My Life as a Dee-Cline

...I went to Chicago thinking I wanted to concentrate on labor economics, which seemed closest to the problems of the unemployed and the poor...

...I joined a team of economists in the Price Stabilization Division of the National Defense Advisory Commission...

...I felt that I was missing out on the most exciting part of life in Washington, and possibly in the United States, which is the life of politics, because of my reluctance to commit myself...

...The "positive" part of the program indicated his rejection of the notion that nothing needed to be done other than to get the government out of the way...

...Perhaps that is because I have spent the past fifty years in Washington, which they have not...

...Toward the end of 1940, the head of the division, Leon Henderson, took on another team of economists, who were equally devoted to the idea that price controls were essential...

...The U.S...

...It asserted an active role for government in maintaining high employment and economic stability by the use of its fiscal and monetary policies...

...This attitude makes it impossible for me to go along with conventional conservative strictures about government spending...

...2 coins, $150...

...I am now a registered Republican but not a very hard-rock one...

...Or, as I told George Shultz after one meeting in the White House, "I have the feeling that we are a troop of boy scouts invited into City Hall for a day to act as if we are the City Council...

...That every boy and every gal That's born into the world alive Is either a little Liberaz Or else a little Conservative...

...Simons was the colleague and protégé of another Chicago economist, Frank Knight...

...And expressing the same distaste for extreme inequality in the distribution of power was his warning against pushing too far any of the responsibilities he assigned to government...

...5 coins, $345 (save $30...

...My "instincts" are against capital punishment—it is so irreversible...

...2) Since the market would not necessarily exist by itself, at least in the form in which it would yield its maximum benefits, the government had a responsibility to maintain the necessary character of the market, especially competition and the availability of information...

...On the other hand, liberals clearly regarded Simons as a conservative, one of the founders or forerunners of the Chicago school that was a synonym for conservatism in economics...

...Government had a positive responsibility to create the conditions in which the benefits of the market would be realized, but this was a strictly limited responsibility...

...Also, I have come to think that differences of policy within the range of options usually under consideration in the United States are not terribly important...

...I chose Brookings not because of any ideological affinity—rather the contrary—but because at Brookings I could do my own thing rather than writing statements to be signed by people with whom I was not much in sympathy...

...If you were a Dee-Cline you could not vote in the primaries...

...My request was denied, however...

...showed how far he was from the radical equalizers of his time...

...At the same time I found no other attachment...

...It also distanced me from the Wall Street variety, which fairly described the CED, and the Main Street variety, which fairly described the Republicans in Congress...

...Whether that means that I have been corrupted or that they have been insulated is not for me to say...

...Sometime in 1968 I read part of a novel (I never finished it) by Sartre about the Spanish Civil War, in which there is a conversation between a French Communist and a friend...

...C imons's attitude has remained a 1—) major influence on me in the fifty years since I left Chicago...

...Many believed that it had to be kept small because of the budgetary and economic costs...

...The essence of his philosophy was summed up in the title of a pamphlet he had written in 1934, "A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire...

...He supported the idea that the budget should be balanced at high employment, and took pleasure in thinking that made him a "Keynesian...

...After Pearl Harbor it became clear that we had been nowhere near economic limits to our defense program and that we would have been much better off if we had rearmed more rapidly...

...And yet it is consistent with my attitude as I have described it that the team I joined was rather unusual...

...To order by credit card, call toll-free 1-800-451-4463 (24 hours a day, 7 days a week...

...People routinely say with apparent certainty serious things that are if not patently false at least highly uncertain...

...I wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal explaining that I was for Reagan despite his ideas about the tax cut, because I thought he would be stronger for defense and against inflation than Carter...

...This left me with the feeling not only that I was not a member of the Keynesian liberal team but also that they were my enemies...

...I learned about the economy as a balanced aquarium in which everything was permanent and for the best...

...During the Johnson-Goldwater campaign the word "conservative" had the same implications of danger to the nationthat the word "liberal" was to have in the Bush-Dukakis campaign, and with about as little reason...

...I was ignorant of thedifferent degrees of leftishness that existed...

...The Communist then replies: "Join and you will be committed...

...A struggle went on between these two teams during much of 1941...

...In the early days of the Carter Administration I had been asked to serve as chairman of an advisory committee on economic policy to the Republican National Committee...

...Government had three important functions in a laissez-faire system: (1) Since the market by itself would not assure aggregate equilibrium—would not prevent inflation or unemployment—government had a responsibility to use its fiscal and monetary policies to maintain the macroeconomic conditions in which the market could work well...

...This was not only an effort at exposition...

...Basically its policy position was what I have described as the position of Henry Simons...

...But those ideas stuck with me...

...But if you think some of the additional spending will be for purposes for which spending would otherwise have been too low, you cannot be sure that increasing taxes causes a net loss...

...His great sin, in the field of economics, was the imposition of price and wage controls, but he at least recognized that it was a sin...

...They accepted much of what Keynes had to say about the short-run behavior of the economy and about short-run anti-Depression policy, only complaining that it was not new and they had always known it...

...So they were neither Keynesians nor non-Keynesians, and were excluded and rejected by both...

...But they denied that he had any general theory, and they particularly rejected the prescriptions for permanent re-ordering of the economy that some of his more devout followers drew from the book...

...Indeed, it was to become clearer in later years that whereas I still clung to, or was stuck with, Simons's idea of the "Positive Program for Laissez-Faire," the new Chicagoans were elevating the laissez-faire aspect of that prescription and downplaying the positive program part...

...I have become less confident that I know what good policy is...

...The first chairman and guiding spirit, Paul Hoffman, was a trustee of the university...

...100 % satisfaction guarantee: you may return your order within 30 days of receipt for a prompt noquestions-asked refund...

...It was too protectionist, too dovish, too inflationist, too redistributionist, and too tempted by grandiose ideas of economic planning for me...

...People ask me to sign petitions with which I am basically sympathetic, but there is always a sentence I cannot sign...

...Also, he recognized, or claimed, that even if the real world did fulfill those conditions, the resulting state of the economy would not necessarily be the best conceivable or the best achievable...

...I offered my services in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, characteristically, to Nelson Rockefeller, the least Republican of the Republicans...

...It also made me think that there were a lot of poor people out there who were miserable through no fault of their own...

...The CED position of being outside both the business mainstream and the economists' mainstream, and of having consciously chosen to be outside, was very congenial to me...

...In this mood I decided to join...

...And although I did stay for five and one-half years, I was never "fully"committed...

...The "laissez-faire" part of the title indicated a rejection of the notions of a planned economy that were then very common in the country, especially in some Washington circles...

...until 1857 and were the most favored trade silver dollars in the world...

...So it was very cold walking along the Midway to an eight a.m...

...Everything could be discussed with him: there were no forbidden subjects, as increasing taxes was to be in the Reagan Administration...

...As time has passed I have come to recognize that my dissent from the conventional parties, ideologies, and schools is less a matter of policy than of talk...

...While current supplies last, prices are as follows: 1 coin, $75...

...In 1980, I favored the selection of George Bush as the Republican presidential candidate, and was especially pleased that he recognized the deception in "voodoo economics...

...The other members of the advisory committee, and the RNC as a whole, were infatuated with the ideathat reducing taxes would raise revenues and that the politically attractive promise of cutting taxes could thus be made consistent with the traditional Republican devotion to balancing the budget...

...The state of the economy made a strong and lasting impression on me...

...This Keynesianism, even though tempered, and this free-trade attitude irritated the conventional business leadership...

...Forexample, in a statement on inflation in 1958 they insisted, despite my arguments, on making an appeal for voluntary restraint on wage and price increases that I regarded as a dangerous opening toward price and wage controls...

...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 logical point that defense, like other good things, has its costs and that at some point the costs are not worth bearing...

...This was a precisely limited endorsement...

...It did not have a rigid doctrine...

...The use of the word "extremes" America's First Silver Dollar Real legal tender of our 13 Colonies — two centuries old Struck in New Spain from 1772 to 1825, these magnificent silver dollars were popularly used in the 13 Colonies, and Thomas Jefferson recommended that they become official legal tender of the United States...

...These areas are filled with hard questions to which the answers are painfully uncertain...

...Government was not to intervene in the "heart of the market," which was the price system...

...843, Montpelier, Vermont 05602...

...Paul Hoffman described the position of the CED as "neither left nor right, but responsible," and that became the watchword of the organization...

...Others who encountered Simons in the 1930s and were similarly influenced then have since changed their ideas significantly...

...Perhaps it is more accurate to say that some of the Brookings people, like Harold Moulton, who had been open-minded researchers before the New Deal, became sullen defenders of the past record as soon as FDR came into office...

...Postage and handling: add $5 on orders up to $499...

...I was still identified with an organization of businessmen that everyone considered "conservative...

...I thought that I had demonstrated enough expertise and objectivity on that subject to be eligible for the appointment, and I did not have to be paid...

...The next two research directors, Howard Myers and I, were also products of the University of Chicago...

...An attempt to write a policy statement about antitrust policy turned out to produce a sermon on the social responsibility of business...

...After Ronald Reagan became the candidate, I worked with an independent committee that raised $3 million on his behalf, which relieved me of any direct contact with his rhetoric...

...Also, if I accept the proposition that defense spending may be too low, I am unable to accept the proposition that there is some flaw in the political process that universally makes government spending too high...

...My father was unemployed for much of this time...

...He floated the dollar, removed production controls from agriculture, and initiated a round of international tariff reduction...

...So the answer probably depends on times and circumstances, which will be hard to define with confidence but will be better than "always" or "never...

...Abortion is a good example...

...But on "micro" matters CED was strongly free-market, opposing price controls (which was an issue at the end of the war) and opposing protectionism (which would be a continuing issue...

...Anyway, observing their complete negativism, I felt no kinship with them...

...My difference from all those people became most acute in 1940 and 1941 when I became involved in questions of defense economics...

...Denominated 8 Reales, occasionally some were cut into quarter-dollar pieces (hence the expression "two bits...

...And if Eichmann, who else...

...I dislike serving on committees that are going to draft statements, because I know there is going to be something I cannot go along with...

...At the same time CED was not embraced by the orthodox Keynesians and liberals...

...So at the infrequent meetings that PEPAB held before it disappeared at the end of 1986, I grumbled and dissented, mainly about the tax policy but also more generally about the absence of any logical foundation for the administration's whole budget policy...

...I tried to clarify the situation with an article in the Washington Post entitled "Varieties of Conservatism: Wall Street, Main Street and the University of Chicago...

...In the upshot I chaired a task force on the budget for the Nixon campaign and then joined the Nixon Administration as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers...

...I don't remember having ideas about politics or public policy until I was in college...

...Some time, probably in my junior year, our college had a visit from John Strachey, a fashionable British Communist...

...When I left the government, at the end of August 1974, I was comfortable in feeling that I was part of the Republican mainstream, and that the Republican mainstream was broad enough so that being part of it imposed no serious limits to my independence of thought...

...And there is no debate, no confrontation of facts or analysis...

...Knight regarded economics as a description of how things would be if these conditions were fulfilled, and of how the real world is insofar as those conditions are fulfilled, which might not be very far...

...My dissatisfaction was intensified by the fact that the courses in labor economics were taught at eight o'clock in the morning and that Colonel McCormick had arranged for Chicago to stay on daylight savings time through the winter...

...I felt that the ideology of the CED was becoming the fashionable liberalism of, for example, the editorial page of the New York Times...

...But it is the talk, and not only from the right but also from the left, and not only from the politicians but also from the "intellectuals," that is most distressing...

...This did not mean the members became more "free-market...

...T have concentrated here on economic issues...

...These ideas were embodied in a little book, An Economic Program for Economic Democracy, by seven Harvard and Tufts economists, that received much attention in 1938...

...It made me think that the economy left by itself might not work very well...

...Nixon was "a conservative man with liberal ideas...

...I wrote a sarcastic article about him in the college literary magazine, because I thought that he did not know any economics, which was true, and I thought that I did, which was untrue...

...Having a hankering to live in Paris, I asked the Council of Economic Advisers to name me as the U.S...

...And they were the unifying doctrine of a group of politically active economists in the Department of Commerce, the Budget Bureau, the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury...

...It was not so much that I was opposed to cutting taxes, although I was already worried about the effect of a tax cut on the defense program...

...CED had a strong University of Chicago orientation, and the idea behind it originally came from discussions at Chicago...

...A rmed with these ideas I went to Washington in 1938...

...I declined because I did not want the responsibility it involved, but I did accept membership...

...In 1964 the CED decided to give me a sabbatical for the year 1965-66, after twenty years of service...

...He was a master at the rigorous and comprehensive elaboration of the conditions implicit in the economists' model of a competitive market economy...

...Gilbert and Sullivan Gilbert and Sullivan were wrong about me...

...But my dissatisfaction with what had become conventional conservative Republicanism did not make me any happier with the opposition...

...These were the casual observations of a naive mind...

...It made me unable to accept the view that government spending per se is bad and that limits should be placed on total government spending...

...Mainly I was offended by the use of the shoddy "Laffer curve" argument...

...Order #7144A...

...The standard attitude of mainstream economists of the time was that CED was pretty good for a group of businessmen, and certainly better than other businessmen, but not really liberated from old taboos and interests...

...CED was to be a victim of its own success...

...I found only one day's work for myself during all of my vacations from college...

...I soon found myself at odds with that team...

...This discovery created a conflict for me...

...At the same time he recognized the large gap between those conditions and the real world...

...In 1940 and 1941, there was a debate in Washington about the scale of our defense buildup...

...I sometimes felt that there were people commonly identified as "liberals" who were as unhappy with their team as I was with mine...

...Our supply bears "chopmarks" of Chinese merchants — proof of their world travel...

...CED was an organization of businessmen, but they were unorthodox businessmen, rebelling against the business establishment of the time, as represented by the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S...

...I continued to believe, following Simons, that vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws was essential, whereas the Chicagoans of 1964 had rejected that idea...

...But still, I was more committed, and felt more a part of a team, in the Nixon Administration than I have before or since...

...That may seem rather late, but I went to college at an early age...

...He was, after all, the proponent of revenue sharing, the Family Assistance Plan, and the Environmental Protection Agency...

...I do not regret missing Paris, because I did some of the best work of my career spending my sabbatical at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, but the incident illustrated what it meant to belong or not belong to a team...

...Although I studied under Knight I did not at the time get much out of him...

...After the election the administration created a committee called the President's Economic Policy Advisory Board (PEPAB), consisting of former Republican economic officials, almost all of whom had worked on the campaign...

...I thought I was identifying myself with the Chicago variety...

...Anyway, I was in college from 1931 to 1935—that is, in the depths of the Depression—and my family lived in Schenectady, New York, which was terribly hard hit during the Depression...

...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989...

...Simons said that he found extremes in the distribution of income, as of power, "unlovely...

...This attitude toward defense put me at odds with the "liberal" community after Vietnam...

...But it was the kind of team that especially appealed to me because it was itself outside the main ideological and political groupings of the time...

...Knight was an argument against dogmatism, whether "conservative" or "liberal...

...My exposure to the Keynesians and the liberals was more intense and painful...

...class in January...

...This position I also absorbed and carried with me through much of my later life...

...The Communist is urging his friend to join the Party, but the friend says he is not committed...

...I am aware that now the difference between liberals and conservatives is at least as much about social or moral issues as about economics...

...But the reasons are partly more objective and may throw some light on the state of policy discussion today...

...I was later told by an "insider" that I would have been appointed if I had been a "card-carrying Democrat...

...Special presentation cases for individual coins are also available at $2.50 each...

...On these other matters I have less experience than on economics, but I feel about them the same ambivalence, the same inability to swallow whole the doctrine of any party or sect...

...Thus, he left a lot of room for the possibility of appropriate government interventions in particular cases for particular reasons, while retaining a great deal of skepticism about government management as a general method of economic organization...

...In 1967, after twenty-two years, I left the CED and moved to Brookings, which was then in a liberal phase...

...It made me a consistent supporter of defense expenditures and especially resistant to the idea that defense spending in the United States had to be severely limited by ideas of what we could afford...

...They are only the signs by which one indicates which team one belongs to, like the "Identification-Friend-or-Foe" signals that warplanes emit...

...I would have the year off with full pay and could go anywhere...

...Capital punishment is a similar case...

...The use of that particular word removed the subject of income inequality from arguments about efficiency and justice, and simply asserted the right of the society to have and implement a preference about the distribution of income...

...representative on an international committee of economists who would advise on a study of fiscal policy to be done by the Organization This attitude makes it impossible for me to go along with conventional conservative strictures about government spending...

...They were an ideological and social "set," and I did not belong to it, ideologically or socially...

...Although I had joined, I was not fully committed...

...It created for me the possibility that if total spending is limited by some general ceiling, defense spending might be cut too much, and the adverse consequences of that would exceed whatever gains there might be from the limitation of total spending...

...The situation did not last, however...

...But we were notabout to form a new team called "None of the Above...

...But I did not fit in with the other team either...

...It was while I was a student at Chicago that Keynes's General Theory was published, quickly dividing the world of economics between Keynesians and non-Keynesians...

...After college I went for graduate study in economics to the University of Chicago, and that was another great influence in the direction of agnosticism or ambivalence, which may be a surprise to people who think of Chicago as a center of dogmatism...

...I was a Dee-Cline until 1964, when I registered as a Democrat in order to vote against George Wallace in the presidential primary...

...But in a peculiar way it also put me at odds with much of the "conservative" community...

...But I soon learned from a good friend at the.University that I was not orthodox in that sect either...

...Its fiscal policy was, as I later called it, "domesticated Keynesianism," relying on Keynesian analysis but rejecting as unworkable the fine-tuning prescriptions of Keynes's more devout followers...

...But I soon found that doing my own thing, at least in that stage of my life, was unsatisfactory, not ideologically but existentially...

...I did not choose Chicago because I thought it had any brand of economics different from what I would have found at any other first-rate university, but mainly because it was recommended to me by a professor to whom I was close...

...But as the CED received increasing amounts of attention and seemed to have influence on public and official thinking, it attracted more and more leaders of the big corporations...

...no charge on orders over $499...

...I was firmly of the opinion that there was no cost to building up the defenses rapidly which could be nearly as great as the cost of failing to do so...

...Only later did I realize how much support I would find in his writing...

...These historic coins remained legal tender in the U.S...

...One of the arguments in favor of low taxation most commonly used by conservatives is that if taxes are higher "they" (Congress, or politicians generally) will spend more...

...Everything could be discussed with him: there were no forbidden subjects, as raising taxes was to be in the Reagan Administration...

...Perhaps this low quality of the discussion does not hurt, but it is surely "unlovely," in Henry Simons's favorite word of disapproval...

...T he war had another important ef- 1. feet on my thinking insofar as it is measured on the liberal-conservative scale...

...I discovered that labor economics as it was then taught was impossibly dull, having mainly to do with the struggles of the cordwainers' union in the nineteenth century...

...This may explain the consistency of inconsistency and the raHerbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Nixon, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute His most recent book is Governing the $5 Trillion Economy, a Twentieth Century Fund Essay published by Oxford University Press...

...Simons spelled out some policy implications of Knight's economics and philosophy...

...I think of an article by Charles Schultze effectively debunking the idea of "industrial policy...

...Thus, Simons distinguished himself from both the conservatives and the liberals of his time...

...The ideas attracted a lot of publicity from testimony by Alvin Hansen and others before the Temporary National Economic Committee in 1939...

...Defense policy is an exception to that, but I do not pretend to know what defense policy should be...

...The things people say are not meant to be measured on the scale of truth...

...A militant and extreme Keynesianism was coming into Washington in 1938 at about the time I came to town...

...On the contrary, on some matters they became less so...

...At the end of the war I went to work for the Committee for Economic Development, and there I felt that I was a member of a team, at least for about ten years...

...The Committee had been formed originally by a group of maverick businessmen who were not the heads of the largest corporations...

...But that in turn makes it impossible for me to go along with conventional strictures about taxation...

...They're real scarcities in the well-preserved quality we offer...

...The conservative reaction was later epitomized in William Buckley's book God and Man at Yale, in which Buckley cites the use of Simons's work in economics courses as evidence of the radical influences at work in New Haven...

...I argued against this in the advisory committee and at a hearing that the RNC held, but to no avail, obviously...

...During work on a statement about labor relations it became clear that many members were not concerned about the power of unions as long as all the firms in an industry dealt with the same union and had the same contract...

...B stout I am getting ahead of my LP ry...

...My mentor, Henry Simons, wrote a report on taxation for the CED...

...For a large part of my life, when I lived in Maryland, I was a Dee-Cline...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 25 for Economic Cooperation and Development...

...I thought that economics was the path to reform, and I was a reformer, what would now be called a liberal...

...Here again the Chicagoans took a middle-of-the-road, "none of the above" point of view...

...My initial intention was to take only one year's leave from Brookings, but its president, Kermit Gordon, who had been a member of the CEA in the Kennedy Administration, told me that I would not get the hang of things in less than one year...

...Limit 10 coins per customer...

...This conflict was resolved for me by a remarkable economist, Henry Simons...

...There was always part of me in observer status, expecting that the clock would strike twelve and return my car and driver to a pumpkin and mouse...

...10 coins, $675 (save $75...

...I only know that what is commonly said about the economics of the matter is nonsense...

...Do we then logically go to chopping off the hands of purse-snatchers...

...tionality of the commitment to being uncommitted...

...Decisions have to be made, and people will disagree about what the decisions should be, but no one will have a strong claim to moral or intellectual superiority...

...We regarded as our objective the avoidance of inflation during the defense buildup, without resort to price controls...

...There was a conflict between the idea that "the market" was the best of possible systems and my observation that something was in fact quite wrong...

...It was redistributionist, holding that low-income people saved a smaller share of their income than upper-level income people, and that a transfer of income from rich to poor was a good way to overcome the secular excess of saving...

...I soon gave up that idea, however...

...I have been on a team from time to time, and have enjoyed it for a while, but there was always some reservation, as if that wasn't my true life and I was half an observer of what the other half of me was doing...

...3) Since the market by itself would not yield a desirable distribution of income, the government had a responsibility to affect the distribution of income in the desired direction, while interfering as little as possible with the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 23 workings of the market that generated income efficiently...

...Mainly they have become much less tolerant than he was of government intervention in the economy...

...Or send a check or money order to: International Coins & Currency, Inc., 11 E. State St., Box 218, Dept...

...But I have been terribly impressed by the costs of being unprepared militarily, and terribly unimpressed by the magnitude of the costs when the defense program is of the size that has been under consideration ever since World War II...

...So I was already neither here nor there...

...A sophisticated economist and econometrician might be able to disprove them...

...I had just completed a history of the making of fiscal policy in the previous forty years and told myself that I was only entering the government as an observer, to be a "fly on the wall" to see how things looked from the inside...

...In Maryland one could register as Democrat, Republican, or Dee-Cline...

...Surely the reasons for this attitude are largely matters of private personality in which there is no reason for others to be interested...

...Each silver dollar is a big 39mm in diameter, contains 27 grams of .903 silver, and comes with a Certificate of Authenticity attesting to its Fine quality and genuine status...

...I am uncomfortable with ideologies and ideologues, with people who know the answer to everything, with political parties and teams...

...Nixon, as I and others have said, was "a conservative man with liberal ideas...

...dollar sign (8) is believed to derive from the scroll-effect pillars of the reverse...

...Finally the price-controllers won...

...This was stagnationist, holding that private investment would be permanently below the saving that would be generated at full employment and that government had to fill the gap permanently...

...These ideas contributed to my decision to major in economics...

...And if I accept that exception for defense spending I am bound to ask whether other kinds of expenditures may fall into the exceptional category also, and be too low...

...One of the leading members, Beardsley Ruml, had been dean of the social sciences at Chicago, and the first director of research, T. 0. Yntema, was a professor at Chicago...

...3 coins, $215 (save $10...

...I was not initially invited to join, but I told my friend, George Shultz, who was to be the chairman, that I would like to participate, and he included me...

...I worked at the FDIC for an economist named Homer Jones, who was an alumnus of the Brookings Institution...

...But we also had a visit from a vice president of the Chase Bank, and I enjoyed the thought that I had heckled him with difficult questions...

...I think that I have not neglected the People ask me to sign petitions with which I am basically sympathetic, but there is always a sentence I cannot sign...

...There I encountered some real conservatives and liberals and became even more aware than I had been that I did not belong in either camp...

...There are heart-rending conflicts of rights and interests, and I find it impossible to say that one never or always dominates the other...

...But I cannot say that Israel was wrong to make an exception and execute Eichmann...

...Chamber of Commerce...

...However, by 1978 I found that mainstream to be too narrow...

...More important, I discovered the marvels of "the market" and of general equilibrium...

...It had also absorbed a desire for a variety of government investment programs and other government interventions, even though that was notreadily deducible from Keynes's theory...

...That was basically because a number of people who could not have been more different from me—starting with Richard Nixon himself—treated me as part of the team...

...Consequently, the Committee became more and more conventional...

...M y homelessness was evidenced by two incidents in 1964...

...So, after about 1957 I became more and more disaffected with CED...

...Brookings was then the Alamo of pre-New Deal conservatism...