Hardcover $15,00 each volume Softcover $7.50 each volume Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...

...Consequently, those entrepreneurs so vividly portrayed here are more than just interesting cases in the recovery...

...At the same time, they eye the U.S...

...This sense of drama is what makes Glider's tales read--as any truly human tales read--like novels, with interesting clleracters and complicated plots...

...It was the "good" that threw people...

...it has columnists, radio and television commentators, and authors of all sorts, pleading its causes...

...Also like Codina, these entrepreneurs are essentially normal people who, in a climate that allowed them relative room for maneuver, responded to some nagging problem in an original way...

...As silly as these numbers games seem, they have been a favorite passion in this century's pursuit of the rational...

...One such technique is the use of forged documents which, after dissemination, lead to false news stories in the international media...

...In other words, as the driving force of capitalism's vast productive engine Gilder has found a transcendent ideal...

...Indeed, that a l l manner o f American economists persist in their calls for a national industrial policy, the elimination of "waste," and more joint government-business operations is most ironic, given that this is more or less a description of today's Europe...

...Because it is thus primarily a process of the mind moving back and forth from theory to practice, a success like Armando Codina's cannot be confined to an equation without sucking out its lifeblood...

...The other reservation I have is Glider's decidedly negative view of anything that seems to deflect attention from the valiant entrepreneur...

...Thus for our purposes, a given front organization is best described as a disinformation phenomenon, as would be a forged State Department cable...

...for the same reason, it is probably the most stagnant...

...A growing economy always makes room...

...For nearly two centuries capitalism's defenders continued in this line, relying on the traditional least-possible-evil approach in their arguments...

...Gilder has taken it further...

...Others, including Richard H. Shultz, Jr...

...Front organizations are but one element in a broad range of deception techniques that fall under the general Eric M. Breindel is adjunct professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service...

...In advancing our grasp of disinformation, key defectors are a condition sine qua non...

...In London, were it not for the Pakistanis, no Shops would be open at night or early in the morning...

...Almost alone he has insisted that a free-market economy, in addition to its aforementioned physical prowess, is what philosophers would call a "positive" good...

...Answer: "E.T...

...In the same way that two centuries ago the mercantilists misunderstood wealth to be gold or natural resources, the current crop of economists-professional doomsayers--locate it in infrastructures, national industrial policy, anything but the people who create it...

...Above the intense bickering Gilder waved his hand and silenced the crowd with the baldness of his pronouncement: More than just efficient, America's system of free enterprise was, he said, good...

...9.95 HENRY ADAMS by R. P. Blackmur Edited by Veronica A. Makowsky Foreword by Denis Donoghue "Operating at the height of his powers...

...Fascinated by computers, he spent his nights and weekends trYing to come up with a software program that would computerize the teller accounting system...

...wanted to go home...

...Marshall "The author, like a skilled surgeon and the master military historian he is...

...While trying to justify a loan for a distinguished local physician who was short of cash, Codina discovered that the doctor's financial records were a sea of complicated insurance, government,, and financial forms...

...buy it...

...Similarly, the product is an idea in the entrepreneur's mind that he has given a material shape to...

...That point is worth pausing over the next time you read some economist's gloomy prediction that the U.S...

...A current Belgian joke asks, "What's the difference between North Africans and E.T...

...These countries would be a lot better off were they instead to show some confidence in their own people, by slashing their horrendous taxes and reducing the seemingly endless restrictions on business...

...He was promoted to teller in 1967...

...Volumes I and II are already available while Volumes V and ~ I will be published later...

...are merely described and into the furnace where their spirit is forged...

...No better example of this statistical hypnosis exists than Europe...

...Traditional Conservatism, and millions of morally concerned, sensible, but largely nonideological citizens without strong loyalty to any political party can all be kept under the same tent--and even the strongest tent can be blown away in a storm...

...When Barron focused primarily on Soviet espionage, as in his first book, he was not engaged in a particularly shocking task...

...economy is in danger of "overheating...

...An imaginatively rich and judicious book...

...As Gilder would put it, what they lack most is faith...

...Foundations for a more permanent structure have barely been begun...

...On the one side were arrayed those who reject capitalism in toto...

...There he got the idea that would make him rich...

...Largely because of such efforts as this, capitalism is no longer quite the dirty word it was just a sfiort time ago, and the most surprising folks are trying to get in on the act...

...Walter Clemons, Newsweek "A fascinating insight into the mind of a _9 remarkable man...

...Lenin would have termed these idealistic innocents "useful idiots...

...In general its governments have combined a bureaucratic zeal for the rational with a distaste for what Gilder properly sees as the animating force of any economy: people...

...This LibertyClassics edition is based on the posthumous edition of 1778, the last to contain corrections by Hume...

...In this lucid study, they analyze these aspects of Soviet foreign policy with the precision and rigor of top-flight THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 45...

...The young Cuban was no simple nine-to-fiver...

...Hume's History o f England illustrates his belief that the growth of liberty is neither inevitable nor necessary and that the preservation of liberty requires an understanding of the conditions which gave rise to it as well as the institutional arrangements which sustain it...

...Mitterrand's unshackle the source of productivity, they will have nothing more to show for their efforts than giant, lifeless hunks of matter, useless without the souls that make them go...

...cuts through the accumulated tissue of myth ~md legend, accusation and exculpation, laying bare the fundamental and irreconcilable differences between the way of life of the white man aud the ted which made war between them inevitable . . . a wealth of lessons in leadership-both good and bad . . . . " - G e n . Matthew B. Ridgway 0-306-80226-0/270 pp...

...and other Western intelligence agencies, to come to terms more fully with this element in our adversary's arsenal, determined--and intellectually courageous--scholars and journalists are another essential ingredient...

...It worked, and by the time he moved to Miami two .years later, Codina had progressed far enough to become a loan officer at National Republic Bank...

...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...

...David Schoenbrun, Saturday Review 0-306-80227-9/vi + 1048 pp./$14.95 CRIMSONED PRAIRIE The Indian Wars by S.L.A...

...If ever an idea had a consequence, this was it...

...Simplot, rising from the western brush to command a financial" empire of frozen .french fries, apartment complexes, hotels, mining concerns, box-making plants, lumbering facilities, and even semiconductor chips...

...The key, I would suggest, is for us to keep our shared sense of common direction without trying to force our comrades-in-arms to march in lockstep...

...There is no good reason why Germans, Irish, Italians, Turks, Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, Greeks, and so on should not prosper on their own soil as they do in America...

...The notion that the frontiers are closed, that there is no more opportunity, is based on the same static assumptions that make the U.S...

...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...

...Gradually the package caught on, and, as Codina modified the package to fit other physician specialties, Professional Services' value soared into the millions...

...In France, the government is paying immigrants to go back whence they came...

...The American recovery, just one chapter in our historical economic progress, is built in large part on immigration, which by definition means people...

...Throughout Western Europe, and in the United States, large organizations have been created, or are directed by, activists operating at the behest of Moscow, determined to serve Soviet foreign-policy interests...

...Or even the current argument over whether the Reagan tax cuts went far enough...

...The free-market system, after all, is founded on trust and promises...

...they are the recovery...

...To the extent they have been, a large part of the praise is due to pioneer conservatives like Bill Rusher and Bill Buckley who encouraged so many younger writers and activists to take their fledgling steps in the movement, and to Ronald Reagan who made it possible for them to become active parts of America's first thoroughly right-of-center administration in the post-Depression era...

...When the capitalists arethwarted, deflected, or dispossessed," writes Gilder, "the generals and politicians, the guerrilla chieftains and socialist intellectuals, are always amazed at how The History o f England From the Invasion of Julius Caesar To the Revolution in 1688 By David Hume Foreword by William B. Todd In Six Volumes-Volumes III and IV now available...

...There is J.R...

...For the same reason, perhaps, so many of the great books on wealth, from the Wealth of Nations to The Spirit of Enterprise, have not been written by economists...

...Slowly, glacierlike, the nature of the debate has changed accordingly...

...That is always a pitfall when one part of someone's views are abstracted, and so I suggest that Gilder should begin another book that makes this link between faith and culture much more explicit, rounding out his perspective on the full man...

...Nevertheless, what Gilder has done in The Spirit of Enterprise is to draw out the stars of his earlier Wealth and Poverty from all those facts, figures, and charts under which they are usually buried, t o give them their due...

...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...

...And there are also "agents of influence"-men and women, frequently working either in journalism or in government, who carry out their duties with Soviet needs in mind...

...and several others--we know an enormous amount more than we did, say, a decade ago...

...Before charges of "redbaiting" and "McCarthyism" are hurled, let it be said that many, if not most, political groups engaged in combating American foreign policy have no ties whatever to the Soviets or their allies...

...It has numerous candidates for public office eager to expound its views...

...20 illus...