Midterm Excuses
BROCKWAY, GEORGE P.
The Dismal Science MIDTERM EXCUSES BY GEORGE P BROCKWAY By the time this reaches you, the election returns will be in and the pundits may well have finished talking about them. As I write,...
...Capital," says Mill, "is kept in existence from age to age not by preservation, but by perpetual reproduction: every part of it is used and destroyed generally very soon after it is produced, but those who consume it are employed meanwhile in producing more...
...One is tempted to like Ike, but the sad fact is that he ran up the largest peacetime deficits until the advent of Ronald Reagan...
...The liberal scenario, I'msorrytosay, is not much better...
...the disappearance, inashorttime.ofall traces of the mischiefs done by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and the ravages of war...
...In the present instance, the doctors of the far Right agree with the diagnosis of the doctors of the far Left...
...The alleged debauch never began...
...Nor will it be something mean-spirited and tawdry, like depriving the poor and helpless in order to bribe the rich and fortunate into making themselves richer, hoping thereby to improve the GNP...
...Steel decided against modernizing its plants, not because it lacked the ability to do so, but because it felt the economy too weak to need the steel it could produce...
...I hasten to add that I am thinking of Mr...
...The GNP, too, is incidental, perhaps a means but certainly not an end in itself...
...I merely say that, for change, Mr...
...New Deal...
...Contrast these figures with those of the first two years of Reagan-omics...
...It might have been no great thing to reinvent the water wheel...
...But this objection is beside the point...
...New Deal...
...Another trouble with metaphors is that, once you get them started, they're hard to stop...
...Yet I have no hesitation in saying that appalling numbers of people will have expressed approval of Reaganomics...
...Well, there is such a case...
...Nor has the infrastructure been destroyed...
...once I spent an entire day in Albany and Troy, called on a wholesaler, a department store, and five bookstores, and didn't sell a single book...
...Is Jimmy Carter solely to blame...
...You cannot, we are earnestly assured, correct in a year or two the mess made in 10 (or 20 or 30) years of mismanagement...
...Is there a moral equivalent of war...
...As I write, however, the election is almost a month away and the pollsters have made only the vaguest of preliminary predictions...
...As was pointed out in the debates over saving Lockheed and Chrysler, the physical factories would have remained even if the companies had gone bankrupt...
...it would be harder to rebuild the automobile industry from scratch...
...The GNP, in 1958 dollars, stood at $227.2 billion...
...The one that seems most popular now, almost two years into the Reagan Presidency, compares the economy to a person who has destroyed his health in years of overindulgence and today faces a long and rigorous convalescence...
...The economy has, the story goes, been on an extended debauch...
...But by the end of the War, there were 7 million more civilian jobs than there were in 1939...
...Of course, there may still be some truth behind the metaphor...
...Nevertheless, let's take it at its face value...
...and controlling inflation seems to require controlling the money supply—which immediately throws people out of work but, it is hoped, will do better in time...
...If we are not responsible, we are nothing...
...If this is so, it would certainly be churlish to deny President Reagan time for his program, as he says, to take hold...
...I don't mean to denigrate Mr...
...In the long run we are all dead...
...One version of the Hippocratic Oath starts with the words, "First, do no harm...
...There was never a pre-existing "healthy" state that we should now be returning to...
...On the basis of metaphor, there is no choosing between programs...
...It is conceivable that when an economy has been badly damaged it cannot be repaired in a short period of time...
...In between were miles and miles of farmland that no one bothered to farm...
...It will not, however, be something incidental, like cutting down on the consumption of oil, as Jimmy Carter, costumed in a cardigan sweater, and posed before a fireplace in supposed imitation of FDR, told us an inner light had told him...
...There is one crucial difference between Mr...
...Guns (except handguns, which aren't of much use in war) are not consumer goods...
...I noticed that myself...
...Some may object that the world has grown vastly more complicated in the almost century and a half since Mill wrote, that today's factories and infrastructure could not be replicated so easily as those of the mid-19th century...
...This is perhaps particularly true with medical metaphors, medicine being an art and all that...
...Very few of these approving voters are beyond disappointment with the present state of affairs, but all of them are sustained by the belief that we are on the right track...
...In mid-1940, when France fell, there were about 8 million unemployed in the United States, or 14.6 per cent of the labor force...
...Block that metaphor...
...Yes, there was a war on...
...This is absurdity of a high order...
...Was it Lyndon B. Johnson, then...
...but instead of an austere program of drying out, they prescribe an equally drastic program of surgery...
...it has merely been allowed to deteriorate, and the deterioration has resulted precisely and solely from the astringent measures of the end-the-debauch doctors...
...I'm not going to give a lecture on morality—at least not a comprehensive one, not here—but I will say this: Each of us as individuals and as a nation, is responsible for ourselves...
...In the late '30s I was a traveling salesman and had occasion to travel over a good deal of the northeastern United States...
...In short, Mill's observation remains as sound as ever...
...Since I am appalled that even Reagan himself approves of his policies, you may think that my crystal ball doesn't have to be very clear...
...Even in terms of medical metaphor, Reaganomics is a failure...
...It now goes like this: If people are out of work, they are disadvantaged and have the wrong skills or none, so they need to be trained or retrained...
...and if one wants to encourage investment, one encourages savings...
...Although Congressman Jack Kemp (R.-N.Y...
...The state of the economy in 1940 was incomparably worse than it was in 1980...
...Win-the-War was nonpareil...
...is perhaps not old enough to have experienced the Great Depression, and President Reagan apparently had his mind on other problems, some of us remember how things were and how they changed...
...People were scarcely visible...
...and to encourage savings, one attacks inflation...
...This remedy will also take time...
...If millions are out of work, the problem is to be met by the indirect route of encouraging investment...
...Two years of irresponsibility in Washington are more than enough...
...This perpetual consumption and reproduction of capital afford the explanation of what has so often excited wonder, the great rapidity with which countries recover from a state of devastation...
...The 18 million of us who ultimately wore khaki or blue suits did not produce anything of ordinary usefulness while we did so...
...If, on the other hand, there is a case where a ruined economy made a rapid recovery, then we had better recognize that Reaganomics is a failure and quickly embark on another program...
...Or they may use some other metaphor...
...There'd better be, or we are all either amoral or dead...
...And we have had, well within the memory of man, a situation that confirms it...
...All subsequent programers—and I mean all, both Right and Left—have tried to accomplish their ends by indirection...
...Surely Gerald Ford and Richard M. Nixon aren't the ones, for they are Republicans...
...The metaphor is nonsense on its face...
...That's the conservative scenario...
...Those figures make little allowance for women, who stayed home if they could, and blacks, who just tended not to be counted...
...The factories may be judged obsolete, as people tell us the steel industry is, yet it is noticeable that U.S...
...Win-the War and all the proposals and programs that we have had for the last 35-40 years...
...I did not sell many books...
...But can the national will be mobilized except in time of war...
...That would make John F. Kennedy the Golden Age, which can't be allowed...
...I was not a very good salesman, but I did keep my eyes open, and what I saw out the daycoach windows was miles and miles of abandoned factories, empty warehouses, and railroad sidings whose rusted rails were overgrown with weeds...
...The only ends are people...
...The devastation alleged to have been caused by an economic debauch has not extended to factory buildings or machinery...
...When you stop to think of it, that makes the achievement all the more remarkable...
...I' 11 name it, but first let's glance at John Stuart Mill's Principles ofPolitical Economy, a work that even more than Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations can be called the leading statement of "classical" economics...
...in the meantime, a nationwide commission of unemployed economists will be convened to figure out what industries should be fostered?and how they should be fostered—to employ the retreaded workers...
...Win-the-War, not of Mr...
...War industry does not, in itself, improve the standard of living...
...This was in the winter of 1938-39...
...Two years later, unemployment was practically nonexistent and the GNP was up to $297.8 billion, for an increase of 31.1 per cent...
...The Golden Age is and always has been merely an enchanting dream...
...To say so is unfair, since it was he who appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and so may be said to have initiated the "cure...
...When did this all start...
...Win-the War saw what had to be done, and did it...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 20
