The Public Policy

...There is considerable justification for these warnings and arguments...

...American grain sales to the Soviet Union were temporarily halted last summer because of a fear of an inflationary effect on domestic food prices, because U.S...

...Make him hire a lawyer, spend large amounts of time recalling the minutiae of his life...

...by George Washington Plunkitt The Bootblack Stand Dear Dr...

...It is conceivable that this "public trust" cannot be restored—and that in place of delicate institutions Polsby describes so well, we may see the emergence of a plebiscitary style based on mass manipulation in coming years...

...If you regard a regime as incorrigibly wicked, then to trade with it is to nourish its wickedness...

...The Soviets, who worry less about such pressures, were in no hurry to end the moratorium, even though their grain shortfall has been so serious as to provoke widespread "distress" slaughtering of livestock...

...The transfer of wealth was smaller when, as until 1974, the U.S...

...Plunkitt: Political conditions continue to worsen in Portugal...

...This success is probably more a function of national character than of ideology...

...By sell-ing grain to the Soviet Union we do permit the Politburo to escape admitting responsibility for shortages that result from an accumulation of disastrous economic policies (this year's grain shortfall of more than thirty percent is attributable as much to unpredicted bad weather as to bad policies...

...Marginal gains, nevertheless, are gains all the same...

...GWP Dear Dr...

...In the case of your Eieveron, a foreign op-erative could easily secrete a bomb in his skateboard...

...They are the principles of prosperity—for they encourage not only the efficient allocation of world resources but also a mutual appreciation by nations of each other's riches...

...With respect to your question, there of course remain ways to take care of Safire...

...Johnson's spies at the 1964 convention...

...Duck...

...Nor are trading opportunities likely to expand as significantly in the future as some Western businessmen anticipate...

...an order in which exchange reverts to extortion and expro...

...You closet candidates have become a dreadful nuisance...

...I suggest you get the Gambino family's judgment...

...From Honolulu Eceveron has kept a sharp eye on Portuguese politics for the past 65 years, and da Gama claims that the avowedly pro-Western prince feels that there is no reason Portugal cannot be returned to the same stability that characterizes Spain or even Monaco...

...According to da Gama, 78-year-old Dom Fernando Oliveira Da Costa Eceveron, the half-brother of the present pretender to the Portuguese throne and the man who was actually groomed for that job, is willing and able to return to Lisbon from Honolulu if someone could only be found to pay his airfare...

...One would not expect the Soviets to be so jealous of their prerogatives if our trade were crucial to their economy or to the maintenance of their regime's control...

...It was Lenin who supplied that famous observation—that the bourgeoisie would sell the rope with which the Bolsheviks would hang them...

...The recent agreement which ended the moratorium on grain sales is an indication of how the Soviets can do without our trade...

...What do you say to the idea that we send him airfare and let the chips fall where they may...

...the Soviets certainly have all the natural resources they need, and they have been remarkably efficient in those sectors of the economy which they have considered most important (e.g.,electrification, aerospace, nuclear weapponry), in part because they have allowed market-like incentives to operate there...

...He also charges that my committee glossed over evidence that the 1964 Republican convention was bugged by the FBI under orders from the late Mr...

...While that may well be, Polsby quietly reminds us that the people and public policies so condemned—imperfect though they are —may be far preferable to the alternatives...

...Go to it, Senator Church...

...And he's not a steel mogul, so we can't harass him with agents in the night...

...But before coming to such a revolutionary conclusion—which would surely lead to a form of monarchy (as has so often occurred in earlier republics, such as the Rome of antiquity or Renaissance Florence)—we would do well to ponder the arguments in favor of our own traditions...

...by Adam Meyerson The Public Policy For all its antipathy to capitalism, the Soviet regime has shown remarkable skill recently in trading on capitalist markets...

...On the other hand, the Soviet economy is strong enough to function adequately without Western trade...

...even so, a good plan is supposed to be able to take uncertainties into account...

...If the Soviets gain influence in Angola, that is a diminution of our own influence...

...In such political and military conflicts, the Soviets and the Americans can gain only at each other's expense...

...Plunkitt: Wouldn't you have thought that the Nixonian menace to our liberties was finally over...

...But as for the last concern, the Wall Street Journal has aptly observed of our grain sales that we do indeed get something in return: "a transfer of wealth from the Soviet Union...

...The United States and the Soviet Union 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 are divided bitterly—not only by ideological differences but by political and military conflicts that would probably be inevitable between whatever nations were the world's two greatest powers...

...I long for the good old days when jackasses like you ran for the Presidency by promising to rid the country of demon rum and the foreign element, instead of promising to rid the country of its intelligence agencies...

...By trading with the Soviets when it is marginally beneficial to do so (as opposed, say, to trading with the Italians, or the Japanese, or our own countrymen), our enterprises and our economy become correspondingly stronger and better equipped to serve both domestic and foreign preferences...

...In 1974, a year of low grain purchases for the Soviets, the United States was only their seventh largest Western trading partner, following West Germany, Japan, Finland, Italy, France, and Great Britain...

...Why don't you extend your investigations to cover the doings of the KGB...

...For the last generation, the countries of the world—both industrial and developing—have benefited from a respect for, if not a complete adherence to, the principles of free trade between nations...

...we thereby rescue Communism, he suggests, from the internal seeds of its own destruction...

...The Russians pay us money, money that strengthens our balance of payments, money with which we can buy oil from the Arabs, or coffee from the Brazilians, or whatever we want from whomever we want at whatever is the best price...

...But given the abuses of such a transformation of our system, informed Americans would do well to read—and think carefully—about the strength of "inner restraints and institutionalized rules" that have dominated what Polsby calls the "Washington subculture...

...Export-Import Bank helped the Soviets pay for their imports by extending low credit terms of six to seven percent, and when the U.S...

...One of the advantages of our economic system over the Soviets' is not only that our enterprises can determine marginal costs and benefits more precisely, but also that they are freer to follow the logic of their calculations...

...GWP The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 35...

...Department of Agriculture paid for $160 million of the Soviets' 1972 grain purchases...

...Although they have sometimes been a screen for exploitation, they are the principles of freedom...

...we thus help relieve the regime of angry consumer demands...

...Cordially, Senator Frank Church...

...George Meany has observed that by providing the Soviets with grain and technology we allow them to overcome the "disastrous consequences of totalitarian planning...

...He wants us to desecrate the graves of patriots and Democrats...

...But the world of commerce and production does not play what the game theorists call a zero-sum game...

...Soviet trade represents only 5% of West Germany's foreign trade, and the West Germans are the Soviets' biggest trading partner in the West...

...Now what galls me is that this Safire is not talking about dangers to civil libertiesbut about the deceased...

...In the November 20th edition of the New York Times that man attempted to cast doubt on the integrity of my Senate Select Committee on Intelligence by claiming partisan political interests have caused me to neglect several instances of domestic skulduggery during the illustrious administrations of President Johnson and President Kennedy...

...By buying palladium and other rare metals from the Soviets, we do provide them with the hard currency to buy from other countries products which we might consider too dangerous to sell on our own to an enemy...

...priation...

...Polsby's perspective is, of course, not the only one that deserves consideration...

...The benefits of greater export opportunities were apparently not worth the price of American interference in Soviet internal affairs...

...In a later article on food prices, I shall try to show that the inflationary impact of such sales is modest and only short-term...

...B. Dear Senator Church: My mother died 26 years ago, and I wish I could say the same for you...

...What I want to know, Dr...

...We wanted to buy oil from the Soviets at a price lower than OPEC's, but under strong political pressure from farm states clamoring for sales to resume, we settled for an agreement which makes no mention of oil except for a "letter of intent" no one intends to uphold...

...The CIA estimates that the Soviets will be importing an average of $31 billion of goods yearly from 1980 to 1985, and that includes imports from their Eastern European satellites (which still account for two-thirds of Soviet trade...

...It is ironic in this connection that the Russian word for comrade, tovarishch, comes from the Turko-Tatar word for merchandise, and originally meant business or trading partner...

...As a start I'd recommend that, instead of next Sunday's New York Times, you read Nelson Polsby's Political Promises...

...Johnson...

...for many centuries, Russia's closest commercial and cultural ties were to Levantine and Central Asian peoples—peoples more adept in trading goods than in manufacturing them—and that uncanny Russian knack for negotiating the best possible deal reminds one of Bedouin traders at Arab bazaars...

...In such times it is left to the United States to bear a faltering but noble stand dard...

...maritime unions wanted to exercise monopoly power over grain transport, and because there was a widespread feeling that the Soviets ought to be giving us something in return for our wheat and corn...

...The United States is one of the few countries in the history of the world which has been committed, however imperfectly, to the freedom of exchange and to the principles of friendship and prosperity which spring from that freedom...

...And yet, there is also an ideological purpose in the Soviet eagerness for and facility with Western trade...

...Similarly, it was the Soviets who canceled the agreement tying most-favored-nation status in America to permission for Soviet Jews to emigrate...

...there was certainly no rush to sign American contracts when the moratorium ended...

...This by no means implies that we should give such terms of credit, just as large subsidies for foreign competitors hardly justify subsidies to our own international airlines...

...though it did smell awful for a few days...

...just as the enormous American aid and sales of grain to India have not made her capable of feeding herself, so sales of bulldozers and corn to the Soviet Union will not alleviate structural problems like the inefficient use of labor (the Soviet economy is afflicted at once by extensive underemployment and by a serious labor shortage...

...We have embraced these principles more often on a domestic than on an international scale, but if we are to win our ideological battle with the Soviet Union—which represents the very antithesis of these principles as of almost all our principles—we must strengthen our international efforts...

...You can't at this time rely on the old schemes that were so useful in the early sixties...

...If IBM were not selling the Soviet Union 370/ 158 computers, and if the Commissars considered them essential either for economic or for military purposes, the Soviets would find a way to make them on their own—perhaps a few years late, perhaps not quite as well-made, but they would have them all the same...

...Indeed, to anyone who has observed Soviet shrewdness in buying American grain futures or in playing foreign investors off against each other it might seem that the Communists are better capitalists than the capitalists...

...Incidentally, your letter failed to self-destruct...

...For instance it would be kid stuff to slip one of the old boys a loaded backgammon stone or to swamp his yacht...

...The Soviet economy is bedeviled by the inefficiencies and poor incentives characteristic of centralized planning...

...That is the public trust that has evidently been so abused and which must be restored...

...If trade with the Soviet Union is evil, then we should not engage in it, but given other available export and import markets we should not imagine that we are denying the Soviets much by denying them our trade...

...By selling the Soviets machine tools for their new Kama River truck factory, we do bolster their transportation system, hence their economy, and hence their military preparedness...

...He wants us to investigate men who aren't even alive to defend themselves...

...Remember me to your mother...

...William Colby Acting Director, CIA My Dear Colby: The trouble with these European aristocrats is that their peculiar working habits leave them open to easy assassination, and as you are aware assassination is an increasingly popular form of diplomacy...

...But now, whatever semblance of free trade existed is giving way before the "new international order"—an order based on nationalistic envy, spite, and greed...

...Plunkitt, is how I can give it to this rat good and hard...

...Further he charges that we have not delved deeply enough into revelations that the management of NBC News gave press credentials to the late Mr...

...You can't send the IRS after him...

...For all our talk of getting something in return (besides money) for our grain, it was we who pressed hastily for a conclusion to the agreement...

...For this reason, now that American agribusiness is again selling grain to the Trading with the Enemy Soviet Union, now that Occidental Petroleum is constructing a long ammonia pipeline through the Ukraine and other American firms are scrambling for similar contracts, there is a widespread fear—at least among those of us who still loathe totalitarian Communism—that by trading with the Soviets we are strengthening their regime and playing into their hands...

...Moreover, there is a strong moral argument against trading with the Soviets, just as there is a strong (though different) moral argument against trading with Rhodesia and South Africa...

...We have far more important trading partners, except for a few rare metals there is little we could not get elsewhere, and except for our agricultural sector our gains from exports to the Soviet Union are only marginal...

...There is a very real sense, then, in which we would be playing into Soviet hands not by trading with them but by restricting their trade...

...Our Portuguese operative Admiral Francisco da Gama, ret., reports that there exists a political resolution eminently desirable to the vast majority of Portuguese and that it could be put into effect overnight with but a gesture of support from Washington...

...Of course, we should not suppose that we are gaining enormously from Soviet trade either...

...Bonn, however, is having much more success in its trade with Eastern Europe...

...If the Soviets develop a new attack missile, that is a threat to our security...

...Make him sit before abusive interrogators, endure questions that could never be put to him in a court of law, and then have his reputation thoroughly blackened by leaks to unfriendly newspapermen...

...Our honorary countryman Alexander Solzhenitsyn declared in his moving address before the AFL-CIO that "The whole existence of [Soviet] slave owners from beginning to end has depended on Western economic assistance...

...For it is precisely because we Americans are so numerous, so diverse, and so liable to disagree that we must nurture with particular care a government whose leaders are subservient to law, hedged by custom, protected from arbitrary and impulsive acts by inner restraints and by institutionalized rules...

...This is the essence of Solzhenitsyn's plea —that we do not, for the sake of a few dollars, sell our soul to the devil...

...If we're to understand the daily "news" heaped on us by the media, a refresher course in American politics is probably in order...

...3 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 33 Much as I respect these warnings and the moral force of these arguments, I nevertheless think that there is a strong case to be made for nonmilitary trade with the Soviet Union, or at least against restricting such trade...

...By the way this letter is timed to self-destruct thirty seconds after you have read it...

...Solzhenitsyn opposes all trade with the Soviet Union: even if we supply goods and capital only for feeding, clothing, and housing the Soviet people, he contends, we strengthen totalitarian control and threaten our own freedom by freeing Soviet resources for the military and the police...

...if exchange is free, it can take place only when it is to the advantage of both parties to engage in it...

...To my lights your plan is full of peril...

...Why this should be the case remains a mystery to old Portuguese hands...

...I say this despite my chariness of much of what passes for "detente"—in our SALT talks, in our failure to challenge Soviet behavior in Vietnam and the Middle East, and elsewhere, we have been making unilateral political and military concessions which may have fearful consequences...

...It is a sign of these times that Britain, once the beacon of international liberalism, now yearns to join the oil car tel...

...Persons who value the proper working of American political institutions, and who see in their proper working a marvelous instrument of democratic self-government, are bound to view the unfolding events of Watergate with repugnance...

...Indeed, American exporters have discovered that they are often at a competitive disadvantage when they try to sell their wares to the Soviets, for the Export-Import Banks of France, Japan, and other countries extend them generous terms of credit, while ours does so no longer...

...indeed, it is by marginal calculations that the success of commercial propositions is judged...

...Specifically this Safire claims that we have not looked into the identity of the attorney general who in 1963 authorized a program of wiretapping against Martin Luther King, which ended in attempted blackmail...

...But now it seems that I am to be the victim of a muckraking campaign directed by one of the most vicious relicts of the Nixon years, one William Safire...

...No, it seems that for the present the best way to put the screws to an enemy is to call him before your committee...

...These are the principles of friendship—in an imperfect world marred by bitter national animosities, they suggest that there are some concerns in which one country's gain is not necessarily its neighbor's loss...

...Furthermore, East-West trade, though clearly advantageous to the Soviet Union, is not so advantageous as some of its critics suggest...

...But trade is not a unilateral concession: it may be advantageous to the Soviet Union, but—provided it is not financed by American government subsidies, as in the preposterous 1972 grain sales—it is just as advantageous to the United States...

...It may be that, faced with intractable economic crisis, ecological disaster, and foreign chaos, the traditional institutions of the American regime are incapable of responding fast enough and decisively enough...

...That is one valuable lesson of Watergate...

...in the last year, however, the Soviets have had to pay market prices and borrow at market rates...

...You can't bug him...

...And this brings me to the major reason why I favor Soviet trade, or at least why I oppose placing obstacles on it...

...For purposes of comparison it is interesting to note that in 1973 $22 billion worth of goods were imported by Belgium and Luxembourg...

...We played a more prominent role in 1975, as a result of our grain exports, but even though the United States accounts for 75% of all world grain exports, the Soviets do not seem to have had much trouble finding other grain suppliers during our moratorium...

...One reason, of course, that the Soviets can do without American trade is that plenty of other Western countries are eager to buy or sell when we are unwilling...

...The political process in America occurs not once every four years but continuously...

...In particular, given the wave of cynicism now abroad in the land, Polsby's assessment of Watergate—though written before Nixon's resignation—deserves to be quoted: "Legitimacy in our system proceeds not from electoral mandates alone, but also from the mutual accountability of political leaders...