The Challenge to Liberalism

...Without anyone having very much planned it, the size of the U.S...

...Futile, that is, save for increasing the autonomy of government itself...

...But assessments of this kind are curiously new to American liberalism, which over-reacted to the opposition to the New Deal and for a generation thereafter virtually repressed internal dissent, arguing that it would give aid and comfort to the enemies of liberal purpose...

...In the modern age, nothing has enlarged the power and scope of government so much as war...

...in such a situation...

...It was not our own doing that we were driven from that Eden...

...government has grown to such an extent in recent years that even those who arc pleased by this trend have evidently not been able t< keep abreast of the data...

...Last fall Charles L. Schultze, now the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, gave the Godkin Lectures at Harvard University...

...I sincerely hope there was someone present who understood what we were talking about, for surely I did not...

...One asks: Will we quite recognize ourselves Daniel P. Moynihan, a frequent New Leader contributor, is the junior United States Senator from New York...

...Far more important, the price of energy was not a political issue...

...It doesn't matter which, but it does matter that we all say the same thing...

...Yes, and so little distant in time, yet so irretrievable...

...More and more, Washington tends to be satisfied with whatever expands its power, however little it may expand its efficacy...

...What it comes down to is a simple matter: Freedom is not a condition of mankind...

...These questions come urgently to mind now, as the Congress commences to deal with the President's proposals on energy...

...Will we quite have intended it...

...Should we not assume that simulated war will do the same...

...In one of the first committee meetings I attended in the Senate, a representative of an important and respected national organization presented testimony on behalf of more government spending...

...Yet of course it is anything but commonplace...

...I can report one early response...

...It reversed itself on Friday, but we must look to tomorrow's newspapers to learn what the Congress will ultimately decide...

...He took as his theme the extraordinary clumsiness displayed of late by the American government in going about the business of attaining desired social purposes...

...Alfred Marshall put it as well as anyone, and did so generations ago: "Government is the most precious of human possessions...

...I beckoned to a member of the committee staff and within minutes was able tc inform the witness that the public sector of the United States GNP was already 38 percent...

...For it—we?shall surely decide something about something...

...At current rates it will surely reach 50 per cent by the end of the 20th century...

...The evidence of this process is daily to be encountered in press reports about the movement of the President's energy program through Congress...

...For all I knew it was a question of whether oil companies should be stood up straight or laid on their sides, rather like coal mines...

...The command and control approach of a centralized bureaucracy, Schultze observed, has become virtually the only mode of American government...

...A decade ago the energy sector of the American economy was almost wholly private, and energy was cheap...

...A splendid phrase, that...

...Gasoline by volume sold for about the price of bottled water...

...The median number of years turned out to be 11...

...With a candor that is rare, but with an inaccuracy that alas is far from rare, our witness declared that if the legislation he desired required increasing the economy's public sector, then so be it...

...it is an achievement...

...Large movements in global politics led to our expulsion...

...Very possibly the ease of transfer is facilitated by its seeming commonplace nature...

...How ironic it would be, though, if James' effort to support the pacifist movement of his time—a movement that must be credited with sensing the irredeemable horror of world war that soon would devastate Western civilization—should today become the battle cry of an equally fatal enterprise: the irreversible growth of the power of the United States government...

...I don't in the least remember what we decided, although even at the time I recalled Melbourne's remark following a British Cabinet meeting on the price of wheat...

...It is not the gift of government...

...The results, he continued, were social interventions that are staggeringly complex, and ultimately futile...

...Thinking Aloud THE CHALLENGE TO LIBERALISM BY DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN Isuppose there is no way for us not to take for granted the orderliness with which power changes hands in America at election time, from person to person, from one party to another...

...The public sector, he explained, represented only 32 per cent of our gross national product, a smaller percentage than that of many Western nations...

...and no care can be too great to be spent on enabling it to do its work in the best way: A chief condition to that end is that it should not be set to work for which it is not specially qualified...

...Whenever a problem confronts us, he said, we do not restructure things so that public goods become private incentives...

...These thoughts lead me to reflect on the durability of the American system, and on those facets of our political sensibility that will preserve it further...

...I was a member of the drafting committee for the Democratic platform (last year...

...But there remains the matter of how we will respond to the world, given the knowledge of good and evil that has been forced upon us...

...This problem confronts us today in an almost subtle manner—a subtlety, one might say, of numbers, of statistics...

...What we have done less carefully, I fear, is cultivate a sensitivity to the deformation of a political system that arises from the enlargement of power: not from the misuse of government, but simply from its expansion...

...Such apprehension is not worthy of a great tradition, and once again reminds us of Lionel Trilling's plea for an internal opposition, one that can put pressure on liberal ideas in the way most outsiders cannot and most insiders will not...

...In announcing his plan, Mr...

...But the long run is another matter, and it must be attended to...

...we choose instead to remove the decision-making power from the private sector and turn it over to the public sector...

...Only one thing may be said with certainty: We shall certainly fail at this task unless from the first we conceive it in these terms...

...This, to be sure, is a venerable view...

...At the end of the session Melbourne, who was then prime minister, called to the Cabinet members as they were leaving: "A minute now...

...On a recent Thursday the House Government Operations Committee resolved that the import of oil should henceforth be a government monopoly...

...Devising a system that makes the supply, allocation and price of energy a matter to be determined by the national government—what President Carter has proposed and what his predecessor proposed—without vastly enhancing the power of the national government will be the greatest challenge to public administration since the era of the New Deal...

...This genius is nowhere more needed than in assessing the uses of government that will preserve freedom and enhance it...

...it is the genius of a people...

...A state of innocence, you might say...

...As I noted in these pages while serving as ambassador to the United Nations ("America's Crisis of Confidence," NL, October 24, 1975), I got to wondering one day just how long the typical UN member had enjoyed a relatively stable government without violent overthrow or usurpation, including revolution...

...half of the then 142 members, in other words, had been under their form of rule for fewer than 11 years...

...Inasmuch as the price of coal in terms of energy production is less than one-half the current price of oil, I should be wary if I lived in West Virginia...

...Carter recalled William James' phrase about the need for a "moral equivalent to war...

...At one point in our proceedings we were caught up with whether we should advocate the horizontal or vertical divestiture of the holdings of American oil companies...

...Did we decide to raise the price or lower the price...

...No wonder Oscar Wilde said America's youth was its oldest tradition...

...His point, I think, was that the political process pays little heed to the substance of these issues in the short run...

...At the outset, in the Constitution, we recognized that power may be abused and organized our internal defenses against this possibility...