Dear Editor
Dear Editor Goodman "Poker Rights" (NL, September 3), Walter Goodman's burlesque of affirmative action, was terribly funny and terribly sad. Above all, however, it was terribly realistic. I...
...On the other hand, Tyler's conscience reminds him that he has himself defended deficits in the past...
...On the one hand, Tyler's political instinct tells him that Reagan's deficit makes good election-year politics...
...Memphis Charles Wortley...
...These in effect outlawed criticism of the government and placed serious obstacles in the way of immigrants seeking to become U.S...
...Detroit Frank Bond Woodcock With all due respect to The New Leader's newest —and very welcome—Regular Contributor, I think George Woodcock is wrong in contending that Chicago's 1886 Haymarket Square tragedy set off the first "Red Scare" in American history ("Trial and Error," NL, September 3...
...In his hands it has been just as fraudulent as it was in 1980, when Ronald Reagan told us to live within our means...
...Unhappily, the logic of socially motivated quotas is now so brazen as to be almost beyond satire...
...I suspect that the piece was inspired by the New York City Police Department's recent sergeant's test...
...On the contrary, it appears to have deprived them of any practical motive for doing so...
...Ending that stimulus now would bring back the unemployment rates of 1981-82, something I would hate, even if the deficit has given Walter Mondale a convenient issue...
...Looking below the surface of our present prosperity, we find both high unemployment and high under utilization of productive capacity...
...He also points out that despite the logic of market economics, they have had little effect on interest rates, because stagnation has reduced the demand for funds...
...When first recruited into it, the minority candidates had been chosen by affirmative action, the others by competitive examination...
...Such people were thought to be contaminated with French ideas and thus probable Jeffersonians...
...citizens...
...Despite the claims of those who support affirmative action, this policy has obviously failed to give minority police officers a chance to catch up with their colleagues...
...One other point...
...The fact that interest rates show no consistent tendency to rise in an era of allegedly ruinous deficits would suggest to a Keynesian that the economy is slack and in need of a deficit-induced stimulus, which has provided us with the current limited recovery...
...The problem with Tyler's attempt to square the circle is that Keynes believed periods of stagnation are the very times deficit financing should be unleashed...
...a 'banana republic' plagued by unemployment, inflation, waste, external debt, and economic polarization...
...All the elements of a true Red Scare were present: an overseas revolutionary contagion, the resulting fear of newcomers, and an attempt to silence internal dissent by tainting it with the label of foreign extremism and by suppressing the Bill of Rights...
...therefore he warns us that Republican red ink "could push up interest rates" and make the U.S...
...Of course, this country does not now seem to be in recession...
...Fearing rightly that their days of rule were numbered, they struck at their Jeffersonian rivals in 1798 by passing four laws collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts...
...Our earliest witch hunt took place in the French Revolution's aftermath, when the Federalists held power in Washington...
...But Tyler himself tells us that a slump is just around the corner...
...Depending on the gestalt in which they are incurred and how they are used, they often can be both necessary and desirable...
...In this vein he insists that they "are not an evil to be avoided at all times...
...When minority candidates failed that exam in unusually large numbers, the organizations claiming to represent them challenged it in court with exactly the same arguments "Pagliacci" used in Goodman's column...
...All the men and women who took the sergeant's test were already patrolmen in the department...
...New York City Edward Walker Deficits Gus Tyler's attack on "Reagan's Counterfeit Keynesianism" (NL, July 9-23) defies its own logic...
Vol. 67 • September 1984 • No. 17
