The Good Life and Its Discontents

...Samuelson says this is not just mindless phrasemaking, but a genuine response to the failures of the entitlement society: "Entitlement denies choices, ignores limits, muddles accountability...

...It is a disciplinary tool whose very crudeness makes it comprehensible to the ordinary citizen and therefore effective...

...Three bad ideas that had found credence in most elite quarters by the middle 1960's —just the time Samuelson and I were at Harvard—made that problem worse...

...Toughening welfare eligibility might reverse those trends, but even those who believe that doubt the effect would be instant or dramatic...

...He says that we don't know yet what makes for greater stability in our economy (i.e., the much smaller oscillations between recession and boom since World War II and even since the 1960's), why growth has been slower since 1973 than it was in the quarter-century before, and why incomes have become less equal in the same period...

...When I took Economics i in 1964, I wastaught that we know how to produce low-inflation economic growth indefinitely...

...A number-crunching, Harvard Business School genius like Robert McNamara seemed to be the answer to any problem...

...One was Keynesian economics...

...Neither, dare I say, did Jim Fallows, which may explain his book's curious "Epilogue" concerning the estimable ABC correspondent Jim Wooten...

...This was nonsense, Samuelson reports...

...Samuelson begins in 1945—Americans have just won a victory that was not inevitable, and are about to embark on a generation of economic growth that seemed impossible...

...Back in the 1960's, for instance, he'd heeded Bobby Kennedy's call to examine rural poverty in the South and done a five-part series on The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945-1995 Robert J. Samuelson Times Books / 293 pages /$25 REVIEWED BY Michael Barone Ifirst met Robert Samuelson in 1963 or 1964...

...In other words, if your motives are pristinely liberal and pro-government, long may you prosper...

...and that growth was unusually rapid in the quarter-century after 1945 because pent-up demand was let loose...

...ly venue—the Washington bureau of Newsweek, where he writes weekly columns about economics—and now has delivered his first book...

...What we need is not sophisticated policy-makers but simple rules, not a sense Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism Richard Gid Powers Free Press /554 pages / $30 Red Scare or Red Menace...

...As James Q. Wilson, quoted here by Samuelson, put it, "Many of the largest changes in the last century have occurred not because of popular demand but because of elite interests...

...04 A Sure Sign of Sanity Samuelson does not claim to know all the answers...

...We" was the Keynesian economics professoriate which, by controlling a few key institutions, believed it could manipulate the federal budget surplus or deficit and the Federal Reserve interest rates...

...Whoever wins in 1996, spending will rise far less rapidly than if Democrats had held Congress in 1994...

...local conditions for Alabama's Huntsville Times...

...The problem, Samuelson argues, is that the people got in the habit of expecting it to do a good job and feeling entitled to ever better results...

...The threats and insults and bomb waving swapped by the United States and Russia...forced both into an extravagant arms race which may not have been either prudent or necessary...

...in retrospect, economic growth from 1961-69 "was simply an inflationary boom...

...Unemployment could be reduced to low levels...

...it had done a good job...

...For those sterling achievements we have since paid a price...

...In the 1950's and early 1960's government in general, and the federal government in particular, enjoyed great confidence and high prestige among the people...

...in the future people would just sit around, jettison capitalist rules and conventional mores, and enjoy the fun...

...When government takes on tasks it can't perform, its reputation suffers—as so many believers in big government woefully lament...

...We were both on the undergraduate newspaper, the Harvard Crimson—as smug an institution as can be imagined...

...We act toward an enemy in such a way that he is moved to react toward us in a way we predicted and dreaded...

...It was a serious responsibility, a public trust, which deserved the very best that was in him to give...

...trist, Dr...

...Its essence is the quest for control...

...Frank's diagnosis, not surprisingly, was that anti-Communism might be the most pronounced symptom of a collective "sickness" focused on a fear of the outside world...

...Fallows concurs...

...It is hard to judge this experiment kindly...

...American Communism and Anti-Communism in the Cold War Era John E. Haynes Ivan R. Dee /215 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Arch Puddington During his tenure as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright once summoned a well-known psychiaARCH PUDDINGTON works for Freedom House in New York...

...He has long advocated a balanced budget, even though it may not be the best adaptation to every macroeconomic circumstance...

...And the notion of anti-Communism as an episode in mass psychosis was to endure as well, at least in the dominant liberal culture...

...Former New York Times political correspondent Wooten "had turned to television," Fallows writes, "because he needed the money...

...Lamar Alexander does this best, but other Republicans chime in...

...The profligate spending of Rockefeller and Lindsay led to the bankruptcy of New York City and near bankruptcy of New York state in 1975—plus a huge exodus registered in a population loss of one million people in the 1970s.of entitlement but a sense of responsibility...

...The second bad idea flourishing at the time was that "management" could run big organizations brilliantly...

...The Good Life and Its Discontents is an analysis of why our politics keeps producing unsatisfactory results, but it also serves as a history of the last half-century...

...In an apparent absence of any community conscience," the writer said, "Mr...

...mond often says he did not take an oath of poverty when he became a journalist...

...There are no permanent or entirely satisfactory conclusions, he argues, no happy ending...

...The Cold War had evolved into a "self-fulfilling prophecy," Dr...

...Wooten has stepped into the void to serve as a conscience for us Give the man a raise...

...but it could not be perpetually held at some fixed, low level without spawning high inflation," Samuelson writes...

...Similarly, in this year's political campaign, you hear candidates calling over and over for "personal responsibility...

...Responsibility poses choices, recognizes limits, clarifies accountability...

...Even as the The American Spectator • Apr i 1199 6 67...

...Though he wants balanced budgets and an end to affirmative action, Samuelson is characteristically cautious on many policies...

...His salary by 1995 "was several hundred thousand dollars per year," but that was all right for Wooten because of his journalism...

...As for greater stability, surely some part of that is explained by computers and the information revolution, which allow people in the marketplace to adjust more quickly and nimbly to economic cues...

...As the 1970's showed, Keynes was wrong...

...Coat-and-tied young men (and the occasional young woman) debated what to do about NATO or how big the deficit should be or how Harvard should be run...

...It was not just a way to make as much money as he could—though he has gone on to make a lot of money now...

...And a very good book it is...

...The Cold War was to endure for many years after Dr...

...Frank's discourse on political psychology...

...Not the vision thing candidates try to display on the campaign trail, perhaps—but not bad advice...

...He showed Fallows a letter to the editor he still carries from those days...

...Entitlement is a mirage," Samuelson believes...

...In retrospect, America went on a binge, but it was not the binge of the 1980's that liberals like Hillary Rodham Clinton described —the so-called age of greed, of Michael Milken and leveraged buyouts, of Wall Street and The Predators' Ball...

...The availability of welfare," he writes, "may have promoted debilitating dependency and single parenthood...

...Sam, as we called him, was different: he wore frowzy clothes, covered not the universe but the Cambridge City Council, and added to a native skepticism the insight of the Chicago-trained Edward Banfield that government action tends to be ineffective and self-defeating...

...There is none of Newt Gingrich's chiliastic certainty here, but then Samuelson does not run in packs...

...So we ought to stop caterwauling about a system that mostly works well, appreciate its strengths, even as we remain alert for its weaknesses, remain skeptical of advocates of complex policies that promise unalloyed happy results, and look for simple rules that can minimize irreversible damage...

...it's simply that the alternatives are almost always worse...

...Perhaps it is not a coincidence that public confidence in institutions started to decline at The Winters of Our Discontent & Entitlement 66 April 1996 • The American Spectator about this time...

...accurate forecasting was impossible, and people's adjustments to Keynesian policies produced higher inflation and lower employment than the models predicted...

...His crackpot ideas gained wide acceptance, and around the time Richard Nixon took office, we experienced the weird phenomenon of an elite moving left even as the people moved right...

...The third bad idea of the 1960's was entitlement itself, articulated best by Charles Reich, the Yale law professor whose 1965 article, "The New Property," argued that government payments such as welfare were entitlements that could not be taken away without due process...

...Frank averred...

...The binge that sapped America's economy was the binge of the 1970's, when liberals including Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, and Michael Dukakis spent other people's money profligately, producing a permanently bloated public sector, sometimes to bursting—Richard Nixon and Wilbur Mills's Social Security bill of 1972 created the entitlements problem of today even as the system had to be refinanced in 1977 and 1983...

...Who doesn't...

...Reich's 197o book, The Greening ofAmer- ica, maintained that the nation's economic growth was assured...

...He has carried these habits into an unlikeMICHAEL BARONE is a senior writer at U.S...

...Even Bill Clinton, though less than perfectly positioned by personal history to ring this bell, rings it nonetheless...

...Jerome Frank, to explain the roots of America's continuing anxiety about Communism...

...News & World Report and author ofThe Almanac of American Politics 1996 and Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan...

...This was a natural conclusion to draw from our successes—big government, big business, and big labor had recovered us from the Depression, won the war, and built a prosperous postwar America...

...My view is that the answers to the last two questions are implicit in Samuelson's narrative—that (relatively) egalitarian incomes were a product of the wartime regime of big government, big business, and big labor...

...It wasn't until the 1980's that "power shifted from the executive suite to the market," big companies downsized, and productivity started zooming up again after years of stagnation...

...It caused unnecessary economic distress, yet still raised expectations and created a sense of entitlement...

...Although the balanced budget amendment failed by one vote, Bill Clinton as well as the Republican Congress feels compelled to explain how he will balance the budget in seven years...