Letters

...I’ve been fighting that kind of indifference for five years and there are times when I’m almost ready to throw in the towel...

...Your column is certainly one of the good guys...

...What appears in the column is p l y the tip of the iceberg, as journalists are fond of saying...

...We don’t, of course, have to go quite this far and equate the “usefulness” of people as citizens with the availability of “work for them to do...

...What a marvelous, searching article [“Better Than Deep Throat,” April] on Action Lines...

...Alan Reynolds is a contributing editor of the National Review...

...Subsidies to agriculture, symphonies, and higher education, for example, clearly soak the poor...

...The public choice theory of how politicians and bureaucrats respond to incentives, as well as a growing body of evidence accumulated by Kenneth Boulding and others, casts considerable doubt on this rather naive view of political reality...

...busy (no matter how imaginatively) on problems whose main significance is that they allow someone to sit in an office or a lab keeping busy...

...And if our only contribution is to keep consumer agencies and consumer lawmakers on their toes, then it’s worth the effort...

...But it’s a long jump from this reluctant recognition that makework has its purposes to the romantic glorification of business and the work ethic that pervades the works of .Ayn Rand...

...But neither do we have to swallow the fallacy that only the lower orders are ever on “work relief” and that the rest of us-like Rand’s titans or Fortune’s subscribers-work because society needs our output and rewards us commensurately...

...You might take a look at Alan Harrington’s Life in the Oystal Palace (or William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man) for a corrective to that notion...

...A certain proportion of our national product seems to range downward from the merely pointless to the affirmatively pernicious...

...ALAN REYNOLDS New York, N.Y...

...But I try...

...six columns a week...

...Almost everything, other than the utmost trivia is answered...

...After a few scenes (from Atlas Shrugged) you can begin to understand the businessman, understand why he hates the civil servants in their risk-free world...

...2. You say (p...

...Government support of minimum pricing, through regulatory agencies and fair trade laws, does the same...

...I can only plead overwork...

...Allowing privileged labor and professional groups to limit entry into their trades, with the help of licensing laws and the like, is another policy to keep the poor in their place...

...if one doesn’t have a staff, you take the easy way out...

...IRENE G. KEENEY Albany, N.Y...

...It may be that this (or some substitute) system- of makework is the best hope we have of reconciling our traditional work ethic with our latter day ability to produce sustained glut without providing full employment...

...The analysis of Milton Friedman and evidence from Harvard’s Martin Feldstein suggest that Social Security and unemployment benefits are regressive in their net impact...

...Oddly enough, it’s long since dawned in some quarters that society might achieve a net gain if each and all of the bureaucrats in certain government agencies simply failed to come to work in the morning...

...Our fellow journalists don’t consider what we are doing “journalism” and most of the time we feel like the office pariahs...

...Taggart all by herself, or is there some management structure, some bureaucracy...

...I’ll grant that humanity can be divided, if you like, into achievers and tail-coverers...

...And some would argue that this proportion is not only large, but in a sense “necessarily” large, that in our highly industrialized economy we run out of useful work long before we reach full employment, and that the business of America-to paraphrase Calvin Coolidge-is largely mere business...

...a reader sent me a copy with the cover note: “I wanted to be sure you see this article...

...I guess that before letting my heart go out, I’d like to know just what kinds of problems a businessman is devoting his 18-hour days to solving-and why...

...Governments, after all, are imperfect too...

...Our readers assume, and we encourage the fiction, that we have a staff of hundreds, with investigators and lawyers standing at the ready...

...An imperfection in voluntary contractual arrangements does not by itself constitute an argument for substituting the political decision-making process...

...I don’t think we want to fool ourselves too completely about the social utility of sitting in an office or a lab keeping...

...Almost as purely and simply, work relief is the Dole, too, except that it does provide a little more self-respect for its recipients: at least it creates for them the fiction that they are still useful citizens and that there is work for them to do...

...1. The first and most obvious of these points is your statement (p.59) that: “Ayn Rand is absolutely on target in depicting the contrast between those who plunge themselves into the effort to make something work, be it a novel or a smelter, and those whose most fervent desire is to cover their tails...

...Are the “Taggart Transcontinental Railroads” run by Ms...

...But the thought that the same is true throughout entire thriving industries in the private sector seems to be anathema to everyone, left or right...

...We’ve been the poor step-children of the office for so long, it’s good- to see an article such as yours, even though you exposed all our warts...

...Assuming that the creation of bigness is fulfilling to the creator, is that the kind of fulfillment that the rest of us want to applaud...

...Fortune magazine, in the early days of the New Deal, opined that: “Direct relief is-purely and simply-the Dole...

...These examples, I’m aware, lie at the dark end of a rather long spectrum, but there are plenty of people who do just those thmgs, and I’m not aware of any basis in conventional economic theory (much less in Rand’s) for distinguishing between them and any other businessmen, so long as they have enough political clout to keep their businesses from being prohibited by law...

...Editor’s note: Research for George Crile’s article in the June issue of The Washington Monthly was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism...

...But sad to say, and I have to be honest enough to admit it, I fall into all the same traps you so perceptively outlined...

...It seem to me that on several points it warrants at least an attempt at argument...

...Action Lines Arthur Levine: Bless you...

...But, if so, where does that bring you out with respect to the creators of great bureaucracies whom Rand so much admires...

...We might do well to keep in the back of our heads an observation that comes from almost as far right on the political spectrum as Rand herself...

...Personally, I‘m handling 200 letters a week, alone-I’m it-researcher, writer, and solver of problems, all by myself...

...This assumes that the maximum state acts to offset such inequalities, rather than to reinforce inequalities by distributing favors on the basis of political clout...

...Are the rest of us reduced by that very creation to the kind of bureaucratic lives that Rand deplores...

...For all I know, he might be trying to maximize human inhalation of cigarette smoke, or to facilitate free trade in handguns...

...I’m far from sure what the answer to this problem is...

...But we are filling a void, so I keep plugging...

...I’ll even grant, arguendo, that “civil servants” fall predominantly into the latter category...

...Possibly a case might be made that small, independent entrepreneurs-as opposed to the executives of large corporationshave a better record for self-reliance and creativity (cf...

...James Fallows argues, in his article on Ayn Rand that the case for the minimal state fails because initial endowments of property, talent, beauty and intelligence are not equal...

...But what makes you-or Rand-think that the general run of executives in the private sector is any different...

...Private bureaucracy seems to caponize its servitors every bit as efficiently as public bureaucracy...

...many times we Action Line editors grab the “encyclopedia” questions, the ones that could be answered by a quick trip to the library, only to fill space...

...Letters Ayn Rand Since reading your appreciative reappraisal of Ayn Rand in the May Washington MonthZy [“The Gold in the Garbage: What the Left Can Learn From Ayn Rand,” by James Fallows] early last month, I’ve been turning it over a bit in my mind...

...Quoted in Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hop kins, p.57...

...That idea may even be orthodox analysis in large parts of the Republican Party-to say nothing of Ayn Rand and her disciples, and to say nothing of The Washington Monthly...

...58) that: “Time and again my heart went out to one of Ayn Rand’s titans when, after working an 18-hour day trying to fend off one catastrophe after another, he would run into a smug liberal fresh from reading Babbitt...

...JOHN HELLEGERS Washington, D.C...

...Quinn, Giant Business: Threat to Democracy, or almost any of the writings of Louis D. Brandeis...

...The poor aren’t eligible for most housing subsidies, which are clearly designed to help builders, bankers, and realtors...

...While we are “cutting red tape, standing up for people’s rights,” we are also required to fill space...

...It’s a curious gap in our thinking...

...Irene G. Keeney is the Action Line editor for The Knickerbocker News...