A Liberal Anthology

...In some instances he stresses business recognition of the importance of paying decent incomes to many people so that they can consume large quantities of goods...

...Veblen and Berle loom largest in The Paper Economy, but the Thurman Arnold of The Folklore of Capitalism and the Gardner Means of administered pricing are also much in evidence...

...How, for example, can the corporation be simultaneously a thoroughly autocratic organization and a haven for Whyte's well-adjusted, non-directive committeemen...

...In fact, I encountered no more than a single casual reference to the circumstance that "there are a number of existing and potential conflicts between different groups of managers...

...Bazelon is not completely consistent even on the central relation of the corporation to economic abundance...

...The tax system receives a thorough drubbing at Bazelon's hands...

...Even though the government as Big Underwriter is one of Bazelon's happier conceptions, it is scarcely a theory of political and economic power...

...The most cogent recent exposition of this theme, however, is not Bazelon's but Robert Heilbroner and Peter Bernstein's A Primer on Government Spending...

...For Bazelon, in common with other non-Socialist critics of the contemporary scene, is pitifully bereft of a convincing alternative to the corporate management and the Federal underwriting of the Paper Economy...

...If anything, it represents retreat from Galbraith's suggestive conception of countervailing power...

...On these varied topics, Bazelon, though frequently irritating, imprecise and excessively prone to airy generalization, is usually intelligent and occasionally original...

...Galbraith on affluence, Whyte on the organization man, Lampman and Harrington on poverty and the distribution of wealth, and Drucker, Mason, Chayes, Manning and Miller on the corporation as private government are other writers who are the heavily employed and faithfully acknowledged sources of Bazelon's commentary...

...What else has exercised the critics of American capitalism...

...Until critics from the left acquire more powerful ideological tools than they now possess, the pragmatiste in and out of the White House have very little to fear from their disaffection...

...The first and the overriding conception of the volume is Veblen's fundamental dichotomy between the machine process and business enterprise—between the activities which produce useful goods and the manipulations which evoke only money...

...For Bazelon, as for Veblen, technicians have made abundance for all possible, and the businessmen have not quite allowed, or dared to allow, actual abundance to emerge...

...More important, Bazelon, for all his comment on private and political power, never explains how our corporate masters resolve their own conflicts of interest...

...It would have helped here, as in a good many other places, if Bazelon had indicated the books and articles from which he quotes...

...Only slightly less emphasized in Bazelon's exposition is the much argued conception of the corporation as a form of private government whose prices correspond to taxes and whose powers to open and close plants, introduce new products and discontinue old ones, and expand or contract employment, have consequences upon individuals and communities closely analogous to the effects of government policy...

...After reading the passages on the Internal Revenue Code and its interpretations, no residual belief should linger in our allegedly progressive structure of income tax rates and no one should think very much of the current propaganda in favor of lower tax rates as incentives to effort, whatever may be their merits on other grounds...

...author, "A History of Economic Ideas" David Bazelon's sprawling, loosely organized assault on the conventional wisdom is most profitably read as an anthology of 20th century economic criticism of American capitalism...

...Around these polemicists Bazelon has written a series of casually linked essays which touch and sometimes illuminate a large number of themes...

...To begin with, in Bazelon's statement of it at least, the critique suffers from a number of inconsistencies...

...In dipping into the large literature on this subject, Bazelon summarizes the arguments in favor of large corporations as private governments but does little to break new conceptual ground...

...If a single thread runs through The Paper Economy it is this Veblenian contrast between the worlds of the technician and the corporate manager...

...How powerful is the liberal critique...

...Bazelon, an accomplished corporate attorney, is at his best in the tax sections...

...Indeed, Bazelon's most important service may be one of exposure...

...The rest of Bazelon's bill of particulars against our economic institutions and practices includes a demonstration that prices are administered by large corporations, a review of the fictions of "vigorous anti-trust," a sketchy account of the growing significance of the intellectually trained in the business world, and a description of the lingering poverty which still defaces American prosperity...

...Much of the material on the private government theme appears to derive from Edward Mason's collection of essays, The Corporation in Modern Society...

...For one thing, the fictions of conventional accounting which praise corporate debt as investment for the future and slander government debt as a burden on future generations...

...In others he stresses instead restraints on production, "the conscientious sabotage" of efficiency with which Veblen made such devastating play...

...He has made it painfully plain that American critics of capitalism badly need a coherent theory of political and economic power, a consistent program of liberal action, and a vision of the better society which existing technology and superior organization are capable of creating...

...Although Bazelon would have been a better guide if he had aimed more often for conceptual accuracy and less frequently for mere verbal cuteness, still the names and the ideas which have been the instruments of recent dissent from the American Celebration are here conveniently gathered in a single place...

...The text offers little evidence that Bazelon accepts either Marx's or C. Wright Mill's version of how power is distributed, but his own position seems no more specific than the general proposition that large corporations dispose of our affairs and the government bails them out of their occasional difficulties and miscalculations...