Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR FARM SUBSIDIES Compliments to Professor Ernest van den Haag for his thoughtful article on farm subsidies ("A Modest Farm Proposal,"' NL, February 27). Up to now, American...
...It is obvious that SANE has special appeal for them...
...People go to a specific doctor because he is reliable, not because of reasonable rates...
...Students, he believes should enter medicine because of the "attractive rate of return...
...If I'd read this anywhere else, I'd have let it pass—but in The New Leader, one of the few sane, hard-headed anti-Communist papers...
...This feeling is making it difficult for the United States to play its natural part in the global competition between freedom and Communism...
...My criticism of the proposal would only be that van den Haag has given insufficient emphasis to a couple of indirect benefits which can be of even greater importance than the direct benefit...
...The new Administration in Washington certainly should have its ears turned toward van den Haag on this subject...
...Abba P. Lerner SANE "What a jolt it was to read in Tristram Coffin's "Washington: USA" column (NL, March 20): "The day of the Meriwether vote Dodd suggested that the Reds had infiltrated the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE...
...Sylvia Erber DOCTOR DILEMMA I believe the vital message contained in E. M. DeCicco's article, "Solving the Doctor Dilemma," (NL, March 20) is subverted by insertion of bits and pieces of non-objective reporting...
...His references to the Graduate Record Exam for medical students could be added as an aside to indicate the need for potential doctors to concentrate in broad fields of learning prior to medical school, if it belongs there at all...
...I am not a partisan of Senator Dodd's and I wish there had been resounding defeat of Meriwether...
...Fair Lawn, N.J...
...We need more doctors, and government aid through repayable loans is a practical aid in alleviating the dilemma...
...There is no good reason, apart from the use of depression as an anti-inflationary instrument, to accept more than about 2 per cent of unemployment for the inevitable frictions and for people in transition between jobs...
...It is a far more promising field than the League of Women Voters or a citizens committee for a new junior high school, which they also do not neglect...
...For one, while the average income o£ an MD may be $18,122, this figure in no way denotes the vast differences in earning between the GP and the specialist and between the new practitioner and the old...
...East Lansing, Mich...
...The second benefit would be an annual saving of several billion dollars...
...The central message of the article cannot be stressed too hard...
...The reduction in the cost of living that would result from van den Haag's proposal would diminish the inflationary pressures and permit the authorities to adopt a policy of fuller employment...
...He did not specifically charge the Communists with having taken over SANE, but he planted suspicions all over the lot...
...Even more disturbing than these inferences was DeCicco's unfounded use of IQs in establishing a point entirely unrelated to the main theme—a means of providing medical education to all qualified...
...Oberlin, Ohio Murray A. Tucker...
...Up to now, American liberals have failed to take an intelligent (or any) position on the farm subsidy monstrosity...
...This is the explanation for our continuing high unemployment, of our being indoctrinated into accepting more and more unemployment as normal and of the modesty, not to say timidity, of President Kennedy's objective that we try to reduce unemployment to something like 4 per cent...
...Hollywood, Calif...
...He will find that though the Communists have not taken over SANE they have not ignored it, either...
...As an economist, another point which bothered me was DeCicco's naive reliance on the competitive system to solve the problem of high doctor fees...
...One of the most disturbing of these is his unqualified use of averages...
...Perhaps these considerations will help to dispel the natural abhorrence of van den Haag's immodest proposal...
...But I would like to suggest that Coffin visit some local SANE meetings...
...This would not only be a great boon to poorer people, but would reduce the cost of living for all, the Cost of Living Index and the inflationary pressure of the economy...
...The first of these is the reduction in the price of foodstuffs and other agricultural products...
...van den Haag's proposal would ease the pressure on the budget at the same time that it eased the inflationary pressures, diminishing both of the primary inhibitions against our acting with the required vigor for the peaceful establishment of a free and prosperous world...
...i.e., to use some of our available (and wasted) resources to help the economically backward countries to achieve a decent standard of living by democratic means...
...At present, the country's most important internal problem is the way in which our new Administration, almost as much as the previous one, feels compelled to depend upon and even to defend depression as a means of checking price increases, though it is costing the country between 30 and 50 billion dollars in unproduced potential output...
...IQs are measurements of potential -which have very little normal use above the tenth grade in secondary school...
...Nicholas Granet Ernest van den Haag puts forth the remarkable suggestion that, everything else having failed, we should try to apply reason to our farm problem by limiting our subsidies to those with incomes not much above the average in the United States...
...This is important because of the powerful and widespread, if unwarranted, feeling that we ought to have a balanced budget...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 14
