Correspondents' Correspondence Beware the Sup-symps

...Beware the Sup-symps New York-One of the disappointments many of us have felt with the present Congress is its failure to re-establish the House Un-Amencan Activities Committee (huac) There was some brave talk last fall about doing this, but nothing has happened On reflection it is easy to see why The plain fact of the matter is that the Marxists have at last taken over Oh, I know that they call themselves supply-siders and pose as reindustnalizing reformers But I was not born yesterday, and I remember that Mao and his gang pretended to be agrarian reformers, and they turned out to be more Marxist than the Russians Once burned, we should be twice shy If you've had any experience with this sort of thing, you see at once that "supply-side" has to be some kind of code They couldn't come right out and admit that they're Marxists—at least not yet But other Marxists will readily recognize them as brothers under the skin even though it's not yet prudent to say so publicly And any disciple of Adam Smith will recognize them as enemies For you may be very sure that Adam Smith was no supply-sider He laid it right on the line in The Wealth of Nations "The interest of the producer," he said," ought to be attended to only as far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer " On the other hand, those who have been initiated into the secrets of Karl Marx know that, regardless of what the liberal press says, he was actually the original supply-sider He was usually able to disguise his meaning m a miasma of Germanic rhetoric, but when he could write privately m his notebooks (which they call Grundrisse), there was no doubt about what he meant He wanted to make it perfectly clear, and he did "The important thing to emphasize here," he wrote, "is that, whether production and consumption are viewed as the activity of one or of many individuals, they appear in any case as moments of one process, in which production is the real point of departure and hence also the predominant moment " Well, there you have it It's pretty obvious why the new powers in Washington aren't anxious to have huac start up again What I would like to know is, where is the John Birch Society now that we need if Or has that been taken over by so-called supply-siders, too7 "Sup-symps," we might better call them —George P Brockway...