Once Again, Nuclear Disarmament
H., I. & Walzer, Michael & Clark, Joseph & Christenson, Reo M. M.
Perhaps there are some people in politics who might disagree with the Nobel Laureate and father of the Soviet H-bomb, Andrei D. Sakharov, when he writes in A Letter from Exile, "I feel that...
...But primarily the demise of SALT II was caused by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...And there probably are oppositionists and revolutionaries whom we ought on balance to help too...
...The Reagan administration is not directly challenging the progressive income tax, but it is salivating at the prospect of scaling down the "unearned income" tax to well below the current 70 percent level...
...The struggle had this form: the free world against communism, limited government against totalitarianism— a fantasy version of what political theory is all about...
...It was General Douglas MacArthur who showed the inescapable necessity for a Soviet-American agreement to ban the bomb and outlaw war...
...But we must also, for the sake of our values, maintain some critical distance from it...
...Foreign policy is always a double business: we have to pursue our interests and we have to defend our values...
...It doesn't rule out economic (or even military) cooperation with Communist China...
...Herman Miller has written that "there is virtually no scientific evidence to support the view that the incentives of the rich to accumulate would be destroyed if they were taxed more heavily...
...And the largest single group of refugees since World War II was produced by Pakistani repression in East Bengal, which was nothing if not old-fashioned...
...But that only means that there will be many failed totalitarianisms...
...In fact, however, if there really are strategic interests, and if we take them seriously, then it would seem to follow that we should line up as early as possible with the side most likely to win, so long as there is a real chance of keeping the winners out of the Russian camp...
...However pessimistic one might be about the possibility of reaching agreement, failure to offer leadership on this paramount concern of mankind can only make the prospect bleaker...
...The opposition needs to fight, of course, but it needs most of all to consider the terms of fighting...
...Reducing the income disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest members of our society could also reduce social tensions when times are grim...
...They were seldom reared in slums or ghettos...
...Twenty-six years ago, one of our country's most conservative military leaders concluded that the atomic bomb had made war obsolete...
...Totalitarianism is indeed a new kind of tyranny, not entirely without precedent in the long history of tyranny, but new nonetheless...
...I was dumbfounded when the number three leader of the German Social Democrats, Herbert Wehner, declared a little more than two years ago that Soviet arms were intended only for defense...
...They are acting upon their beliefs—which distinguishes them from Jimmy Carter and his friends in at least two ways: (a) they have beliefs...
...Admittedly, the upperincome class has contributed some distinguished liberals to American politics but this phenomenon is the exception to the rule...
...One of the most frightening features of Orwell's 1984 was the two-way television screen...
...CONSIDER NOW the two major moral/ political arguments of the new cold warriors...
...The new cold warriors exploit what we might think of as the apocalyptic features of the theory of totalitarianism...
...Totalitarian" quickly became a cold war tag, our everyday name for the Communist regimes of the East...
...If upper-level taxes reached nearconfiscatory levels, this might reduce the obsession with wealth that afflicts so many people and is rarely slaked, whatever the fortune won...
...And for the sake of the struggle against communism, we must make our peace with tyranny...
...One proposal is to do away with the recordkeeping requirement in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, making it harder to prosecute bribery in international business deals...
...Most of the rest comes from people earning less than $100,000 a year...
...Right now, the American bourgeoisie is showing itself to be supremely classconscious...
...Lester Thurow noted in 1976 that ". . . if you subtract housing investment from total capital investment, more than 99 percent of real capital investment funds took the form of corporationThey Can't Take That Away from Us • Mr...
...It's a time for mutual defense...
...If they begin coasting, they may coast right out of their jobs...
...New York Times, July 3, 1981 q 397 One need not belabor the point that large inheritances are wholly incompatible with the supposedly cherished American value of equal opportunity...
...In fact, I'm afraid, the decline in democracy in the free world is rather more noticeable than its slow advance...
...West Germany and Japan are among the most productive societies in the world, and the differential between the top tenth and the bottom tenth of income in those countries is 11-1 and 10-1, respectively, compared to 15-1 in the U.S...
...Scaling down the upper reaches of wealth also would diminish the unhealthy political power enjoyed by the wealthy in America...
...Taxes, therefore, that weigh more heavily on the rich reduce the sum total of well-being less than a flat-rate tax would...
...It is safe to assume that only a tiny percentage of college students—or of other Americans—have ever been exposed to the major facts about wealth and income distribution in America, and to the arguments for altering that distribution...
...The aim should be to inhibit, not encourage, a race to stockpile more and more nuclear weapons...
...equal opportunity, therefore, can never exist...
...Sometimes Soviet agit-prop is primitive and self-defeating...
...But what policies follow from that moral stand...
...It was nothing less than a proposal to turn over to an international organization the authority for atomic development, the ownership of uranium and thorium mines and ores and the operation of the extraction plants, which would be distributed equitably throughout the world...
...Otherwise, we could hardly have any relations at all with the Third World states...
...For the latter, the after-tax income differential runs from 100-1 and upward...
...President Carter reminded us that a single nucleararmed submarine can fire missiles capable of destroying all the large and medium-sized cities of the Soviet Union...
...And indeed, as the theory was worked out by writers like Hannah Arendt and Carl Friedrich, totalitarianism was not contrasted with freedom...
...our governments were "constitutionalist...
...Compared to the cold war rhetoric of the 1950s, this sort of talk represents, I suppose, a more sophisticated appropriation of the original theory...
...He said that no military commander could ever again hope to achieve any military objectives in a major war...
...We know that the free world includes a large number of brutal and repressive regimes...
...If society creates the framework within which one earns a living, society can also impose whatever economic restraints and whatever limits upon the acquisition of wealth that its members believe are in the public interest...
...Agreements reached in the SALT II discussions and confirmed by our military leaders indicate that the means at our disposal are truly effective for monitoring adherence to or violations of such arrangements...
...Totalitarianism was a radically new kind of unfreedom, a new species of the genus "tyrannus," different from all the others...
...the rhetoric of revolution is now the lingua franca of the Third World...
...The refugees who fled Hungary in 1956 or Afghanistan in 1980 were fleeing the Red Army, not domestic oppression...
...To permit inheritances large enough to raise and educate children through college is one thing...
...In depth and scope, this is almost as significant as the steps taken toward a welfare state during the early days of the New Deal...
...The first of these is an argument about political possibility...
...There is, however, a more potent argument that is made to reassure us about avoidance of nuclear war...
...Shortly after World War II we were inundated with prophecies that within two or three decades World War III would be upon us and it would be a nuclear war...
...Although there is no agreement on this point among economists, there is a strong possibility that most corporation taxes are passed on to the consumer...
...Orwell, Thou Should'st Be Living at This Hour We take the following item from the excellent Catholic magazine Commonweal: In our July 3 issue we ran an editorial called "The Pakistan Bomb...
...Get the Government Off Our Backs...
...THE DEFENSES OF WEALTH designed by the Reagan camp largely come down to three arguments: (1) Lower taxes on upper income groups will lead to greater savings, augmented capital formation, more investment in new plants and equipment, more jobs, improved productivity, and a higher standard of living for all...
...Judged by the principle 396 of the greatest good for the greatest number, the progressive income tax has always made a great deal of sense...
...That is a key distinction and it remains, to my mind, a useful guide to 20th-century politics...
...This suggests that substantially higher taxes on the rich would not erode the dynamism of our system, a probability reinforced by the fact that America's savings, capital investment, and productivity made a better showing when the income tax scale was higher than it is today...
...It is preposterous to assume that such people are performing more valuable work than reporters, poets, truck drivers, schoolteachers, electricians, carpenters, die casters, and other skilled workers...
...Assuming that the Russians don't intervene—an unlikely but analytically necessary assumption—the prospects for democracy are probably better, certainly no worse, in much of Eastern Europe than, to cite some of Kirkpatrick's odder examples, in Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and Zaire...
...Kennan can see no way out of the cud rent dilemma "other than by a bold and sweepin departure": . . . . What I would like to see the President do, afti proper consultation with the Congress, would be t propose to the Soviet government an immediate across-the-boards reduction by 50 percent of the nuclear arsenals now being maintained by the two superpowers—a reduction affecting in equal measure all forms of the weapon, strategic, mediumrange, and tactical, as well as all means of their delivery—all this to be implemented at once and without further wrangling among the experts, and to be subject to such national means of verification as now lie at the disposal of the two powers...
...That has to be, I think, the working assumption of any sane diplomacy...
...But had they been raised in a society where the income spread between the most affluent and the most First Things First The chairman of Procter & Gamble Co., the nation's largest television advertiser, says the company will not lend its name or advertising support to programs that feature gratuitous sex or excessive violence...
...And reducing the tax bite on the wealthy in general is a high priority item among the Reagan high command...
...Yes, they say, many of our allies are tyrants and always have been...
...And if we set aside the Soviet Union, where Stalinism remains today a regime-in-reserve, it is clear that all the other examples of post-World War II Communist and fascist governments are failed totalitarianisms...
...He argues that whe it comes to nuclear weapons "relative advantage i illusory...
...And it is sheer willfulness, ideological relentlessness, to insist that this line, once it is worked out, will conform to the cold war division between East and West...
...Smith and the Justice Department are also central to the probusiness revisions suggested for antitrust and corporate bribery laws...
...This was the difference on which the theorists focused their attention, and it played a part too in political debates among small groups of leftist intellectuals struggling to understand Stalinist terror...
...We must hope—we can reasonably believe—that it also has its duration...
...THE CONTRAST BETWEEN totalitarian and authoritarian regimes is a conceptual contrast, not a practical one...
...And he fears at the same time that his work will be distorted, corrupted, appropriated for partisan uses over which he has no control...
...And all this for the sake of a misunderstood and badly applied political theory...
...We don't have to become apologists for the internal policies of our allies...
...They also command a degree of deference from legislators and administrators that other do not enjoy...
...The idea of totality bears the marks of its discovery in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and in the last years of Stalin's personal rule...
...But— "There are still plenty of people Mr...
...That doesn't mean Wall Street directs every move...
...A favorite debating tactic among defenders of the rich is to point out the folly of trying to impose total equality upon a society...
...Ken nan's address, as edited for publication in the Nei York Review of Books, starts from the same pre mise outlined by MacArthur, that we are dealin, with "a type and volume of weaponry that could not possibly be used without utter disaster fo everyone concerned...
...Communist totalitarianism brings with it a long, dark night...
...There is no instance of a revolutionary `socialist' or Communist society being democraticized," writes Kirkpatrick...
...But let's assume that there is room, some limited room, for political maneuver (economic aid, military supply, diplomatic pressure, and so on...
...A few quick observations: • When liberal politicians make promises, be skeptical...
...Top executive personnel are seldom indifferent to prestige, and that is not usually maintained unless they do good work and remain in the upper echelons of the firm...
...If the Soviet Union moves toward the Persian Gulf and tries to detach Western Europe from the United States, he said, the new ties become "a major counterpoint...
...And their subjects are accustomed to the old patterns, have long ago adjusted to them and learned how to survive...
...usually they were raised in homes (not of their choosing) that gave them self-confidence and stressed the importance of "getting ahead...
...The loser is annihilated but, "If you win, you stand only to lose," and "no longer does it possess the chance of the winner of a duel—it contains rather the germs of double suicide...
...If political leaders exploit that discontent, the political turmoil that follows might well persuade the ultra-affluent that their wealth was not an unmixed blessing...
...In more democratic societies, every step in the field of armaments is subjected to public budgetary and political scrutiny and is carried out under public control...
...Under President Kennedy aboveground testing by both the Soviet Union and the United States was banned...
...All that should change...
...If the wealthy consistently made far greater contributions to the nation's welfare than others, that would mitigate (though not remove) the injustice...
...Needless to say, wealthy members of Congress can usually be counted on to take care of their class interests...
...Once the estate lawyers have worked their magic, the tax take is usually even lower than this...
...He has reminded the world that the Soviets have been emplacing medium-range nuclear missiles aimed at the capitals of Western Europe ever since 1978—while the protests of the Communists have centered on the U.S...
...These are "our" dictatorships, many of which, to the naked eye, don't look all that different from "theirs...
...To itemize all the reactionary steps the Reagan administration has taken would be superfluous: our readers see the papers...
...I was assured by the ministers and by the President himself that it was not the intention of the Pakistan Government to develop nuclear weapons," he told a Senate Government Affairs subcommittee...
...The Red Army is a threat to human freedom, but communism, in these states at least, is an ugly but not all-powerful political system...
...For sound commercial reasons, we are not going to let our advertising messages appear in an environment which we think many of our potential customers will find distasteful," he said...
...As Lester Thurow convincingly demonstrated in The Zero-Sum Society, even successful entrepreneurs are mostly "lucky rather than smart or meritocratic...
...Why hasn't it happened...
...Conservatives are fond of noting that the personal qualities promoting success are not fairly distributed by nature...
...So here it is, for those of our readers who didn't see it...
...I.H...
...The hardest choice, and the one for the sake of which the new cold war ideology has been worked out, is simply this: an authoritarian regime, oldfashioned, brutal, repressive, allied to the West, is threatened by a revolutionary movement some of whose leaders have totalitarian ambitions and/or Russian connections...
...MacArthur began by tracing the development of weapons in his own lifetime...
...Workaholics will remain workaholics even if tax rates are raised...
...Consistently, over the past 15 years, the largest number of responses cluster around the 10-1 or 15-1 range...
...Yet hundreds of thousands of Americans receive after-tax incomes of well over $100,000 a year and a large rapidly growing number receive over $1 million annually...
...The people running the Reagan administration are ideologues, at the moment full of high confidence, yet serious...
...I. H. Every political theorist hopes that his concepts and distinctions will turn, magically, into common currency, so that men and women on the street will talk exactly as he does...
...But inflation is the major deterrent to higher levels of savings...
...Inheritance taxes are ridiculously low and becoming lower...
...East Germany and Cambodia are different but equally clear-cut examples...
...do much about them, but we can do something about large inheritances...
...And Professor Thurow observes that . . . all the empirical evidence points in the same diection...
...Or maybe not...
...There just isn't going to be one answer in cases like the one I've described, and to act as if there is one answer—we get it right or wrong, we win or lose—is the beginning of political disaster...
...If they slack off because the tax bite seems burdensome, ambitious persons with lower incomes and a lower position 398 in the corporate hierarchy will be eager to win their post...
...The difference, we now can see, is enormous...
...In fact, I'm afraid, the decline in democracy in the free world is rather more noticeable ment rate...
...So why not do it...
...As for the American people, they are oblivious to the issue because the politicians never raise it...
...Most of the theorists who first worked out the concept of totalitarianism in the late 1940s and the early 1950s lived to see both their hopes and fears fully realized...
...Segments of sophisticated opinion on Wall Street are skeptical...
...MacArthur was an unlikely source for that viewpoint since in the Korean War he had proposed the use of atomic weapons against the North Koreans and Chinese...
...It is important to remember that the wealthy became so largely because of good luck...
...Of course, some of the wealthy are making more valuable contributions to society than the average person...
...But it isn't true...
...How much capacity for change...
...But the line she draws is a fabrication...
...The federal estate and gift tax on a million-dollar estate is about $62,000...
...Brzezinski dismissed arguments that the growing military ties between Peking and Washington would feed Soviet fears of encirclement...
...One can't pull politics or morality out of a theoretical hat...
...In all these cases, social structure and political culture are far more important than the current regime in shaping the long-term evolution...
...Not so...
...Even if the taxes on upper-level incomes were very steep, the most creative members of our society would be likely to remain creative, simply because creativity, so to speak, is in their blood...
...Perhaps it could do no more, I can't say...
...Our own tyrants, by contrast, are sometimes replaced by democratic regimes—though it is always important for the stability of the new democracy that the replacement rate...
...IN THE THIRD WORLD, at any rate, there is not likely to be much permanence—no sustained development toward modernity and liberty, but also very few stable or solidly established tyrannies...
...One might detect among contemporary cold warriors a sneaking sympathy for "traditional autocrats [who] leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources...
...If this limits the earnings of the more deserving, persons with annual after-tax incomes in excess of $100,000 do not merit excessive pity...
...The AFL-CIO did very little...
...within the framework it provides, choices still have to be made...
...If we imposed severely progressive taxes on those earnings, say, over $100,000 a year, the impact on venture capital would be minor...
...There was, after all, nothing new about unfree government...
...But that is no reason for supporting the "other autocracies" or excusing their bloodiness...
...I am not wholly persuaded of the latter, but my doubts lack a solid empirical base...
...Indeed, as unstable a regime as that of Pakistan is now the recipient of massive American military aid and indirect support for its nuclear arms plans...
...The simple even-handed condemnation of both sides will, however, obscure a fundamental reason for failure...
...Perhaps it has finally learned the lesson James Burnham and, more recently, Irving Kristol have been laboring to teach it: ideology pays off...
...The only reasons it does not seem shockingly unfair to more people are that, first, they are unaware of these damning statistics and, second, they have grown up in a society in which vast income differentials are taken for granted...
...It's time, also, to lay the groundwork for sweeping liberal tax reforms once the political winds have changed...
...we'll go along with that distinction, though it won't make anyone happier...
...The million Cubans who have reached our shores since the 1960s probably could be matched by a million Haitians, were the latter given a comparable welcome...
...The Soviets and their parties in the rest of the world call it agit-prop...
...Those bombs have been superseded, of course, by hydrogen bombs, which make the original A-bombs seem "puny" by comparison...
...In the few months since Ronald Reagan took office, there has occurred a large-scale retrogression...
...Informed persons have long known that loopholes have removed most of the progressivity from our graduated income tax...
...It's true that class struggle becomes more politicized...
...It doesn't know that, even from purely pragmatic considerations, a principled stand may be more advantageous than making deals so sleazy you end up looking like those you're suposed to be against...
...Or rather, our choice is the same choice that the Russians have faced again and again in Eastern Europe: send in the troops or let the local conflict take its course...
...Nixon would like to have over: William F. Buckley, Jr...
...A change will come—given the volatility of American political culture, that is certain...
...It seems to me that such a challenge to the Soviets would accomplish the very opposite...
...Whether these failures will be bloodier than the "other autocracies" is a question unlikely to find a yes or no answer...
...An international control body would see that no one could produce bombs secretly...
...Barring a sudden recession, I'd say for some time...
...They enjoy the creative process and would be restless and unhappy if they failed to respond to the deepest springs of their nature...
...To dramatize the wealth and income distribution scandal in America, I annually ask my National Issues class a question: "Judging by your own standards of justice and fairness, whatever your criteria may be, what should be the maximum spread between the after-tax income of the 395 best-paid members of our society and the most poorly paid who are still working 40 hours a week at socially useful labor...
...when conservative politicians make promises, believe them...
...We can't...
...How much popular support does the regime have...
...0 retained earnings or depreciation allowances in 1973...
...Not that high taxes are a positive economic factor, but the roots of human effort are far more complex and resilient than conservatives realize...
...Elements of the welfare state (such as it's been . . . ) remain, of course, but significant parts have been lopped off and, David Stockman assures us, more will go...
...In political terms that means that there have been and will be again regimes so evil that the only moral stand one can adopt toward them is absolute opposition...
...But what the liberal-left needs is to emulate the New Right, not just in publicity techniques, but in doing preparatory politicalintellectual work...
...399 We don't customarily reprint from American publications, least of all one like the New Republic, which at least some of our readers are likely to see...
...SOME AGREEMENTS have been reached on nuclear arms in the past...
...Old-fashioned tyrannies, according to Kirkpatrick, because they don't set out to transform their societies, do much less damage to them...
...But more, it's a time for programmatic work...
...Not even the liberals have dared to...
...The labor movement is in greater jeopardy than at any point during the past half-century...
...If average real incomes cannot rise much hereafter, as many economists anticipate, dissatisfaction with the current income and wealth distribution may well mount...
...But since no consensus is possible concerning the relative social value of different occupations, the least we can do is establish a highly progressive income tax that prevents the most patently undeserving from piling up vast fortunes...
...still hasn't been able to fit dinner into his schedule, and Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, whom Mr...
...Maybe it is in our interest to support, say, the present South Korean regime...
...Perhaps the major unions with membership in the airports were afraid they couldn't rally enough support among their members...
...It is by no means certain that the liberal-left will be ready for it...
...It would reduce even further the impact of those who suggest single suicide in place of double suicide...
...A good deal of venture capital comes from corporations that invest marginal funds in high-risk but potentially high-return enterprises...
...And in the 20th century it is difficult to avoid some engagement with, some hard contemplation of, apocalypse...
...On the far left, there is often similar sympathy for revolutionaries who upset those allocations, even if they do so only in order to establish a new tyranny— and this view, too, has its theoretical rationale...
...Maybe they could come together...
...A differential, say, of 10-1, except for the greediest of souls, is a handsome differential indeed...
...For the first time in history a government suggested that the possession of an essential source of industrial and military power transcended national sovereignty...
...If there can be notable moves forward, there can be notable moves backward...
...France's Socialist President François Mitterrand has given effective replies to those who suggest that the way out of the nuclear impasse is unilateral disarmament...
...This is the "damning contrast" between Communist regimes and "other autocracies...
...I'll take them from Jeane Kirkpatrick's Commentary article ("Dictatorships and Double Standards," November 1979), a particularly good example of contemporary ideology, even if it isn't, or just because it isn't, a particularly good article...
...is producing and stockpiling neutron bombs has dismayed our European allies...
...The massive refugee population of the modern world is largely a creation of Communist totalitarianism...
...When our maximum taxes were 92 percent on unearned income and 70 percent on earned income, our national savings were proportionately higher than they are today—and inflation was minimal at that time...
...It would encourage the more generous, humane, and artistic qualities of the human spirit to flourish...
...If we need more capital investment than the system is able to generate under a highly progressive income tax, reductions in corporate taxes are far more likely to achieve the desired result than reductions in the tax on upper incomes...
...And an increasingly high percentage of members are in that category...
...Between these regimes and other sorts of tyranny it isn't easy to draw a sharp line...
...State taxes usually add very little to that...
...But it was a difference largely ignored in the official ideology of the cold war...
...This was "followed by the atomic explosion to reach the hundreds of thousands...
...Particularly in a period of severe or prolonged economic distress, frustrated groups will ask more critical questions about those who have so much when they have so little...
...Not that the government will systematically go out to destroy the AFL-CIO...
...Authoritarian regimes in South Korea or Guatemala or Argentina are not so bad when compared with Russia or North Vietnam or Cuba...
...The original theory still has genuine value...
...The incentive argument has some merit but not nearly as much as conservatives generally believe...
...the current tax levels have very little to do with it...
...Who are the rebels and what is their "cause...
...The Supreme Court's bizarre opinion in Buckley v. Valeo that the First Amendment permits the spending of unlimited sums of personal wealth in election campaigns resulted in Jay Rockefeller drenching West Virginia with $10 million in his successful drive for reelection...
...So they have dug deeper into the original theory, looking for richer conceptual plunder...
...It would be nice—not for the refugees but for the ideological peace of mind of the rest of us—if this were 401 true...
...Now, however, it has been taken up by the new cold war ideologists, led, for the moment, by our representative to the United Nations...
...It would be a mad world indeed that allowed mutual terror to substitute for the agreement that MacArthur wisely said is the one issue on which the interests of both sides are completely parallel...
...And if prestige is important, so is power...
...As part of the Administration's more restrictive public information policy, the Justice Department has tightened disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act, and the White House is structuring key advisory panels, such as the Presidential Coordinating Task Force on Federalism, so they do not fall under the public meeting rules of the Advisory Committee Act...
...This writer is convinced, however, that what we need are higher, not lower, taxes on the rich, and that includes much higher inheritance taxes as well as a more steeply graduated income tax, more rigorously enforced...
...It is not, however, a less corrupt one...
...Power is usually won, sustained, or enhanced by doing a job well and, above all, by holding one of the top decision-making positions...
...Now that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are no longer with us it's hard to think of anyone, anywhere, who would disagree with Sakharov's declaration that "nuclear war . . . is the greatest peril confronting the modern world...
...It doesn't make Kissinger's Pakistani "tilt" of 1971 smell any better...
...Older tyrannies were marked by a more limited ambition...
...It doesn't conform to, nor does it justify our actual alliances...
...Then came the Reagan administration, pledged to the defeat of SALT II and ready to undertake a race for nuclear (and conventional) arms superiority between the Soviet Union and the U.S...
...China, with which, it appears, we must also make our peace, tends to get overlooked in these discussions...
...They fear that, in a year or two, the Reagan economic program will be shown up as a placebo, though that doesn't keep them from licking their chops over immediate benefits...
...In my opinion the criticism of the neutron bomb as a morally more disreputable nuclear weapon than the giant H-bombs is bad logic and worse ethics...
...Insofar as the welfare state is an arena for socio-political struggle, you can say that what's happening now bears a pretty close resemblance to oldfashioned class struggle—with the corporate interests reaping the immediate benefits...
...He emphasized the redur dancy of these weapons and then reverted to theme raised by MacArthur, questioning whethe they were really weapons at all...
...Yet elementary as these observations are, it is surprising how many people talk and act as if this relationship really existed...
...The Hitler and Stalin regimes come as close as regimes have ever come to realizing that model, but even they realized it for some, not for all, of their subjects...
...Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland probably would be democratic states were it not for the Red Army...
...Does that clear things up for you...
...Our side needs two or three years of sustained programmatic development, just as the right did...
...Also wrong is the inclination some of us may have had to suppose that the progress of the welfare state takes a smooth Fabian course, increment by increment...
...Surely initiative in the direction of such an agreement redounds to the credit of those who undertake it...
...You mean some people deserve that much more...
...We can make the alliances we have to make on both sides of this shadowy line, and we can condemn when we must the internal policies of our allies...
...When I asked some of the spokesmen for the "left" trend within the German Social Democracy how Wehner knew why the Soviets were arming so strenuously, they replied: "Why, the Russians themselves told him that...
...Many just happened to be in the right place at the right time...
...Higher income groups pay about the same, and often lower, income-tax rates than middle-income families...
...But the new cold warriors of the 1980s want to draw the line exactly as it was drawn in the 1950s...
...Moreover, the wealthy can purchase the most expensive legal talent to help them avoid taxes and can hire top-flight lobbyists to advance their interests in legislative halls...
...It took a good deal of probing to establish that there was not a trace of irony in their explanation...
...If enormous wealth were beyond reach, this might redirect many energies toward more socially constructive and personally satisfying pursuits...
...Most of the others were fortunate enough to be born with good health, high energy reserves, a better than average IQ and/or personality, or unusual creative talents...
...The claim of the new cold warriors is that the liberal impulse in all such cases is to support the revolutionaries or at least to desert at the first opportunity the authoritarian regime...
...The New Republic says it's not a counterrevolution, only a triumph for reaction...
...It could lead to movement in a direction devoutly to be desired— mutual nuclear disarmament...
...A policy of this kind assumes that there is no long, dark night, no thousand-year Reich, no totalitarian transformation that is proof against political opposition and social change...
...They don't measure up to Arendt's standard, they fall short of Orwell's brilliant science fiction, their terror isn't total...
...2) To promote personal incentive, taxes on the higher income groups should be reduced...
...The contribution that additional income makes to human felicity and well-being is greatest at the lower end of the scale and diminishes as incomes rise...
...they are normally very conservative investors rather than risk takers...
...Buckley added that Pakistan, which has not signed a 1968 treaty to curb the spread of nuclear weapons technology, had made no promise not to seek a weapons-making or nuclear explosions such as one by India in 1974...
...In any case, there probably are such governments that we ought on balance to help...
...After 1960, it was in our interest that Cuban communism develop in, say, a Yugoslav rather than a Bulgarian direction, and we might have accomplished that, or at least assisted in it, through some sort of economic cooperation...
...The real danger, the present danger, of the new cold war ideology is that it will drive us into alliances that our material defense does not require and rule out the outspokenness that the defense of our values does require...
...In any case, this is a false distinction...
...Beyond that, we are going to be guided by our conscience on the kind of material we sponsor...
...These people are surgeons of reaction...
...What we owe them at most is critical support...
...I then place numbers on the blackboard ranging from 1-1, to 3-1, to 5-1, and 10-1, etc., on up to 100-1, with a final option of "unlimited...
...In it we argued against giving President/Dictator Zia of that nation $3 billion primarily in military aid, citing as one of our reasons that the United States had failed to extract from Pakistan any pledge that it would give up its drive for a nuclear bomb and adding that officials of the Reagan administration seemed unperturbed by that fact...
...The final component of the post-Watergate package is Attorney General William French Smith's announced determination to try to abolish the 1978 law requiring him to appoint special prosecutors to investigate alleged crimes by the President and Federal officials...
...But perhaps I overestimate the power of theory (it is a common professional mistake...
...Let us examine each of these propositions...
...There is nothing in its internal mechanics that rules out a democratic transformation...
...Now, electronics and other processes of science have raised the destructive potential to encompass millions...
...I understand, of course, that there are serious diplomatic difficulties involved in any such policy—much discussed and never overcome during the Carter years...
...but it is creating an atmosphere in which the corporations— pretty soon, it seems, there may be One Big Corporation—feel cocky enough to give the unions a smash in the face...
...Then the aerial bomb, to strike by the thousands...
...There were small advances, at least toward the 391 objective of limiting strategic nuclear arms, in SALT I negotiated under President Nixon in 1972...
...The welfare state, reaching a certain point, may even exacerbate social struggle—see 392 the nuclear arms race came with their rejection of the Acheson-Lilienthal Plan, more popularly known as the Baruch Plan...
...Their leaders wanted simply to stay in power, to enjoy the fruits of power, for as long as possible...
...But this is to turn policy into a reflex of ideology (disguised as theory...
...b) they are prepared to fight for these beliefs...
...The opposition, so far, has been pitiable...
...q 393 comes at the very moment when negotiations are supposed to get under way on the emplacement of medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe...
...But its significance decreases as incomes rise...
...When he entered the army, the target was one enemy casualty at the end of a rifle or bayonet...
...Income, of course, matters a lot insofar as the necessities and ordinary comforts of life are concerned...
...America is saving a much lower percentage of its income than some other industrialized nations and this is undoubtedly a serious matter...
...If the students then were faithful to their own estimates of social justice, they would become radical critics of the reward system in this country...
...The air controllers' union—inexperienced, rash, isolated—may have made tactical blunders...
...In the Soviet Union, all decisions of this kind are made behind closed doors and the world learns of them only when confronted by fait accomplis...
...The egregious timing of the Reagan administration's announcement that the U.S...
...The shame of the Democrats is not that they lost the congressional battles, but that in trying to hold conservative votes, they ceded in advance most of the issues to the Reagan people...
...A depressing aspect of this effort— one-sided though it was and tilted toward an American "advantage"—was that both from right and left the initiative for nuclear arms reduction was condemned...
...The reigning wisdom is simple: To those who have, much more shall be given, and maybe a little will drip down to the rest of us...
...But I would propose a different sympathy: for the tortured dissidents, the imprisoned oppositionists, the threatened minorities, all the "disappeared" and murdered men and women of all the tyrannies, old and new...
...It was described in Sakharov's Letter: But in order to assess the situation properly it is imperative to take note of the particular features of the Soviet Union—a closed totalitarian state with a largely militarized economy and bureaucratically centralized control, all of which make the growing might of such a country even more dangerous...
...Can one cite a single prominent liberal, radical, or socialist who seeks that outcome...
...While today's income and wealth differentials generate much less resentment than might be expected, the future may be different...
...No longer can it lead to "international power and wealth...
...This very triumph of scientific annihilation," MacArthur said, "destroyed the possibility of war being a medium of practical settlement of international differences...
...WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE...
...blame should be attached to both sides...
...Let us assume, however, that monetary incentives for upper-income persons are more of an economic spur than I have implied, Still, other incentives exist...
...So, in the long record of failure...
...That being so, and stepping away from the problem itself, just looking at it as though it were a work of art, one can't help but be astonished that so little has been done to eliminate the danger of nuclear war...
...THE CONVICTION THAT SOCIETY has no "right" to impose "punishment" taxes can be readily dismissed...
...To assume that money is more important than power and prestige is to misread most people's nature...
...Hence "such societies create no refugees...
...By contrast, we described ourselves and our allies in those innocent days with words like "free" and "liberal...
...They tolerate existing patterns of misery and injustice, but at least they don't create new ones...
...Surveys of work behavior, econometric studies of work decisions . . . all indicate that current inequalities are much larger than those necessary to produce and expand the current GNP...
...The real enemy, the present danger, is totalitarianism, that is, communism...
...Besides, whatever happened to an American principle proclaimed at the very birth of the nation— to wit, "respect to the opinions of mankind...
...Losing honor, the Democratic leadership gained only defeat...
...We abominate what they are doing, but have to admit that our earlier tendency to pooh-pooh the Reagan gang as mere political cosmeticians was wrong...
...Surely Stalin's was one such regime, and yet we fought with Stalin against the Nazis...
...It is small consolation, considering the menace of nuclear destruction, to know that the Soviets, more than the United States, are responsible for the continuing peril...
...A day or two after the issue containing that editorial went into the mail, Under Secretary of State James L. Buckley testified on the subject in the Senate...
...What is sinister about the Administration's neutron bombshell is that it Thatcherite England...
...The opportunity to become wealthy does not remotely belong in the same category of human rights as the right to freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, travel, and due process...
...STEEPLY GRADUATED INCOME TAXES COULD make our society less crassly acquisitive and less grossly materialistic...
...Many of them attended good schools and the better colleges...
...The only argument of any substance I have heard against the Kennan proposal is that it would encourage the unilateralists in Europe...
...But machines are of little use without the will to use them, and what is most novel and most important about totalitarianism is the peculiarly modern ambition of its leaders: to control everything, to wipe out not merely opposition, but every form of difference, recalcitrance, hesitation, private doubt, and caution, to create an entirely new order and even a new kind of human being...
...But these are ordinary, old-fashioned tyrants...
...The right is full of confidence, it has an agenda, and a lot of popular support...
...But it can't just be applied mechanically, dividing the world, for totalitarianism is an "ideal type," a picture of horrifying perfection never quite achieved in fact, while authoritarianism is a catchall category...
...Now that the left is reexamining some of its basic assumptions and the New Right is denouncing them, it is a good time to take a fresh look at the progressive income tax...
...This was painfully advanced by SALT II after the Carter administration's proposal in 1977 for actual reduction in nuclear arms was rejected by the Soviets...
...Theory, once we have it right, does nothing more than shape our perceptions, guide our understanding...
...Turning to wealth distribution in America, a similar experiment finds a high percentage of students disturbed to learn that 1 percent of the population owns almost 30 percent of the privately owned wealth—and that the top one-half of 1 percent owns as much property and assets as the lower 80 percent of the population...
...Who really believes that those making $200,000 a year are happier than those making $175,000, or that those earning $175,000 are happier than those earning $150,000—and so on...
...What is not well understood is that not much venture capital comes from the rich...
...We ought to have a clear idea of what is happening in this country...
...But the upcoming $600,000 federal tax exemption on all estates is a giant step backward...
...Of course, cogent arguments can be advanced against such a social order, but who is proposing that...
...But when the Communists seize on actual fears among people and on trends that have indigenous sources, they can be effective...
...403...
...How can this phenomenon not be morally offensive to thoughtful persons...
...It is characteristic of the new cold warriors that they would support authoritarian governments both when it is in our interests to do so and also when it isn't—so that one is led to suspect that they just support authoritarian governments...
...q The answer seems to be contained in that terrifying acronym, MAD, which stands for mutual assured destruction...
...Certainly there are Communist states that fit Kirkpatrick's account...
...And what they want instead is the opposite policy, a steadfast commitment to the regime, because totalitarianism is the greater danger, the irreversible transformation, and so on...
...And that kind of argument doesn't work only for right-wing regimes...
...They seem as natural to most Americans as trees, houses, cars, and cats...
...After that, heavy artillery raining death by the hundreds...
...most still are...
...The case for higher taxes on upper-income groups derives support from other sources, too...
...But the accidents of IQ, health, personality, family background, etc...
...That sort of thing is always a trick...
...Boston Globe, June 17, 1981 q poorly paid workers was 5-1, and some brash soul proposed this spread should be 50-1 or even 100-1, they would view that person as a bit daft...
...Then came the machine gun, designed to kill by the dozen...
...this 1963 pact has held...
...foreign policy (the Jeane Kirkpatrick-Commentary theory about supporting authoritarianism against totalitarianism) we think Michael Walzer's article in the July 4-11, 1981 New Republic especially cogent...
...In the long run, we hope that these two efforts come together, but at any given moment there are conflicts and contradictions...
...Abolishing war, MacArthur said, is "the one issue upon which both sides can agree, for it is the one issue upon which both sides will profit equally...
...But in the current discussion about U.S...
...No doubt many of the tyrants will have totalitarian ambitions...
...They were a danger to rivals and opponents, but private life, traditional routines, passive minorities were generally (not always) safe from their interventions...
...Friendship The Wall Street Journal of July 2, 1981 reported that ex-President Nixon held bimonthly meetings with important people at his Manhattan townhouse...
...Nevertheless, the Reagan administration seems to be satisfied with the record of history...
...Most states through most of human history have been unfree...
...We must not allow moralistic qualms about routine oppression— the tyrants always ye have with you—to get in the way of our outrage at what is truly new and truly dangerous...
...It is the one issue—and the only decisive one—in which the interests are completely parallel...
...Nixon has said he would like to get to know, hasn't been invited over yet...
...How much can be said for the view of the Wall Street Journal on this issue...
...it may even be desirable to allow all but the largest farmers and businessmen to pass on their property to their sons and daughters—so long as they actually run those enterprises instead of selling or leasing them...
...SALT II foundered after both doves and hawks, for opposite reasons, of course, roasted it in the Senate...
...Among the "rights" of man, reputable philosophers have never included the privilege of keeping whatever portion of one's wealth that one personally thinks is fair...
...Intelligent labor people ought to recognize this...
...Even evil has its degrees...
...Those who said before the last election that it wouldn't make much difference who is elected—Carter or Reagan— ought to reconsider...
...The following verbatim excerpt is taken from the account of that testimony in the New York Times: WASHINGTON, June 24—Pakistan has given the Reagan administration "absolute assurances" that it is neither developing nor planning to develop nuclear weapons, Under Secretary of State James L. Buckley said today...
...What should we do...
...This was at the beginning of 1946, years before the Soviets had the bomb and when the American monopoly was nevertheless a singularly ineffective means for containing Soviet expansionism...
...But when faced with this uncomfortable hypothesis, conservatives shy away from specifying the point at which their sense of unfairness would be triggered...
...That is why Congress enacted a minimum tax of 15 percent (and an "alternative tax") a few years ago—so that the wealthy who might otherwise pay little or nothing would not go free...
...That is too painful to contemplate, for it implicitly challenges some of their most cherished prejudices...
...What sorts of alliances have they already made and how stable are those alliances...
...But cooperation 402 would have been no excuse for a failure to criticize Castro's dictatorship, the repression of dissidents, the campaign against homosexuals, and so on...
...For our part, we can and should maintain a steady hostility toward every sort of totalitarian ambition...
...Perhaps the earliest indication that the Soviets bore more than an equal share of responsibility for A Triumph for Reaction Or Would You Say Counterrevolution...
...Not even, presumably, if 1 percent of the population received 90 percent of all income...
...Right now the labor movement looks to be in real trouble...
...Thirty-six years ago the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and then a second one on Nagasaki...
...RARELY, HOWEVER, in any part of the Third World, are there going to be old or new regimes, governments, or movements to which we should be ideologically committed...
...The concentration camp, Hannah Arendt wrote, is the model of totalitarian control...
...Are the rich already too burdened with taxes for the good of us all...
...Hence the need to penetrate every aspect of social life, religion, culture, and family, to seize every secondary association, to supervise all communication between persons, all movement between places, all thought and all feeling...
...Whether or not this percentage currently obtains, there is widespread agreement that the overwhelming bulk of capital investment comes from corporation funds, insurance, and pension funds...
...The obvious mutual interest in nuclear arms agreements seems to elude this Administration...
...Today we are too sophisticated for such simple distinctions, or too cynical...
...The second argument is about relative brutality...
...Partly its novelty 400 consists in nothing more than a radical improvement in bureaucratic and police control, the introduction of a more advanced technology of surveillance: old tyranny with new machinery...
...They mean it...
...How shall we describe this...
...In this connection, whatever one may think about Israel's action in destroying the Iraqi plant for nuclear bombs, everyone seems agreed that attention has been focused on the dangers of nuclear proliferation...
...Lenient and porous tax laws permitting large fortunes to accumulate and pass on to heirs will become even more illadvised as two-income professional families proliferate...
...That last question is generally taken to mean we should align ourselves with the established regime...
...The tax system . . . could be made more progressive and, if anything, work efforts would increase rather than diminish...
...It's time to launch the kind of debate that can prevent the Reagan administration from making our scandalous situation even worse...
...Terrain and the lesser size of Nagasaki reduced destruction there to 39,000 killed, 25,000 injured...
...Those who contend that it is metaphysically wrong to place any limit upon the individual's right to acquire wealth imply that no conceivable maldistribution of wealth could be unjust...
...Even more ominous is the fact that this situation applies also to the field of foreign policy, involving issues of war and peace...
...Articles in political or economic journals almost never engage in serious analysis of the subject...
...How long will this reactionary trend continue...
...and NATO decision to install such missiles in the West starting in 1983...
...It has put forward the proposition that control, limitation, reduction of nuclear arms are primarily a Soviet need and that we will undertake negotiations only when the Soviets show that they can "behave...
...We can expect inheritances to increase faster than the rate of inflation, worsening our maldistribution of wealth...
...There are many lesser examples of candidates spending from $500,000 to $1 million or more of their personal fortunes on their election bids...
...But the rich include parasitic real-estate speculators, lawyers who help other wealthy persons avoid income taxes and advise corporations how to outwit federal and state laws, executives who devise clever ads for Virginia Slims and Marlboros to increase the national cancer rates, pornography merchants, sharpies and shysters of every description, and manufacturers of innumerable frivolous products...
...They can't help being what they are...
...but the eagerness of the Reagan administration to throw the book at the controllers tells us something (in contrast to other strikes by government employees, where patience was shown and efforts to negotiate continued...
...Perhaps there are some people in politics who might disagree with the Nobel Laureate and father of the Soviet H-bomb, Andrei D. Sakharov, when he writes in A Letter from Exile, "I feel that the questions of war and peace and disarmament are so crucial that they must be given absolute priority even in the most difficult circumstances...
...Rallies, outcries of indignation, conferences are all very well...
...These, Kenna reminded us, could "destroy indiscriminately th lives, the substance, the culture, the civilizatior the hopes, of entire peoples...
...Half of them achieved wealth through inheritance...
...If so, it's probably good that the UAW has gone back into the AFL-CIO...
...One acquires wealth because society has created an orderly social system with law enforcement agencies, courts, torts, the obligation of contract, the privilege of forming corporations, national defense forces, etc...
...And some of the economic abuses and consumer ripoffs, which we endure because of entrepreneurial hopes of "striking it rich," might be lessened...
...are largely beyond our capacity to control...
...As French historian Andre Fontaine puts it: The Baruch Plan was based on a very daring concept...
...What are our own strategic interests in the area...
...One has to make a distinction between the nuclear option and nuclear weapon," he told the Senate panel...
...No one deserves to start out with a fat nest egg while others must start from scratch...
...Some of them will and some won't...
...And we don't need a political theory to explain why we should keep these people always in the forefront of our consciousness, their names on the tip of our tongues...
...Often we can't do anything at all...
...He recalls that every presi dent of this country, "from Dwight Eisenhower ti Jimmy Carter, has tried to remind us that ther could be no such thing as victory in a war fougli with such weapons...
...It 394 tries to break through the dead-end in which dis cussion of nuclear disarmament has ended...
...Institutional status is coveted and cherished even if the higher pay associated with it is subject to very high levels of taxation...
...3) People have a "right" to keep the fruits of their labor rather than be subject to "punitive" taxes...
...But it is a worse policy to refuse altogether to confront those difficulties...
...It seems to me the recent speech by George F. Kennan in Washington, when he received the Albert Einstein Peace Prize, contains a sane and practical proposal...
...The city of Hiroshima reported that more than 200,000 died as a result of a single bomb...
...As though the European neutralist movement disrupting the Western Alliance is not bad enough, comes the Reagan-Weinberger ploy to accelerate such disruption...
...Given the current minimum wage, this would permit after-tax income ceilings of roughly $70,000 to slightly over $100,000...
...The general's argument is as timely today as it was in 1955, when he startled an American Legion audience in Los Angeles with his categoric imperative...
...Then, obviously, the direction of our maneuvers will have to be determined by the shape of the terrain...
Vol. 28 • September 1981 • No. 4
