Fair Game

...This opportunity to compare the principled Friedman with Nixon impresses on one the advantages of having a President of . . . uh, flexible disposition...

...The secretaries of Treasury, Labor and Commerce have said enough to indicate what is before us...

...I also saw the mediocrity of so many civil servants...

...Nixon's first government job, which he held for about eight months in 1942, was with the tire-rationing section of the Office of Price Administration (OPA), a perverse beginning for a young fellow who would make his way through public life on an antibureaucracy hobby horse...

...He rose as a man of the Right, wherever that is...

...these are safe-and-sound Republican approaches to hotting up the economy: Welfare recipients must defer to investors, and the great ecology crusade will have to share the roads with more cars...

...He told a team of friendly biographers: "I became more conservative first, after my experience with opa...

...It may all prove good medicine, despite the incidents of obtuseness and highhandedness and crookedness before us—but how odd to think that the autumn of 1972 will find the man who was traumatically disillusioned with the opa 30 years ago basing his campaign for reelection on his achievement in bringing America so much closer to a controlled economy...

...A humorous equation, very Nixonian...

...Later, considerably later, when his career had already taken its shape and he knew what he had to do, he would refer to his brief opa interlude as having moved him to the political Right...

...Regimentation and government coercion," he told a joint session of the regathered Congress, "must never become a way of life in the United States of America...

...Thus he announced and interpreted the controls to America in a speech that was a paean to, of all things, unfettered competition: "A nation, like a person, has to have a certain inner drive to succeed...

...His internal drive is fierce, but it is directed by outer forces, an eager vessel that will go where the winds direct...

...We have, after all, had a couple of decades to obeserve the man in motion...

...Why, then there will be a defrosting...

...It had better be, to withstand the effects of a wage freeze...

...there is no assurance in his play...

...And he has managed to carry off his big moments, mainly because his opponents' hands have been so weak...

...The Big Bluff THE CELEBRATED Milton Friedman, a lonely Free Marketeer who will follow his star unto the abyss, sees "utter failure" in store...

...But price controls...

...In his policy pronouncements, whether on Vietnamization or school busing, Nixon has come on strong?often too strong for the hand he holds...

...The wage-price freeze is the kind of action Democratic economists have been demanding for a couple of years and Presidential advisers have been resisting on the highest of principles...

...the automatic adjustments are not being made, or at any rate not being made fast enough to prevent severe discomfort to sizable groups of voters...

...Does that bespeak confidence or nervousness...

...And after the 90 days...

...Like all Presidents, Nixon is constantly appearing before benighted organizations and praising them for their astounding contributions to the public weal...

...The Long Freeze SO WE ARE in the middle of a 90-day freeze—which the President has suggested requires about equal sacrifices from the working man and the businessman and the investor...

...I also became greatly disillusioned about bureaucracy and about what the government could do because I saw the terrible paper work that people had to go through...

...Every action I have taken tonight is designed to nurture and stimulate the competitive spirit...

...The "voluntary cooperation of all Americans —each one of you," on which Nixon says he relies, will not suffice...

...Nixon was not quite 30 at the time...

...In economic affairs, that inner drive is called the competitive spirit...

...Speaking a few weeks ago to the Associated Milk Producers, who got a substantial increase in price supports last March, the President called un-smilingly for self-sacrifice and economic restraint...

...Edgy about taking a step condemned by the right-thinking Friedman and applauded by the likes of a John Kenneth Galbraith, the President is playing the circus contortionist whose double-jointed limbs go one way while his head goes another...

...John Connally, this season's White House favorite, has invited American business and labor to "get used to the idea of living within certain parameters...

...except, to be sure, for "a proper mechanism" to maintain wage-price stability in selective industries and selective unions, selective segments of the free competitive economy...

...Here we have a surgeon, obliged to amputate someone's legs in order to save the rest of him, explaining that the operation is designed to enable the patient to run, skip and jump without a limp...

...Nixon assured us that our "work ethic," poor decayed organ, was "alive and well...

...The cards he holds are not, comparatively speaking, bad, but poker is a game of temperament...

...Each one of us will get what he can for himself...

...There was no difficulty for him in proposing a tax credit for business investment or the repeal of the excise tax on automobiles...

...The "huge price-control bureaucracy" the President abjures looms, and when in time it falls into the hands of an Administration that does not blanch at the thought of an excess-profits tax, the hosannas of today's gop publicists will turn to ashes in their mouths...

...There shapes up the battleground for the 1972 Presidential elections (as Richard J. Krickus and Victor Fingerhut have amply demonstrated in the preceding pages...

...One man's parameter is another man's straitjacket, and November 13 will see the official start of a series of ferocious conflicts for advantage among rival segments of the economy, each demanding that the others tighten their belts...

...The President's decision was slow in coming, but now he has set out on a road he claims to have believed, in 1942, he had left forever...

...Now it has fallen to him to bring extensive economic controls to America...

...Whereas an excess profits tax is deemed "counterproductive," a tax on imports comes out of a grand old protectionist tradition dear to much of the Grand Old Party...

...The Free Enterprisers prefer to make their arrangements among themselves, however, without assistance from despised bureaucrats...

...On Labor Day, Dr...

...Beyond this, common sense suggests that we prepare to enter a new phase of economic life in which government will be the arbiter of the national greed...

...In his current price-wage adventure, however, he is showing little confidence in his hand...

...he had attached himself to no great doctrines, and while he may have felt intimations of glory, he could not yet know the route he was fated to travel or the baggage he required...

...there are times when even an adept player with a promising hand will feel uncomfortable, begin fidgeting in his chair and talking too much...

...And for the first time when I was in OPA, I also saw that there were people in government who were not satisfied merely with interpreting the regulations, enforcing the law that Congress passed, but who actually had a passion to get business and used their government jobs to that end...

...Wage ceilings alone would have been painless for the Nixon Cabinet—like unilateral disarmament by the USSR...

...They set me to thinking a lot at that point...

...Well, that takes some swallowing...

...But, as readers may have noticed, Richard Nixon was not destined to be a Socialist...

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Wage-Price Poker THE DEGREE to which Richard Nixon understands, or permits himself to understand, the larger issues his office imposes upon him has always been problematical...

...We do know, though, that the President has a reputation as a poker player, gained in the Navy during World War II, and one indispensable requirement of a top-notch poker player is the ability to seem omniscient when possessing only scanty information...

...He must be able to sit and wait—but then, when he makes his move, even if his fingers are crossed beneath the table, it must be with authority...

...These were of course some of the remnants of the old violent New Deal crowd...

...Implicit in the act is the sad acknowledgment that the allegedly free market is not performing up to par...

...Steel makers, car makers, oil companies—none has the heart for the kind of tough competition acclaimed in speeches like the President's...

...Had the country taken a different course after the War, we can be certain the freshman Congressman would have used his few months of tire-rationing as credentials for running a quasi-socialist economy...

...In reality (that country where economic theorists take care not to trespass ), there has been little significant price competition among our major industries for decades...

...Small wonder the Young Americans for Freedom are disconsolate...

...Perhaps, as the President keeps assuring us, and himself, we are merely at "a way station on the road to free markets and free collective bargaining," but the evidence of what business and labor will do when left to their consciences is clear to even the dimmer part of the citizenry, making wage-price controls a fair risk for an Administration much occupied with the approaching election year...