National Review's 100 Best NFict of the 20thCent
Lantog
best Non-fiction of the century list'
While I dont have an opinion on most of these I find it very disturbing to
see 'Darwins Black Box' on the list; the latest in creationist nonsense. I"m a
bit dissappointed to see Mere Christianity too. If thats the best the christian
apoligists can do the religion is in big trouble.
Here is the list, including the reviewers for your perusal.....
THE 100 BEST NON-FICTION
BOOKS OF THE CENTURY
Earlier this year, Random House announced that
it would release
a list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. The
publisher had enjoyed success (and controversy) with its
100
best novels; now it would do this. Here at
National Review, we
decided to get a jump on them by forming our own panel and
offering our own list. Under the leadership of our reporter
John J. Miller, we have done so. We have used a
methodology
that approaches the scientific. But-certainly beyond, say,
the
first 40 books-the fact of the books' presence on the list
is
far more important than their rankings. We offer
a comment from
a panelist after many of the books; but the panel overall, not
the individual quoted, is responsible for the ranking. So, here
is our list, for your enjoyment, mortification,
and
stimulation.
THE PANEL:
Richard Brookhiser, NR senior editor
David Brooks, senior editor of The Weekly
Standard
Christopher Caldwell, senior writer at The Weekly
Standard
Robert Conquest, historian
David Gelernter, writer and computer scientist
George Gilder, writer
Mary Ann Glendon, professor at Harvard Law School
Jeffrey Hart, NR senior editor
Mark Helprin, novelist
Arthur Herman, author of The Idea of Decline in
Western History
John Keegan, military historian
Michael Kelly, editor of National Journal
Florence King, author of Confessions of a Failed
Southern Lady
Michael Lind, journalist and novelist
John Lukacs, historian
Adam Meyerson, vice president at the Heritage
Foundation
Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of First
Things
John O'Sullivan, NR editor-at-large
Richard Pipes, historian
Abigail Thernstrom, senior fellow at the
Manhattan Institute
Stephan Thernstrom, historian
James Q. Wilson, author of The Moral Sense.
--------------------------------------------
---------------------
THE LIST:
1. The Second World War, Winston S. Churchill
Brookhiser: "The big story of the century, told
by its major
hero."
* Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm
* Vol. 2, Their Finest Hour
* Vol. 3, The Grand Alliance
* Vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate
* Vol. 5, Closing the Ring
* Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy
2. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr I.
Solzhenitsyn
Neuhaus: "Marked the absolute final turning point
beyond which
nobody could deny the evil of the Evil Empire."
3. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
Herman: "Orwell's masterpiece-far superior to
Animal Farm and
1984. No education in the meaning of the 20th
century is complete
without it."
4. The Road to Serfdom, F. A. von Hayek
Helprin: "Shatters the myth that the
totalitarianisms 'of the
Left' and 'of the Right' stem from differing
impulses."
5. Collected Essays, George Orwell
King: "Every conservative's favorite liberal and
every liberal's
favorite conservative. This book has no enemies."
6. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper
Herman: "The best work on political philosophy in
the 20th
century. Exposes totalitarianism's roots in
Plato, Hegel, and
Marx."
7. The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis
Brookhiser: "How modern philosophies drain
meaning and the sacred
from our lives."
8. Revolt of the Masses, José Ortega y Gasset
Gilder: "Prophesied the 20th century's debauchery
of democracy
and science, the barbarism of the specialist, and
the inevitable
fatuity of public opinion. Explained the genius
of capitalist
elites."
9. The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. von Hayek
O'Sullivan: "A great re-statement for this
century of classical
liberalism by its greatest modern exponent."
10. Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman
11. Modern Times, Paul Johnson
Herman: "Huge impact outside the academy, dreaded
and ignored
inside it."
12. Rationalism in Politics, Michael Oakeshott
Herman: "Oakeshott is the 20th century's Edmund
Burke."
13. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph
A. Schumpeter
Caldwell: "Locus classicus for the observation
that democratic
capitalism undermines itself through its very
success."
14. Economy and Society, Max Weber
Lind: "Weber made permanent contributions to the
understanding of
society with his discussions of comparative
religion,
bureaucracy, charisma, and the distinctions among
status, class,
and party."
15. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
Caldwell: "Through Nazism and Stalinism, looks at
almost every
pernicious trend in the last century's politics
with stunning
subtlety."
16. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
Kelly: "For its writing, not for its historical
accuracy."
17. Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson
Lind: "Darwin put humanity in its proper place in
the animal
kingdom. Wilson put human society there, too."
18. Centissimus Annus, Pope John Paul II
19. The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn
Neuhaus: "The authoritative refutation of
utopianism of the left,
right, and points undetermined."
20. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Helprin: "An innocent's account of the greatest
evil imaginable.
The most powerful book of the century. Others may
not agree. No
matter, I cast my lot with this child."
Caldwell: "If one didn't know her fate, one might
read it as the
reflections of any girl. That one does know her
fate makes this
as close to a holy book as the century produced."
21. The Great Terror, Robert Conquest
Herman: "Documented for the first time the real
record of
Stalinism in the Soviet Union. A genuine monument
of historical
research and reconstruction, a true epic of
evil."
22. Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge
Gilder: "The best autobiography, Christian
confession, and
historic meditation of the century."
23. Relativity, Albert Einstein
Lind: "The most important physicist since
Newton."
24. Witness, Whittaker Chambers
Caldwell: "Confession, history, potboiler-by a
man who writes
like the literary giant we would know him as, had
not Communism
got him first."
25. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
Thomas S. Kuhn
26. Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis
Neuhaus: "The most influential book of the most
influential
Christian apologist of the century."
27. The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet
28. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed.
Helprin: "The infinite riches of the world,
presented with
elegance, confidence, and economy."
29. Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell
30. The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton
Lukacs: "A great carillonade of Christian
verities."
31. Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton
O'Sullivan: "How to look at the Christian
tradition with fresh
eyes."
32. The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling
Hart: "The popular form of liberalism tends to
simplify and
caricature when it attempts moral aspiration-that
is, it tends to
'Stalinism.'"
33. The Double Helix, James D. Watson
Herman: "Deeply hated by feminists because Watson
dares to
suggest that the male-female distinction
originated in nature, in
the DNA code itself."
34. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard
Phillips Feynman
Gelernter: "Outside of art (or maybe not),
physics is mankind's
most beautiful achievement; these three volumes
are probably the
most beautiful ever written about physics."
35. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak
Catchers, Tom Wolfe
O'Sullivan: "Wolfe is our Juvenal."
36. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert
Camus
37. The Unheavenly City, Edward C. Banfield
Neuhaus: "The volume that began the debunking of
New Deal
socialism and its public-policy consequences."
38. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
39. The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
Jane Jacobs
40. The End of History and the Last Man, Francis
Fukuyama
41. Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion
Rombauer Becker, and
Ethan Becker
42. The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter
Herman: "The single best book on American history
in this
century, bar none."
43. The General Theory of Employment, Interest
and Money, John
Maynard Keynes
Hart: "Influential in suggesting that the
business cycle can be
modified by government investment and
manipulation of tax rates."
44. God & Man at Yale, William F. Buckley Jr.
Gilder: "Still correct and prophetic. It defines
the conservative
revolt against socialism and atheism on campus
and in the
culture, and reconciles the alleged conflict
between capitalist
and religious conservatives."
45. Selected Essays, T. S. Eliot
Hart: "Shaped the literary taste of the
mid-century."
46. Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver
47. The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs
48. The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom
49. Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell
50. An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal
* An American Dilemma, Vol. 1
* An American Dilemma, Vol. 2
51. Three Case Histories, Sigmund Freud
Gelernter: "Beyond question Freud is history's
most important
philosopher of the mind, and he ranks alongside
Eliot as the
century's greatest literary critic. Modern
intellectual life
(left, right, and in-between) would be
unthinkable without him."
52. The Struggle for Europe, Chester Wilmot
53. Main Currents in American Thought, Vernon
Louis Parrington
King: "An immensely readable history of ideas and
men. (Skip the
fragmentary third volume-he died before finishing
it.)"
54. The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johann Huzinga
Lukacs: "Probably the finest historian who lived
in this century.
"
55. Systematic Theology, Wolfhart Pannenberg
Neuhaus: "The best summary and reflection on
Christianity's
encounter with the Enlightenment project."
* Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
* Systematic Theology, Vol. 2
* Systematic Theology, Vol. 3
56. The Campaign of the Marne, Sewell Tyng
Keegan: "A forgotten American's masterly account
of the First
World War in the West."
57. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig
Wittgenstein
Hart: "A terse summation of the analytic method
of the analytic
school in philosophy, and a heroic leap beyond
it."
58. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,
Bernard Lonergan
Glendon: "The Thomas Aquinas of the 20th
century."
59. Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
Hart: "A seminal thinker, notwithstanding his
disgraceful error
of equating National Socialism with the
experience of 'Being.'"
60. Disraeli, Robert Blake
Keegan: "Political biography as it should be
written."
61. Democracy and Leadership, Irving Babbitt
King: "A conservative literary critic describes
what happens when
humanitarianism over takes humanism."
62. The Elements of Style, William Strunk & E. B.
White
A. Thernstrom: "If only every writer would
remember just one of
Strunk & White's wonderful injunctions: 'Omit
needless words.'
Omit needless words."
63. The Machiavellians, James Burnham
O'Sullivan: "Burnham is the greatest political
analyst of our
century and this is his best book."
64. Reflections of a Russian Statesman,
Konstantin P.
Pobedonostsev
King: "The 'culture war' as seen by the tutor to
the last two
czars. A Russian Pat Buchanan."
65. The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin
66. Roll, Jordan, Roll, Eugene D. Genovese
Neuhaus: "The best account of American slavery
and the moral and
cultural forces that undid it."
67. The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
Brookhiser: "An epitome of the aging aesthetic
movement that will
be forever known as modernism."
68. The Second World War, John Keegan
Hart: "A masterly history in a single volume."
69. The Making of Homeric Verse, Milman Parry
Lind: "Genuine discoveries in literary study are
rare. Parry's
discovery of the oral formulaic basis of the
Homeric epics, the
founding texts of Western literature, was one of
them."
70. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, Angus
Wilson
Keegan: "A life of a great author told through
the transmutation
of his experience into fictional form."
71. Scrutiny, F. R. Leavis
Hart: "Enormously important in education,
especially in England.
Leavis understood what one kind of 'living
English' is."
72. The Edge of the Sword, Charles de Gaulle
Brookhiser: "A lesser figure than Churchill, but
more
philosophical (and hence, more problematic)."
73. R. E. Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman
Conquest: "The finest work on the Civil War."
74. Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises
75. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
Neuhaus: "A classic conversion story of a modern
urban
sophisticate."
76. Balzac, Stefan Zweig
King: "On the joys of working one's self to
death. The chapter
'Black Coffee' is a masterpiece of imaginative
reconstruction."
77. The Good Society, Walter Lippmann
Gilder: "Written during the Great Depression. A
corruscating
defense of the morality of capitalism."
78. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Lind: "For all the excesses of the environmental
movement, the
realization that human technology can permanently
damage the
earth's environment marked a great advance in
civilization.
Carson's book, more than any other, publicized
this message."
79. The Christian Tradition, Jaroslav Pelikan
Neuhaus: "The century's most comprehensive
account of Christian
teaching from the second century on."
80. Strange Defeat, Marc Bloch
Herman: "A great historian's personal account of
the fall of
France in 1940."
81. Looking Back, Norman Douglas
Conquest: "Fascinating memoirs of a remarkable
writer."
82. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams
83. Poetry and the Age, Randall Jarrell
Caldwell: "The book for showing how 20th- century
poets think,
what their poetry does, and why it matters."
84. Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont
Brookhiser: "What has become of eros over the
last seven
centuries."
85. The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk
86. Wealth and Poverty, George Gilder
87. Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson
88. Henry James, Leon Edel
King: "All the James you want without having to
read him."
89. Essays of E. B. White, E. B. White
Gelernter: "White is the apotheosis of the
American liberal now
spurned and detested by the Left (and the
cultural mainstream).
His mesmerized devotion to the objects of his
affection-his
family, the female sex, his farm, the English
language,
Manhattan, the sea, America, Maine, and freedom,
in descending
order-is movingly absolute."
90. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
91. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
92. Darwin's Black Box, Michael J. Behe
Gilder: "Overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th
century in the
same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at
the beginning."
93. The Civil War, Shelby Foote
94. The Way the World Works, Jude Wanniski
Gilder: "The best book on economics. Shows
fatuity of
still-dominant demand-side model, with its silly
preoccupation
with accounting trivia, like the federal budget
and trade balance
and savings rates, in an economy with $40
trillion or so in
assets that rise and fall weekly by trillions."
95. To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson
Herman: "The best single book on Karl Marx and
Marx's place in
modern history."
96. Civilisation, Kenneth Clark
97. The Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes
98. The Idea of History, R. G. Collingwood
99. The Last Lion, William Manchester
* Last Lion: William Spencer Churchill: Vol. 1
Visions of
Glory, 1874-1932
* Last Lion: William Spencer Churchill: Vol. 2
Alone,
1932-1940
100. The Starr Report, Kenneth W. Starr
Hart: "A study in human depravity."
------------------------------
--------
Jorn Barger
Lantog <lan...@aol.com> wrote:
THE PANEL:
-------------------------------------------- ---------------------
THE LIST:
* Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm 2, Their Finest Hour 3, The Grand
* Vol. Alliance 4, The Hinge of Fate 5, Closing the Ring 6, Triumph and
* Vol. Tragedy
2. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Neuhaus: "Marked
the absolute final turning point beyond which nobody could deny the evil
of the Evil Empire."
3. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell Herman: "Orwell's masterpiece-far
superior to Animal Farm and 1984. No education in the meaning of the
20th century is complete without it."
4. The Road to Serfdom, F. A. von Hayek Helprin: "Shatters the myth
that the totalitarianisms 'of the Left' and 'of the Right' stem from
differing impulses."
5. Collected Essays, George Orwell King: "Every conservative's favorite
liberal and every liberal's favorite conservative. This book has no
enemies."
6. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper Herman: "The best work
on political philosophy in the 20th century. Exposes totalitarianism's
roots in Plato, Hegel, and Marx."
7. The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis Brookhiser: "How modern
philosophies drain meaning and the sacred from our lives."
8. Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega y Gasset Gilder: "Prophesied the
* An American Dilemma, Vol. 1 2
51. Three Case Histories, Sigmund Freud Gelernter: "Beyond question
Freud is history's most important philosopher of the mind, and he ranks
alongside Eliot as the century's greatest literary critic. Modern
intellectual life (left, right, and in-between) would be unthinkable
without him."
52. The Struggle for Europe, Chester Wilmot
53. Main Currents in American Thought, Vernon Louis Parrington King:
"An immensely readable history of ideas and men. (Skip the fragmentary
third volume-he died before finishing it.)"
54. The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johann Huzinga Lukacs: "Probably the
finest historian who lived in this century. "
55. Systematic Theology, Wolfhart Pannenberg Neuhaus: "The best summary
and reflection on Christianity's encounter with the Enlightenment
project."
* Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 2 3
96. Civilisation, Kenneth Clark
--
"Somehow he finds time to browse and read all the sites I never get
around to, and summarizes their latest high points. ...I'm amazed at
the way he hits on stuff I'm interested in about 90% of the time."
I edit the Net: <URL:http://www.robotwisdom.com/> --Candi Strecker
Crawford Kilian
the list is the endearing way in which the judges award one another a place
in the top 100.
Crawford Kilian
Capilano College
North Vancouver BC
cki...@hubcap.mlnet.com
Feuillade
of idiotic titles on it. Titles that remind me of the Modern Library's Readers
List -- the one that had Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard writing *seven* of the top
ten novels of this century.
These are, in my opinion, the books on the National Review list that just don't
belong there:
> 11. Modern Times, Paul Johnson
Anyone who has read any of Johnson's books knows that he is a bit of a joke. I
sent him last year a letter listing all the mistakes and errors of fact in his
latest book -- it was nine single-spaced pages.
> 18. Centissimus Annus, Pope John Paul II
Papal brownosing.
> 41. Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan
>Becker
Please...
> 44. God & Man at Yale, William F. Buckley Jr.
Editorial brownosing.
> 62. The Elements of Style, William Strunk & E. B. White
You've got to be kidding...
> 67. The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
It makes sense that they'd appreciate Pound, with his fascist sympathies.
> 81. Looking Back, Norman Douglas Conquest: "Fascinating memoirs of a
>remarkable writer."
Do the moralists and Bill Bennett value-clones at NR know (or care) that
Douglas was not just a "remarkable writer" also a pedophile?
> 100. The Starr Report, Kenneth W. Starr
Give me a break -- this book is a footnote already.
Besides this and the fact that they put *two* books by Tom Wolfe on their list
while ignoring The Autobiography of Henry Adams tells you more about this list
than I, for one, want to know.
Tom Moran
http://members.aol.com/Feuillade/TomMoran.index.html
My 100 Best Novels List:
http://members.aol.com/Feuillade/TomMoran25.index.html
The Edward Gibbon Page:
http://members.aol.com/Feuillade/TomMoran28.index.html
Robert Teeter
: Besides this and the fact that they put *two* books by Tom Wolfe on their list
: while ignoring The Autobiography of Henry Adams tells you more about this list
: than I, for one, want to know.
Even when they like a good author, it's for the wrong reasons.
Orwell was in no sense a conservative.
--
Bob Teeter (rte...@netcom.com) | http://www.wco.com/~rteeter/
"I can't have information I know would be of
interest to someone and not share it."
-- Sanford Berman, activist librarian
Puss in Boots
> > 67. The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
> It makes sense that they'd appreciate Pound, with his fascist sympathies.
Maybe not. Pound's fascism is the expression of a
revolutionary impulse directed against the stultifying qualities
of bourgeois society -- not the sort of thing the _National
Review_ crew usually likes. His Confucianism would be much more
to their taste: it's the conservative side of P's thinking.
Anyway, _ABC of Reading_ is a great book, no matter _who_ agrees.
-- Moggin
RChamp7927
>Date: 4/27/99 9:32 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Moreover, you shouldn't see the Right as some kind of monolith. NR, in a famous
obit, for instance, laid mightly into Ayn Rand, who herself hated
conservatives. NR also alienated many Southern conservatives for its cavalier
treatment of M. E. Bradford.
If you actually read the books of conservatives instead of confusing them with
people like Newt and Rush, you find that they have little to do with fascism
and perhaps even less to do with the bourgeoisie. (Over the years, the
bourgeoisie has fallen afoul of both the left and the right, at least in the
intellectual reaches of these movements.)
Bob Champ
Ted Samsel
: >From: mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots)
: >Date: 4/27/99 9:32 PM Eastern Daylight Time
: >
: >Feuillade:
: >
: >
: >> > 67. The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
: >
: >> It makes sense that they'd appreciate Pound, with his fascist sympathies.
: >
: > Maybe not. Pound's fascism is the expression of a
: >revolutionary impulse directed against the stultifying qualities
: >of bourgeois society -- not the sort of thing the _National
: >Review_ crew usually likes. His Confucianism would be much more
: >to their taste: it's the conservative side of P's thinking.
: >Anyway, _ABC of Reading_ is a great book, no matter _who_ agrees.
: >
: >-- Moggin
: >
: Moreover, you shouldn't see the Right as some kind of monolith. NR, in a famous
: obit, for instance, laid mightly into Ayn Rand, who herself hated
: conservatives.
I hear that some of the current upshot of Randiness is predicated on
the soap opera that was her life. And the Branden's, too. I also hear
that Helen Mirren is playing her in some "docu-drammer".
Will Gwyneth Paltrow be playing Madelyn Murray-O'Hare? Since she got
her start in Bawlmer, perhaps John Waters can direct. As an epizootic
of HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREETS.
--
Ted Samsel....tejas@infi.net (or tbsa...@richmond.infi.net)
"do the boogie woogie in the South American way"
Rhumba Boogie- Hank Snow (1955)
Michael S. Morris
Puss in Boots wrote:
Maybe not. Pound's fascism is the expression of a
revolutionary impulse directed against the stultifying
qualities of bourgeois society -- not the sort of
thing the _National Review_ crew usually likes.
Yeah, it is curious that Pound's fascism seems to
center on the idea of a negative income tax (or
social dividend, or guaranteed annual income)---
an idea that those supposedly on the left in our time
seem to embrace so uncritically.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Gore Bob
Including, as I'm sure you recall, leftist running dog Richard Nixon.
Bob Gore
Obbook: Six Crises (no, that wasn't one of them)
Michael S. Morris
Moggin wrote:
Maybe not. Pound's fascism is the expression
of a revolutionary impulse directed against the
stultifying qualities of bourgeois society -- not
the sort of thing the _National Review_ crew usually
likes.
I said:
Yeah, it is curious that Pound's fascism seems to
center on the idea of a negative income tax (or
social dividend, or guaranteed annual income)---
an idea that those supposedly on the left in our time
seem to embrace so uncritically.
Bob Gore says:
Including, as I'm sure you recall,
leftist running dog Richard Nixon.
No, I'm afraid I don't recall that at all.
What I recall instead is that George McGovern
in the '72 campaign proposed something like a
guaranteed annual income, and that Republicans
at the time (at least ones like my parents and
the parents of pretty nigh every other school
child in my Indianapolis suburban district) would
swear up and down that if McGovern with harebrained
socialism got elected, they'd leave the country.
This Social Credit idea came up over in the living
wage thread where moggin proposed a guaranteed annual
salary regardless of whether one works or no.
The question is, of course, whether he's thought
about implementing it. For instance, would
everyone get it, or just certain people? Would, say,
$10,000 per head be enough (in today's dollars)?
That seems maybe marginal for a single person living
in a $500 a month apartment plus groceries and
a car, er, or public transport. So, for instance,
since my household is now comprised of 6 persons,
only 2 of whom work, we would be guaranteed $60,000
a year in income? In today's dollars, that's
not far from what we see after we pay taxes now. But of
course, silly me, if everyone got that much---$10k
a head---, there'd be lots who, oh, say, for that
much wouldn't want to work, say, waiting tables or
cooking at all those fancy restaurants we eat out at all
the time. So, of course, silly me, $10,000 *wouldn't*
quite go as far then as it now does. Unless maybe we could
freeze wages and prices by law and dictate what jobs
people shall have to keep on doing? Etc., etc. No doubt
moggin has thought this all through, and cranked through all
of the partial derivatives with a complete economic model,
but I kind of admire at least the quality of Pound's honesty
better---he saw that *control* would be necessary and
openly embraced Mussolini because of it.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
tejas
As I recall, Nixon picked up on it whilst grasping at straws
towards the end of his tenure.
"We'll hang the jerk
who invented work
in the Big Rock Candy Mountain"
--
TBSa...@richmond.infi.net (also te...@infi.net)
'Do the boogie woogie in the South American way'
Hank Snow THE RHUMBA BOOGIE
Jim Collier
Leaving aside the purely hypothetical that McGovern had any chance
of winning in 1972, does he look so radical in 1999? I don't
even remember that he favored a guaranteed income. His main issue was
the Vietnam war. He favored immediate withdrawal, and so did a large
minority by then, maybe 40%. Nearly 100% agreed that the Vietnam
war had been a disaster. Even Paul Harvey had started saying in 1969,
three years earlier, that "the U.S. had lost a war for the first time."
Jim Collier
Richard Harter
>As I recall, Nixon picked up on it whilst grasping at straws
>towards the end of his tenure.
The notion of a negative income tax (instead of welfare) is apparently
due to Milton Friedman. Nixon proposed it in 1969. It wasn't adopted;
the NIT violates the principle that monies should only go to the
deserving poor, a principle that combines both moral righteousness and
bureaucratic control, principles dear to both conservatives and
liberals.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net, The Concord Research Institute
URL = http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, phone = 1-978-369-3911
What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers?
Mechanical Engineers build weapons, Civil Engineers build targets.
Michael S. Morris
Jim Collier wrote:
Leaving aside the purely hypothetical
that McGovern had any chance of winning
in 1972, does he look so radical in 1999?
Not at all. I had the chance to read some of
his political commentary in the years since,
and I guess I consider him a thoughtful man.
Nevertheless, I remember the guaranteed annual
income was *the* thing that my parents picked
up on at the time as a reason not to be afraid
of him (my father wouldn't have voted for Democrat
if Hell had depended on it---he hated FDR, for
example from his experience of the crookedness
of Texas politics back in the 30's, but my
mother I think voted for Kennedy over Nixon---
though she thought that had been a mistake in
retrospect). You know, the fear was that McGovern
would take us the way of Sweden, Canada, and other
such benighted places.
Jim:
I don't even remember that he favored a
guaranteed income. His main issue was
the Vietnam war. He favored immediate
withdrawal, and so did a large minority
by then, maybe 40%. Nearly 100% agreed that
the Vietnam war had been a disaster. Even
Paul Harvey had started saying in 1969,
three years earlier, that "the U.S. had lost
a war for the first time."
Yeah, but Nixon had campaigned on getting us
out of Viet Nam back in 1968. See, this is something
the currently-touted revisionism doesn't like to
remember but lots of conservatives were *against*
the war in the old-fashioned isolationist sense.
And the thing is, in a sense, Nixon had delivered
on this promise by the 1972 election---the last
U.S. ground troops were out before that ("advisors",
sailors, and pilots were still engaged of course).
Getting us out of Viet Nam just wasn't really
an issue vis-a-vis the McGovern v. Nixon election.
I suspect most people thought Nixon's methods had
a solid chance of extricating us. More of an issue,
though, was military spending and the Cold
War. Lots of conservatives wanted us to be out of Viet
Nam, but nevertheless wanted military spending kept
high against Soviet Russia, and they did fear that
McGovern would cut military spending and up social
programs.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Chris Loar
> What I recall instead is that George McGovern
> in the '72 campaign proposed something like a
> guaranteed annual income, and that Republicans
> at the time (at least ones like my parents and
> the parents of pretty nigh every other school
> child in my Indianapolis suburban district) would
> swear up and down that if McGovern with harebrained
> socialism got elected, they'd leave the country.
When one's memory fails, there's always the option of looking it
up. President Nixon's support for a guaranteed income program
(to replace President Johnson's Great Society programs) is an
easily-verified historical fact. See, for instance, this
snippet from a NYT abstract:
Information Bank Abstracts
NEW YORK TIMES
January 5, 1971, Tuesday
LENGTH: 346 words
ABSTRACT:
Transcript of Pres Nixon's TV talk with network correspondents
...
... defends ex-aide Daniel Moynihan on his memo proposing benign
neglect on racial problem; lauds Moynihan's service on his staff
and role as author of family assistance plan; holds his legacy
will be welfare reform enactment and a guaranteed minimum
income for every American family with children ...
(Nixon was also a notable advocate of affirmative action, and
was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Legal
Services Corporation.)
ObBook: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, _The politics of a guaranteed
income; the Nixon administration and the Family assistance
plan_, 1973.
--
Chris Loar
Claremont Graduate University
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
--Walter Benjamin
Michael S. Morris
Chris Loar writes:
When one's memory fails, there's always the
option of looking it up.
Nevertheless (and I'm well aware of Nixon's duplicity
on many fronts---as well as his essential love for
governmental power) I believe my memory to be accurate
about this. This is because I remember being surprised
by my parents' animus against McGovern at the time. Not
that they were going to vote for the other guy, but that
McGovern's election would be so terrible a thing as to
make leaving the country better than staying. I therefore
asked them: Why? And the biggest reason was *McGovern's*
advocacy of a guaranteed minimum income. I.e., by
the election, Nixon had packaged himself differently.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Jim Collier
>
> Wednesday, the 28th of April, 1999
>
> Leaving aside the purely hypothetical
> that McGovern had any chance of winning
> in 1972, does he look so radical in 1999?
>
> Not at all. I had the chance to read some of
> his political commentary in the years since,
> and I guess I consider him a thoughtful man.
> Nevertheless, I remember the guaranteed annual
> income was *the* thing that my parents picked
> up on at the time as a reason not to be afraid
> of him (my father wouldn't have voted for Democrat
> if Hell had depended on it---he hated FDR, for
> example from his experience of the crookedness
> of Texas politics back in the 30's, but my
> mother I think voted for Kennedy over Nixon---
> though she thought that had been a mistake in
> retrospect). You know, the fear was that McGovern
> would take us the way of Sweden, Canada, and other
> such benighted places.
Well, good for your parents, but I assure you that the anti-war
movement was where McGovern's entire campaign lay. I was there as a
27-year-old. You can still see references to his campaign on re-runs
of "All in the Family" which was prime-time in 1972.
> Jim:
> I don't even remember that he favored a
> guaranteed income. His main issue was
> the Vietnam war. He favored immediate
> withdrawal, and so did a large minority
> by then, maybe 40%. Nearly 100% agreed that
> the Vietnam war had been a disaster. Even
> Paul Harvey had started saying in 1969,
> three years earlier, that "the U.S. had lost
> a war for the first time."
>
> Yeah, but Nixon had campaigned on getting us
> out of Viet Nam back in 1968.
And four years later in 1972, he hadn't.
> See, this is something
> the currently-touted revisionism doesn't like to
> remember but lots of conservatives were *against*
> the war in the old-fashioned isolationist sense.
> And the thing is, in a sense, Nixon had delivered
> on this promise by the 1972 election---the last
> U.S. ground troops were out before that ("advisors",
> sailors, and pilots were still engaged of course).
Huh?! No. Significantly, ground fighting with American
troops was still underway at the time of the election in
November, '72 although it was winding down. Congress voted several
months later to cut off funding "as soon as Vietnamization is
completed," but there was still a draft even at the time of the
election. That was significant, too. McGovern was said to be
sabotaging "our American boys overseas". And further, bombing of
Cambodia continued for another year. So people voted for
Nixon as a show of support for young men in uniform, enough to
give him a lopsided vote in the Electoral College.
Ironically, Nixon also took flak from the Right. John
Ashbrook's campaign slogan was "No Tricks" (a not very subtle dig
at poor Dicky) written above a No Left Turn sign.
> Getting us out of Viet Nam just wasn't really
> an issue vis-a-vis the McGovern v. Nixon election.
Only if you didn't believe McGovern meant it when he called for
immediate withdrawal.
> I suspect most people thought Nixon's methods had
> a solid chance of extricating us.
> More of an issue,
> though, was military spending and the Cold
> War. Lots of conservatives wanted us to be out of Viet
> Nam, but nevertheless wanted military spending kept
> high against Soviet Russia, and they did fear that
> McGovern would cut military spending and up social
> programs.
Yep, he did promise to reduce military spending. Fortunately
the Soviets saved our bacon from the morass of post-war
depression. Let the gods smile fondly on Leonid Brezhnev,
whereever he is.
(An obvious name for Brezhnev is Member of the Gang of
Three, a pun on the triumvirate that theoretically ran the
USSR after Khrushchev got the boot, and the fact
that Brezhnev was #1 in a rapid sucession of three
Soviet heads who died in office. A friend of mine who
worked at State at the time said that the protocol office
didn't want to waste money on Gorbachev until they knew
for sure he would survive the winter flu season.)
Jim
Robert Chao
strings attached.
"Michael S. Morris" wrote:
> Wednesday, the 28th of April, 1999
>
Dene Bebbington
>tejas <tbsa...@richmond.infi.net> wrote:
>
>>Michael S. Morris wrote:
>>>
>>> Wednesday, the 28th of April, 1999
>>>
>>> Maybe not. Pound's fascism is the expression
>>> of a revolutionary impulse directed against the
>>> stultifying qualities of bourgeois society -- not
>>> the sort of thing the _National Review_ crew usually
>>> likes.
>>>
>>> I said:
>>> Yeah, it is curious that Pound's fascism seems to
>>> center on the idea of a negative income tax (or
>>> social dividend, or guaranteed annual income)---
>>> an idea that those supposedly on the left in our time
>>> seem to embrace so uncritically.
>>>
>>> Bob Gore says:
>>> Including, as I'm sure you recall,
>>> leftist running dog Richard Nixon.
>>>
>>> No, I'm afraid I don't recall that at all.
>>> in the '72 campaign proposed something like a
>>> guaranteed annual income, and that Republicans
>>> at the time (at least ones like my parents and
>>> the parents of pretty nigh every other school
>>> child in my Indianapolis suburban district) would
>>> swear up and down that if McGovern with harebrained
>>> socialism got elected, they'd leave the country.
>>
>>towards the end of his tenure.
>
>The notion of a negative income tax (instead of welfare) is apparently
>due to Milton Friedman.
Surely NIT is welfare if the effect is that some people get income from
the government.
[rest snipped]
--
Dene Bebbington http://www.bebbo.demon.co.uk
"Beside the braes of dawn. One clear new morning. Down where the lilies
stood in bloom. I knew that I was just a stranger in this world. A wind
just passing through." - Calum & Rory Macdonald (Runrig)
Michael S. Morris
Jim Collier wrote:
Huh?! No. Significantly, ground fighting with American
troops was still underway at the time of the election in
November, '72 although it was winding down.
Umm, entries in _The Twentieth Century: An Almanac_, ed. by
Robert H. Ferrell (World Almanac Publications, 1985):
11 August 1972
Vietnam War. The US ends its Vietnam ground combat role
in withdrawal of its last unit, the 92-man 3rd Battalion
of the 21st Infantry.
29 March 1973
Vietnam War. The last US troops leave South Vietnam, ending
nearly two years of American military presence. Some 8500
US civilians remain, most of them technicians helping South
Vietnamese armed forces.
Now, I fully believe the disengagement in August was an election
ploy, but I recall looking this stuff up when confronted with
someone who was maintaining we were still engaged in combat
on the ground in 1975 when Saigon fell.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Terrymelin
literature list I've seen out in the past year. Some obvious choices, some
surprises, some duds. So what's the big idea?
It's better than that 100 Best Novels of the 20th century list that came out
last year which had nothing by John Updike or Philip Roth on it.
Terry Ellsworth
Chris Loar
> This is because I remember being surprised
> by my parents' animus against McGovern at the time. Not
> that they were going to vote for the other guy, but that
> McGovern's election would be so terrible a thing as to
> make leaving the country better than staying. I therefore
> asked them: Why? And the biggest reason was *McGovern's*
> advocacy of a guaranteed minimum income. I.e., by
> the election, Nixon had packaged himself differently.
I have no doubt that this is true. However, my impression is
that the biggest difference between the two was in the size
of the income to be guaranteed. The Nixon Administration's
program never got off the ground in part because many
liberals and welfare advocates felt it was too stingy (while
more libertarian conservatives objected to the whole shebang
on principle). I have no knowledge of the specifics of what
McGovern was advocating, but I've no doubt that he was ready
to write far larger checks. Whether he would have been
generous enough to satisfy Ezra Pound I have no idea.
Chris Loar
> Michael S. Morris wrote,
>
> > Wednesday, the 28th of April, 1999
>
> > Yeah, it is curious that Pound's fascism seems to
> > center on the idea of a negative income tax (or
> > social dividend, or guaranteed annual income)---
> > an idea that those supposedly on the left in our time
> > seem to embrace so uncritically.
>
>
> Including, as I'm sure you recall, leftist running dog Richard Nixon.
Milton Friedman too, no?
midtown neon
disease?] of Homicide: Life on the Streets."
A most curious posting.
I did watch an >episode< of Homicide in which John Waters acted. It
was at the start of that show and JW's character was being arrested in
the great Baltmore train station ... for something. JW and the two
arresting detectives exchanged pleasantries in:re E.A.Poe. I was very
impressed to hear Poe's name so dropped on popular cable TV.
Did JW direct that program?
That same Baltimore train station had been quite famed in yesteryears as
the #1 place in America to whose baggage room had been sent, to PLEASE
HOLD, for one ficticious name or other, trunks with bodies in them.
Indeed, a singularity.
neon, m.
Michael S. Morris
Jim Collier wrote:
Huh?! No. Significantly, ground fighting with American
troops was still underway at the time of the election in
November, '72 although it was winding down.
I said
Umm, entries in _The Twentieth Century: An Almanac_, ed. by
Robert H. Ferrell (World Almanac Publications, 1985):
11 August 1972
Vietnam War. The US ends its Vietnam ground combat role
in withdrawal of its last unit, the 92-man 3rd Battalion
of the 21st Infantry.
29 March 1973
Vietnam War. The last US troops leave South Vietnam, ending
nearly two years of American military presence. Some 8500
US civilians remain, most of them technicians helping South
Vietnamese armed forces.
Jim:
Then I shall have to re-check the first factoid.
I think you have a typo in the second one.
Yep, "two" should have been "ten". If you find out something
to contradict the first, let me know. Karnow's book
is a project I've been intending to get around to one
of these years.
[Digression/Aside: This last year of Zan's
homeschool, and certainly through next year,
we're re-doing American history---the first pass
a couple years back was Joy Hakim's 10-vol
"A History of US"---with Samuel Eliot Morison's
3-vol "Oxford History of the American People".
But, we have paused at various points to do
James L. Stokesbury's _Short History of the
American Revolution_, Catherine Drinker Bowen's
_Miracle At Philadelphia_, the videos of the
Ken Burns Lewis and Clark, and now Thomas and
Carol Christensen's _The U.S.-Mexican War_ followed
by the PBS series. OK, I figure on pausing to read
1 slave narrative---haven't figured which one---
then probably Stokebury's _Short History_'s
for the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and the Korean
War. Morison ends with Kennedy's assassination.
So, what I need is suggestions for one vol
maybe on U.S. history 1960-1999 and then
what is the best one-volume Vietnam War history
going.]
I said:
Now, I fully believe the disengagement in
August was an election ploy, but I recall
looking this stuff up when confronted with
someone who was maintaining we were still
engaged in combat on the ground in 1975 when
Saigon fell.
Jim:
Oh, I agree with that.
Right, I didn't mean to imply that you didn't, just that
earlier when this came up (it may have been in response
to "Miss Saigon" where I was wondering about who these
American marines in 1975 would have been---and the answer is
embassy guards) I had looked these dates up and was
actually taken by surprise by the first one. If you had
asked me before I would have said we were engaged all the way
up until the signing of the Paris Peace in January of 1973.
Jim:
I said American ground troops were out a year
after the '72 election while bombing continued
and an ancillary staff remained. The staffers
and a few desperate Vietnamese were the ones
who left from the roof of the American embassy
in '75, which I watched on TV in Paris, standing
in front of a department store window.
I was 12 at the time in '72, and I was aware of
very little of it indeed. But, I guess my point
was that it was not like the people who voted for Nixon
then were *in favour* of the war. I think it was more
that they considered McGovern an idealistic flake.
Considering the real flakes we have seen (in and
out of office) since, I think McGovern comes across
much better in retrospect.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael Kagalenko
: I would say National Review's list is no worse or better than any other
John Updike the top 100 author of the century ? That pale cunt ? Surely
you are joking.
Jim Collier
>
> Wednesday, the 28th of April, 1999
>
> Jim Collier wrote:
> Huh?! No. Significantly, ground fighting with American
> troops was still underway at the time of the election in
> November, '72 although it was winding down.
>
> Robert H. Ferrell (World Almanac Publications, 1985):
>
> 11 August 1972
> Vietnam War. The US ends its Vietnam ground combat role
> in withdrawal of its last unit, the 92-man 3rd Battalion
> of the 21st Infantry.
>
> 29 March 1973
> Vietnam War. The last US troops leave South Vietnam, ending
> nearly two years of American military presence. Some 8500
> US civilians remain, most of them technicians helping South
> Vietnamese armed forces.
>
Then I shall have to re-check the first factoid. I think you have a
typo in the second one.
> Now, I fully believe the disengagement in August was an election
> ploy, but I recall looking this stuff up when confronted with
> someone who was maintaining we were still engaged in combat
> on the ground in 1975 when Saigon fell.
Oh, I agree with that. I said American ground troops were out a year
after the '72 election while bombing continued and an ancillary staff
remained. The staffers and a few desperate Vietnamese were the ones
who left from the roof of the American embassy in '75, which I watched
on TV in Paris, standing in front of a department store window.
Jim
Jim Collier
>
> Wednesday, the 28th of April, 1999
>
> Jim Collier wrote:
> Huh?! No. Significantly, ground fighting with American
> troops was still underway at the time of the election in
> November, '72 although it was winding down.
>
> Umm, entries in _The Twentieth Century: An Almanac_, ed. by
> Robert H. Ferrell (World Almanac Publications, 1985):
>
> 11 August 1972
> Vietnam War. The US ends its Vietnam ground combat role
> in withdrawal of its last unit, the 92-man 3rd Battalion
> of the 21st Infantry.
>
> 29 March 1973
> Vietnam War. The last US troops leave South Vietnam, ending
> nearly two years of American military presence. Some 8500
> US civilians remain, most of them technicians helping South
> Vietnamese armed forces.
>
> Then I shall have to re-check the first factoid.
> I think you have a typo in the second one.
>
> August was an election ploy, but I recall
> looking this stuff up when confronted with
> someone who was maintaining we were still
> engaged in combat on the ground in 1975 when
> Saigon fell.
>
> Oh, I agree with that.
>
> earlier when this came up (it may have been in response
> to "Miss Saigon" where I was wondering about who these
> American marines in 1975 would have been---and the answer is
> embassy guards) I had looked these dates up and was
> actually taken by surprise by the first one. If you had
> asked me before I would have said we were engaged all the way
> up until the signing of the Paris Peace in January of 1973.
>
> Jim:
> after the '72 election while bombing continued
> and an ancillary staff remained. The staffers
> and a few desperate Vietnamese were the ones
> who left from the roof of the American embassy
> in '75, which I watched on TV in Paris, standing
> in front of a department store window.
>
> very little of it indeed. But, I guess my point
> was that it was not like the people who voted for Nixon
> then were *in favour* of the war. I think it was more
> that they considered McGovern an idealistic flake.
> Considering the real flakes we have seen (in and
> out of office) since, I think McGovern comes across
> much better in retrospect.
Well you can think that, but the fact is that McGovern's supporters
were reviled as hippies, dopers, hirsute, young, and most of all
anti-war draft dodgers. (I was three of the previous including the
last, and actually, I didn't support McGovern until in retrospect a few
months after the election.) The campaign was in full tilt by
spring after Edmund Muskie tripped over a pebble, and fighting in
Vietnam and body counts were still part of the nightly news.
Nobody talked about McGovern's economic policies with the possible
exception of your parents. This was during the period that the
Republican president and his reborn Republican secretary of commerce had
slapped an unprecented freeze on all prices by ukase. Rent, and the
cost of a haircut or a cup of coffee were all solidified at their July,
'71 levels. The Feds were going after 12-year-olds who tried to milk
more money out of their lawn-mowing customers. Some big TV retailer in
Los Angeles (I think it was Ken Crane) had a loss-leader weekend special
on his mainstay product line from Magnavox, on the threshold date of the
freeze, and the former governor of Texas told him he had to continue
selling that product at below cost. It was crazy. Statist economics
were not a major part of the election. They were in the next one when
everybody remembered gas rationing and the Dow going below 600 in 1974.
Jim
Puss in Boots
>> Pound's fascism is the expression of a
>> revolutionary impulse directed against the stultifying qualities
>> of bourgeois society -- not the sort of thing the _National
>> Review_ crew usually likes.
"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net>:
> Yeah, it is curious that Pound's fascism seems to
> center on the idea of a negative income tax (or
> social dividend, or guaranteed annual income)---
> an idea that those supposedly on the left in our time
> seem to embrace so uncritically.
Thank you and congratulations on the succinct post. But it
it may come out the same -- I'm going to need some space to
sort out the half-truths and insinuations you've so economically
supplied.
Where to begin? I assume you're talking about Pound's
fascination with C.H. Douglas and his "Social Credit" idea. But
Social Credit isn't a fascist program or the centerpiece of
Pound's fascism, although Paund wrote to Il Duce dozens of times,
trying to sell him on Douglas. He also promoted Gessel's
shrinking money. (The _Schwundgeld_ -- scrip that automatically
lowred in value over time, encouraging people to keep it
circulating.)
I don't know that Mussolini ever wrote back. The only
response I've heard about came from an official who commented on
Pound's incomprehensible Italian, adding, "One thing that is
clear is that the author is mentally unbalanced." (Pound didn't
see that -- it was a note for the bureaucrat's boss.)
Pound's interest in Social Credit was based on his personal
experience as a poet: he couldn't make a decent living from
his work. (Ditto for Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, and Gaudier-Brzeska.)
He also noticed that he wrote best writing for the Muses and
worst when he was producing articles to make money. The problem
needed a fix. Douglas had it.
Douglas begins with the observation that in the modern West,
poverty isn't caused by a shortage of resources -- there's
plenty to go around. But most people receive their portion as a
paycheck in return for work done. That makes employment a
system of government -- and not a democratic one. It also means
that anyone without a job is in trouble -- something
increasingly common as technology allows more work to be done by
less people.
No need for that to be a problem, tho -- if technology lets
more people do less work, so much the better! That's all to
the good. The trouble comes entirely from linking livelihood to
labor: breaking that chain is central to the Social Credit
program. Labor-saving devices should _save people from laboring_.
An obvious idea -- but Douglas has been one of the few to
suggest it.
You should get on the bandwagon, Mike -- it's what you need
to make your freedom-of-association arguments meaningful. As
things stand, they fail for a lack of freedom. But add a social
dividend (Douglas), a negative income tax (Nixon), or a
guaranteed minimum income (Your Name Here), and suddenly they're
valid in practice -- not just in principle.
-- Moggin
Puss in Boots
>>>> Pound's fascism is the expression of a
>>>> revolutionary impulse directed against the stultifying qualities
>>>> of bourgeois society -- not the sort of thing the _National
>>>> Review_ crew usually likes.
"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net>:
>>> Yeah, it is curious that Pound's fascism seems to
>>> center on the idea of a negative income tax (or
>>> social dividend, or guaranteed annual income)---
>>> an idea that those supposedly on the left in our time
>>> seem to embrace so uncritically.
Bob Gore:
>> Including, as I'm sure you recall, leftist running dog Richard Nixon.
Mike:
> No, I'm afraid I don't recall that at all.
That's o.k. -- Chris already found a reference to it in the
_New York Times_ Sure enough, it was Nixon-administration
thinking. Without Watergate, Nixon might have pushed it through.
Or then he might have dropped the idea. Hard to guess.
It certainly hasn't been embraced by the left -- critically
or uncritically. The left doesn't even want to shake hands
with it -- there are exceptions, but generally speaking the idea
strays too far from convention to attract support.
> What I recall instead is that George McGovern
> in the '72 campaign proposed something like a
> guaranteed annual income, and that Republicans
> at the time (at least ones like my parents and
> the parents of pretty nigh every other school
> child in my Indianapolis suburban district) would
> swear up and down that if McGovern with harebrained
> socialism got elected, they'd leave the country.
> This Social Credit idea came up over in the living
> wage thread where moggin proposed a guaranteed annual
> salary regardless of whether one works or no.
> The question is, of course, whether he's thought
> about implementing it.
If the question is about putting it into practice, then you
must agree on the principle. But maybe you don't -- I'm
checking. Are you really persuaded that it's a good idea, or do
you still have some principled objections?
> For instance, would
> everyone get it, or just certain people? Would, say,
> $10,000 per head be enough (in today's dollars)?
> That seems maybe marginal for a single person living
> in a $500 a month apartment plus groceries and
> a car, er, or public transport. So, for instance,
> since my household is now comprised of 6 persons,
> only 2 of whom work, we would be guaranteed $60,000
> a year in income? In today's dollars, that's
> not far from what we see after we pay taxes now. But of
> course, silly me, if everyone got that much---$10k
> a head---, there'd be lots who, oh, say, for that
> much wouldn't want to work, say, waiting tables or
> cooking at all those fancy restaurants we eat out at all
> the time. So, of course, silly me, $10,000 *wouldn't*
> quite go as far then as it now does.
You're right, in a way -- many people would be less willing
to accept low wages to cook your food and clean your plates.
In a worst-case scenario, you might even have to do those things
for yourself. That might be why your parents were ready to
flee the country -- the prospect of washing their own dishes was
more than they could stand.
> Unless maybe we could
> freeze wages and prices by law and dictate what jobs
> people shall have to keep on doing? Etc., etc.
If you insist on keeping a servant class, that could easily
be necessary.
> No doubt
> moggin has thought this all through, and cranked through all
> of the partial derivatives with a complete economic model,
> but I kind of admire at least the quality of Pound's honesty
> better---he saw that *control* would be necessary and
> openly embraced Mussolini because of it.
Again with the half-truths and the insinuations. I haven't
said a word and already I'm guilty of some unspecified
dishonesty. Anyway, Pound liked Mussolini for various different
reasons, including his swamp-draining policy and his
willingness to accept responsibility -- something Pound felt was
lacking from contemporary U.S. gov't. Instead of a huge
bureacracy answerable to no one, Mussolini was there to take the
credit if things went well and to hang by his heels if they
didn't. Il Duce didn't live up to all Pound's expectations, but
he did keep his end of that deal.
-- Moggin
Ted Samsel
: Ted Samels wrote: "Perhaps John Waters can direct, As an epizootic [a
: disease?] of Homicide: Life on the Streets."
: A most curious posting.
: I did watch an >episode< of Homicide in which John Waters acted. It
: was at the start of that show and JW's character was being arrested in
: the great Baltmore train station ... for something. JW and the two
: arresting detectives exchanged pleasantries in:re E.A.Poe. I was very
: impressed to hear Poe's name so dropped on popular cable TV.
: Did JW direct that program?
Don't think so. But my son's pal's Mom does walk-ons on Homicide and
got her name placed with JW's casting guy.
: That same Baltimore train station had been quite famed in yesteryears as
: the #1 place in America to whose baggage room had been sent, to PLEASE
: HOLD, for one ficticious name or other, trunks with bodies in them.
: Indeed, a singularity.
Passengers will please refrain...
Other Bawlmer sort.
HL Mencken
Michael S. Morris
Bob Gore said:
Including, as I'm sure you recall,
leftist running dog Richard Nixon.
I said:
No, I'm afraid I don't recall that at all.
Moggin:
That's o.k. -- Chris already found a reference to it in the
_New York Times_ Sure enough, it was Nixon-administration
thinking. Without Watergate, Nixon might have pushed it through.
Or then he might have dropped the idea. Hard to guess.
I wasn't questioning Bob's assertion that Nixon
did propose this---I assumed Bob wouldn't have mentioned
it in the first place if he weren't sure that Nixon
had at at least one point advocated or embraced the idea.
I, however, was taking exception to Bob's "as I'm sure
you recall", because no, I didn't recall, and I do
recall that that is not how it played out politically.
Moggin:
It certainly hasn't been embraced by the left --
critically or uncritically. The left doesn't
even want to shake hands with it -- there are
exceptions, but generally speaking the idea
strays too far from convention to attract
support.
I think this is so much nonsense. The idea
has been a commonplace in political discussion
among students and faculty at universities---which
are most assuredly far lefter on average than
the unacademic population---for at least the last
20 years. The thing that is unusual or shocking
is to argue against the idea.
I said:
This Social Credit idea came up over in the living
wage thread where moggin proposed a guaranteed annual
salary regardless of whether one works or no.
The question is, of course, whether he's thought
about implementing it.
Moggin:
If the question is about putting it into
practice, then you must agree on the principle.
Huh?
Moggin:
But maybe you don't -- I'm
checking. Are you really persuaded
that it's a good idea, or do
you still have some principled objections?
Yeah---the state control that necessarily would
accompany it.
I wrote:
For instance, would
everyone get it, or just certain people? Would, say,
$10,000 per head be enough (in today's dollars)?
That seems maybe marginal for a single person living
in a $500 a month apartment plus groceries and
a car, er, or public transport. So, for instance,
since my household is now comprised of 6 persons,
only 2 of whom work, we would be guaranteed $60,000
a year in income? In today's dollars, that's
not far from what we see after we pay taxes now. But of
course, silly me, if everyone got that much---$10k
a head---, there'd be lots who, oh, say, for that
much wouldn't want to work, say, waiting tables or
cooking at all those fancy restaurants we eat out at all
the time. So, of course, silly me, $10,000 *wouldn't*
quite go as far then as it now does.
Moggin:
You're right, in a way -- many people would be less willing
to accept low wages to cook your food and clean your plates.
Then you missed the point. Actually, there were 2 points.
The first point had to do with our giving everybody
$10,000 per annum, remember? Turns out, though, that
if we did that, then $10,000 would no longer be $10,000.
So, the problem remains of getting the worth of $10,000
in today's terms to people, which is what we supposedly
set out to do in the first place. Maybe $20,000 would accomplish
this, or have you done the numbers?
Moggin:
In a worst-case scenario, you might even
have to do those things for yourself.
That might be why your parents were ready to
flee the country -- the prospect of washing
their own dishes was more than they could stand.
Nicely done, but it was a nicely baited nicely
done. You see, cooking and washing dishes was a
joke, just like the students cleaning their own rooms at
UVa. More to the point (number 2) is that I
(and not just I, but let us say lots of other
people as well) need medical attention from time
to time, and electricity supplied for me to be
able to cook my own food in the customary ways,
and I need clothing in the climate in which I live,
and gasoline, and books and newspapers, and
occasionally I even need to rely on jet-engine
parts to get me from place to place. It's not
just the luxuries of maid-service and restaurant
service which will no longer be available at the
old price.
I said:
Unless maybe we could freeze wages
and prices by law and dictate what jobs
people shall have to keep on doing? Etc., etc.
Moggin:
If you insist on keeping a servant class,
that could easily be necessary.
No, if *you* insist on giving everybody
$10,000 per annum---and on that $10,000
being able to afford a single adult an
apartment and groceries to eat---then some
sort of *control* will be necessary. If you
don't care about the $10,000 being able to
afford room and board for those now-liberated
servants, then, sure, you could just print the
money and advertise the liberation that has
been achieved. But if you want to *really*
give every person enough for room and board---
a living wage---I don't see how you can do it
without a person's having to work to produce
what is necessary to produce so that people
can have room and board (i.e., namely housing
and food). I also don't see myself (or indeed
many others) volunteering to work to give others
who do not work room and board if room and
board is the most I could get. I.e., you've
got a little problem.
I said:
No doubt
moggin has thought this all through, and cranked through all
of the partial derivatives with a complete economic model,
but I kind of admire at least the quality of Pound's honesty
better---he saw that *control* would be necessary and
openly embraced Mussolini because of it.
Moggin:
Again with the half-truths and the insinuations. I haven't
said a word and already I'm guilty of some unspecified
dishonesty.
I have been responding here to your earlier call---on the UVa
"Living Wage" thread---for a living salary to be paid
to people regardless of whether they work. This is why
I joked about the students cleaning their own rooms
being a nice touch. The real problem of course isn't
maid service, but when the students' roofs start falling
down on top of them and crushing students. Or earlier
when there isn't food available for them to buy, or even
earlier than that when there isn't water fit for them to
drink (because the construction workers and the farmers
and the water-utility people won't make enough extra
by working to induce them to do their respective jobs).
The students maybe do know how to push a vacuum
cleaner around, but there are expertises they don't have,
and they will *need* those expertises to be exercised
affordably on their behalf.
Moggin:
Anyway, Pound liked Mussolini for various different
reasons, including his swamp-draining policy and his
willingness to accept responsibility -- something Pound
felt was lacking from contemporary U.S. gov't. Instead
of a huge bureacracy answerable to no one, Mussolini
was there to take the credit if things went well and to
hang by his heels if they didn't. Il Duce didn't live
up to all Pound's expectations, but he did keep his end
of that deal.
Right. In other words, Pound wanted the *control* necessary
to achieve his social goals to be exercised. What I
have been insinuating to you is that in order to achieve
giving *everyone* a living wage regardless of their
working or not, you will need to implement a system
of control over human beings very like a fascist system
of control. You won't need the nationalism or militarism
necessarily. Or the anti-Semitism. (Although there are those
political theorists who claim that in practice you can't
order people about very well unless you give them some
cause like war to keep them interested in obedience.) But
you will need the corporatist power and the micromanagement
of all kinds of things now left to the market (to people).
What I say is dishonest is to pretend you can do the one
(give to people enough money so that they can have room
and board without working for them) without the other
(dictating that people must produce enough affordable
room and board to go around). What I say is dishonest
is to call the current voluntary system "wage slavery"
and to refuse to call what you have proposed *real* slavery.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Moggin:
[snip]
An obvious idea -- but Douglas has been
one of the few to suggest it.
A good summary of Social Credit (which jibes with
what I've read of Pound---all the poetry and translation,
much of the literary criticism but none of the
specifically economic writings---as well as Kenner's
sympathetic treatment of Pound's economics in _The
Pound Era_). But my point is the *equally obvious*
corollary that the second you don't like what the market
is and is not valuing, and you don't wish to use the slower and
more difficult method of putting your own money where your
mouth is and abiding by what that gets you (e.g. burning
the candle at both ends to fit in both the writing of
great poetry and your day job), then you are left to
*dictate* to other people what it is they
shall and shall not value. The same problem obtains
with the game of "hidden economic costs" as with
"social credit"---namely, sez who? And what are you
gonna do about it?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
David J. Loftus
in response to Mike Morris's
: > I was 12 at the time in '72, and I was aware of
: > very little of it indeed. But, I guess my point
: > was that it was not like the people who voted for Nixon
: > then were *in favour* of the war. I think it was more
: > that they considered McGovern an idealistic flake.
: > Considering the real flakes we have seen (in and
: > out of office) since, I think McGovern comes across
: > much better in retrospect.
: Well you can think that, but the fact is that McGovern's supporters
: were reviled as hippies, dopers, hirsute, young, and most of all
: anti-war draft dodgers. (I was three of the previous including the
: last, and actually, I didn't support McGovern until in retrospect a few
: months after the election.) The campaign was in full tilt by
: spring after Edmund Muskie tripped over a pebble, and fighting in
: Vietnam and body counts were still part of the nightly news.
I'm not sure I ever cared about a national election as much as that one,
and of course I was not old enough to vote. I was 13, in eighth grade,
and I wore my McGovern/Shriver button to school (after regretting the
dropping of Eagleton), where classmates -- undoubtedly bringing their
parents' pronouncements from home -- told me we should drop the atomic
bomb on Hanoi.
The coolest thing was when Leonard Nimoy came to the local IWA hall in
our tiny town in southern Oregon, campaigning for McGovern, and
autographed my LP of "Mr. Spock's Music from Outer Space" in green
felt-tip ink.
David Loftus
Jorn Barger
List of 100 best works of 20th century nonfiction 1.16 p.m. ET (1717
GMT) April 29, 1999
(AP) - 1. "The Education of Henry Adams,'' Henry Adams.
2. "The Varieties of Religious Experience,'' William James
3. "Up From Slavery,'' Booker T. Washington.
4. "A Room of One's Own,'' Virginia Woolf.
5. "Silent Spring,'' Rachel Carson.
6. "Selected Essays, 1917-1932,'' T.S. Eliot.
7. "The Double Helix,'' James D. Watson.
8. "Speak, Memory,'' Vladimir Nabokov.
9. "The American Language,'' H.L. Mencken.
10. "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,'' John
Maynard Keynes.
11. "The Lives of a Cell,'' Lewis Thomas.
12. "The Frontier in American History,'' Frederick Jackson Turner.
13. "Black Boy,'' Richard Wright.
14. "Aspects of the Novel,'' E.M. Forster.
15. "The Civil War,'' Shelby Foote.
16. "The Guns of August,'' Barbara Tuchman.
17. "The Proper Study of Mankind,'' Isaiah Berlin.
18. "The Nature and Destiny of Man,'' Reinhold Niebuhr.
19. "Notes of a Native Son,'' James Baldwin.
20. "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,'' Gertrude Stein.
21. "The Elements of Style,'' William Strunk and E.B. White.
22. "An American Dilemma,'' Gunnar Myrdal.
23. "Principia Mathematica,'' Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand
Russell.
24. "The Mismeasure of Man,'' Stephen Jay Gould.
25. "The Mirror and the Lamp,'' Meyer Howard Abrams.
26. "The Art of the Soluble,'' Peter B. Medawar.
27. "The Ants,'' Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson.
28. "A Theory of Justice,'' John Rawls.
29. "Art and Illusion,'' Ernest H. Gombrich.
30. "The Making of the English Working Class,'' E.P. Thompson.
31. "The Souls of Black Folk,'' W.E.B. DuBois.
32. "Principia Ethica,'' G.E. Moore.
33. "Philosophy and Civilization,'' John Dewey.
34. "On Growth and Form,'' D'Arcy Thompson.
35. "Ideas and Opinions,'' Albert Einstein.
36. "The Age of Jackson,'' Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
37. "The Making of the Atomic Bomb,'' Richard Rhodes.
38. "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,'' Rebecca West.
39. "Autobiographies,'' W.B. Yeats.
40. "Science and Civilization in China,'' Joseph Needham.
41. "Goodbye to All That,'' Robert Graves.
42. "Homage to Catalonia,'' George Orwell.
43. "The Autobiography of Mark Twain,'' Mark Twain.
44. "Children of Crisis,'' Robert Coles.
45. "A Study of History,'' Arnold J. Toynbee.
46. "The Affluent Society,'' John Kenneth Galbraith.
47. "Present at the Creation,'' Dean Acheson.
48. "The Great Bridge,'' David McCullough.
49. "Patriotic Gore,'' Edmund Wilson.
50. "Samuel Johnson,'' Walter Jackson Bate.
51. "The Autobiography of Malcolm X,'' Alex Haley and Malcolm X.
52. "The Right Stuff,'' Tom Wolfe.
53. "Eminent Victorians,'' Lytton Strachey.
54. "Working,'' Studs Terkel.
55. "Darkness Visible,'' William Styron.
56. "The Liberal Imagination,'' Lionel Trilling.
57. "The Second World War,'' Winston Churchill.
58. "Out of Africa,'' Isak Dinesen.
59. "Jefferson and His Time,'' Dumas Malone.
60. "In the American Grain,'' William Carlos Williams.
61. "Cadillac Desert,'' Mark Reisner.
62. "The House of Morgan,'' Ron Chernow.
63. "The Sweet Science,'' A.J. Liebling.
64. "The Open Society and Its Enemies,'' Karl Popper.
65. "The Art of Memory,'' Frances A. Yates.
66. "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism,'' R.H. Tawney.
67. "A Preface to Morals,'' Walter Lippmann.
68. "The Gate of Heavenly Peace,'' Jonathan D. Spence.
69. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,'' Thomas S. Kuhn.
70. "The Strange Career of Jim Crow,'' C. Vann Woodward.
71. "The Rise of the West,'' William H. McNeill.
72. "The Gnostic Gospels,'' Elaine Pagels.
73. "James Joyce,'' Richard Ellmann.
74. "Florence Nightingale,'' Cecil Woodham-Smith.
75. "The Great War and Modern Memory,'' Paul Fussell.
76. "The City in History,'' Lewis Mumford.
77. "Battle Cry of Freedom,'' James M. McPherson.
78. "Why We Can't Wait,'' Martin Luther King Jr.
79. "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,'' Edmund Morris.
80. "Studies in Iconology,'' Erwin Panofsky.
81. "The Face of Battle,'' John Keegan.
82. "The Strange Death of Liberal England,'' George Dangerfield.
83. "Vermeer,'' Lawrence Gowing.
84. "A Bright Shining Lie,'' Neil Sheehan.
85. "West With the Night,'' Beryl Markham.
86. "This Boy's Life,'' Tobias Wolff.
87. "A Mathematician's Apology,'' G.H. Hardy.
88. "Six Easy Pieces,'' Richard P. Feynman.
89. "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,'' Annie Dillard.
90. "The Golden Bough,'' James George Frazier.
91. "Shadow and Act,'' Ralph Ellison.
92. "The Power Broker,'' Robert Caro.
93. "The American Political Tradition,'' Richard Hofstadter.
94. "The Contours of American History,'' William Appleman Williams.
95. "The Promise of American Life,'' Herbert Croly.
96. "In Cold Blood,'' Truman Capote.
97. "The Journalist and the Murderer,'' Janet Malcolm.
98. "The Taming of Chance,'' Ian Hacking.
99. "Operating Instructions,'' Anne Lamott.
100. "Melbourne,'' Lord David Cecil.
--
"Somehow he finds time to browse and read all the sites I never get
around to, and summarizes their latest high points. ...I'm amazed at
the way he hits on stuff I'm interested in about 90% of the time."
I edit the Net: <URL:http://www.robotwisdom.com/> --Candi Strecker
Gore Bob
On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, Michael S. Morris wrote:
>
> Yeah, but Nixon had campaigned on getting us
> out of Viet Nam back in 1968. See, this is something
> the currently-touted revisionism doesn't like to
> remember but lots of conservatives were *against*
> the war in the old-fashioned isolationist sense.
> And the thing is, in a sense, Nixon had delivered
> on this promise by the 1972 election---the last
> U.S. ground troops were out before that ("advisors",
> sailors, and pilots were still engaged of course).
> Getting us out of Viet Nam just wasn't really
> an issue vis-a-vis the McGovern v. Nixon election.
> I suspect most people thought Nixon's methods had
> a solid chance of extricating us. More of an issue,
> though, was military spending and the Cold
> War. Lots of conservatives wanted us to be out of Viet
> Nam, but nevertheless wanted military spending kept
> high against Soviet Russia, and they did fear that
> McGovern would cut military spending and up social
> programs.
At the risk of being thought a revisionist (how can you be a
revisionist if you actually lived through the events being revised,
anyway?), I can categorically state that if there were "lots" of
conservatives in those days who were against the war, then they were
keeping awfully damn quiet about it. If you look at how members of
Congress were voting on the various "end-the-war" bills and amendments,
you will note that all the usual suspects are exactly where you would
expect to find them.
You were more likely to hear Republicans express reservations about
the war while Johnson was still in office, while Democrats, including some
names that come as a retrospective surprise, tended support it. I
remember attending a debate on the war in 1966 between George McGovern and
Jake Javits- McGovern was backing the "enclave" strategy (a sort of
premature variant of Vietnamization); Javits was the one demanding full
withdrawal.
After the 1968 election, this changed; Democrats who had supported
the war, no matter how reluctantly, were now free to oppose it.
Republicans who had been anti-war before- and there were a good many of
them- continued, for the most part, to take that position- but I wouldn't
describe any of them (Mark Hatfield, for example) as conservatives.
The Pride of Indianapolis, Danny Burton, got his start in politics in
those days, running for Congress against Andy Jacobs as a strident
(meaning, foaming-at-the-mouth strident) proponent of the war.
Bob Gore
Obsong:Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag
Gore Bob
On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, Michael S. Morris wrote:
> Wednesday, the 28th of April, 1999
>
>
> Chris Loar writes:
> When one's memory fails, there's always the
> option of looking it up.
>
> Nevertheless (and I'm well aware of Nixon's duplicity
> on many fronts---as well as his essential love for
> governmental power) I believe my memory to be accurate
> about this. This is because I remember being surprised
> by my parents' animus against McGovern at the time. Not
> that they were going to vote for the other guy, but that
> McGovern's election would be so terrible a thing as to
> make leaving the country better than staying. I therefore
> asked them: Why? And the biggest reason was *McGovern's*
> advocacy of a guaranteed minimum income. I.e., by
> the election, Nixon had packaged himself differently.
Nixon's negative income tax was packaged differently, to begin with,
though the end result would have been the same- a guaranteed minimum
income. He had, in any event, dropped the idea by the 1972 election due
to opposition within his own party. Richard correctly discerns the
presence of Pat Moynihan's fine Irish paw in all this.
Bob Gore
tejas
>
> On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, Michael S. Morris wrote:
>
> >
> > out of Viet Nam back in 1968. See, this is something
> > the currently-touted revisionism doesn't like to
> > remember but lots of conservatives were *against*
> > the war in the old-fashioned isolationist sense.
> > And the thing is, in a sense, Nixon had delivered
> > on this promise by the 1972 election---the last
> > U.S. ground troops were out before that ("advisors",
> > sailors, and pilots were still engaged of course).
> > Getting us out of Viet Nam just wasn't really
> > an issue vis-a-vis the McGovern v. Nixon election.
> > I suspect most people thought Nixon's methods had
> > a solid chance of extricating us. More of an issue,
> > though, was military spending and the Cold
> > War. Lots of conservatives wanted us to be out of Viet
> > Nam, but nevertheless wanted military spending kept
> > high against Soviet Russia, and they did fear that
> > McGovern would cut military spending and up social
> > programs.
>
> At the risk of being thought a revisionist (how can you be a
> revisionist if you actually lived through the events being revised,
> anyway?),
Hear, hear!
I can categorically state that if there were "lots" of
> conservatives in those days who were against the war, then they were
> keeping awfully damn quiet about it. If you look at how members of
> Congress were voting on the various "end-the-war" bills and amendments,
> you will note that all the usual suspects are exactly where you would
> expect to find them.
> You were more likely to hear Republicans express reservations about
> the war while Johnson was still in office, while Democrats, including some
> names that come as a retrospective surprise, tended support it. I
> remember attending a debate on the war in 1966 between George McGovern and
> Jake Javits- McGovern was backing the "enclave" strategy (a sort of
> premature variant of Vietnamization); Javits was the one demanding full
> withdrawal.
> After the 1968 election, this changed; Democrats who had supported
> the war, no matter how reluctantly, were now free to oppose it.
> Republicans who had been anti-war before- and there were a good many of
> them- continued, for the most part, to take that position- but I wouldn't
> describe any of them (Mark Hatfield, for example) as conservatives.
> The Pride of Indianapolis, Danny Burton, got his start in politics in
> those days, running for Congress against Andy Jacobs as a strident
> (meaning, foaming-at-the-mouth strident) proponent of the war.
>
> Bob Gore
>
> Obsong:Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag
ObURL: http://www.mediacenter.org/folksongs/vietsong.html
--
TBSa...@richmond.infi.net (also te...@infi.net)
'Do the boogie woogie in the South American way'
Hank Snow THE RHUMBA BOOGIE
Robert Teeter
: Well you can think that, but the fact is that McGovern's supporters
: were reviled as hippies, dopers, hirsute, young, and most of all
: anti-war draft dodgers. (I was three of the previous including the
: last, and actually, I didn't support McGovern until in retrospect a few
: months after the election.)
"Amnesty, Abortion, and Acid" was the platform attributed to
McGovern by his enemies.
ObBook: _Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72_ by
Hunter s. Thompson, in which HST says he's for all three
--
Bob Teeter (rte...@netcom.com) | http://www.wco.com/~rteeter/
"I can't have information I know would be of
interest to someone and not share it."
-- Sanford Berman, activist librarian
Chris Loar
> Sure enough, it was Nixon-administration
> thinking. Without Watergate, Nixon might have pushed it through.
> Or then he might have dropped the idea. Hard to guess.
It's interesting to me that Nixon favored the idea (on a personal, rather than
a political level) for profoundly conservative reasons, primarily the
preservation of the family, which he and his advisors tended to see as under
attack from a variety of sources, including poverty. This would align him
with that brand of conservatism that is primarily interested in preserving
traditional social relations. I guess this was before the conservative
movement developed their argument that welfare (rather than poverty) destroys
communities.
Chris Loar
> As I've said before, I think the left's opposition is due more to
> ideology than to convention. The idea behind the plan is that the
> government will try to fix problems indirectly by giving people money,
> rather than directly by giving people what they "really need". I'd
> assume that when you adopt a guaranteed annual income and negative
> income tax, you'd abolish welfare programs like food stamps, Head
> Start, etc. -- once it's agreed that you should give poor people
> money, it seems hard to justify giving them additional goods or
> services rather than the money they could use to buy the goods or
> services themselves. Then you'd have reporters zooming in on a family
> where mom and dad spent all the money on drugs and the kids still live
> in poverty. A problem that the government is doing nothing to fix!
> This would be taken as proof that the program doesn't work.
While I was digging up that bit on the Nixon program, I noted an
interesting report by Ira Allen on UPI (2/13/1987), who noted that Reagan
was fond of commenting that direct cash payments to the poor would be less
expensive and more efficient than welfare. Allen spoke to an
administration spokesperson about the prospect of institutionalizing that
idea, and his reply was that giving the poor money is ''not a responsible
way'' to reform welfare, commenting that the government has a
''stewardship'' responsibility to the poor.
Which is to serve as a reminder that left-liberal types have no monopoly
on the urge to run people's lives.
Jim Collier
> The Pride of Indianapolis, Danny Burton, got his start in politics in
> those days, running for Congress against Andy Jacobs as a strident
> (meaning, foaming-at-the-mouth strident) proponent of the war.
>
Oh, I do hope we see more of him in this next campaign. I love lamb.
Like a hungry coyote.
Jim
Gore Bob wrote:
>
> On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, Michael S. Morris wrote:
>
> >
> > Yeah, but Nixon had campaigned on getting us
> > out of Viet Nam back in 1968. See, this is something
> > the currently-touted revisionism doesn't like to
> > remember but lots of conservatives were *against*
> > the war in the old-fashioned isolationist sense.
> > And the thing is, in a sense, Nixon had delivered
> > on this promise by the 1972 election---the last
> > U.S. ground troops were out before that ("advisors",
> > sailors, and pilots were still engaged of course).
> > Getting us out of Viet Nam just wasn't really
> > an issue vis-a-vis the McGovern v. Nixon election.
> > I suspect most people thought Nixon's methods had
> > a solid chance of extricating us. More of an issue,
> > though, was military spending and the Cold
> > War. Lots of conservatives wanted us to be out of Viet
> > Nam, but nevertheless wanted military spending kept
> > high against Soviet Russia, and they did fear that
> > McGovern would cut military spending and up social
> > programs.
>
> At the risk of being thought a revisionist (how can you be a
> revisionist if you actually lived through the events being revised,
> anyway?), I can categorically state that if there were "lots" of
Michael S. Morris
I said:
Yeah, but Nixon had campaigned on getting us
out of Viet Nam back in 1968. See, this is something
the currently-touted revisionism doesn't like to
remember but lots of conservatives were *against*
the war in the old-fashioned isolationist sense.
And the thing is, in a sense, Nixon had delivered
on this promise by the 1972 election---the last
U.S. ground troops were out before that ("advisors",
sailors, and pilots were still engaged of course).
Getting us out of Viet Nam just wasn't really
an issue vis-a-vis the McGovern v. Nixon election.
I suspect most people thought Nixon's methods had
a solid chance of extricating us. More of an issue,
though, was military spending and the Cold
War. Lots of conservatives wanted us to be out of Viet
Nam, but nevertheless wanted military spending kept
high against Soviet Russia, and they did fear that
McGovern would cut military spending and up social
programs.
Bob Gore says:
At the risk of being thought a revisionist
(how can you be a revisionist if you actually
lived through the events being revised, anyway?),
I can categorically state that if there were "lots" of
conservatives in those days who were against the war,
then they were keeping awfully damn quiet about it.
I'm not sure what you think you are arguing, or whom you
think you are arguing it with. But, again, Nixon campaigned
in 1968 that he would end the war. He plainly worked hard
to that end---obviously not in a unilateral way of just
quitting and withdrawing, but nevertheless in a rather
obvious set of moves aimed at the Paris bargaining table---
and all of those "conservatives" who were running around
wanting to nuke Hanoi rather obviously did not get what they
wanted out of Nixon, did they? I mean, he did win the election.
Two of them. He had the *power* to nuke Hanoi if he'd wanted
to.
What the conservatives were against was the Peace Movement,
but maybe you are confusing being against that
particular faction---being against, say, draft dodgers
and Jane Fonda and the like---with being somehow in
favour of "the war"?
Bob:
If you look at how members of
Congress were voting on the various
"end-the-war" bills and amendments,
you will note that all the usual suspects
are exactly where you would expect to find them.
Again, Nixon won two elections and was well on
the way towards extricating the U.S. from Vietnam
before the second one. This makes him a War Hawk?
Bob:
You were more likely to hear Republicans
express reservations about the war while
Johnson was still in office, while Democrats,
including some names that come as a retrospective
surprise, tended support it. I remember attending
a debate on the war in 1966 between George McGovern
and Jake Javits- McGovern was backing the "enclave"
strategy (a sort of premature variant of Vietnamization);
Javits was the one demanding full withdrawal.
Which is very like the way the politics play
with the current war against Serbia, by the way.
Bob:
After the 1968 election, this changed;
Democrats who had supported the war, no
matter how reluctantly, were now free to
oppose it. Republicans who had been anti-war
before- and there were a good many of them-
continued, for the most part, to take that
position- but I wouldn't describe any of
them (Mark Hatfield, for example) as conservatives.
Well, I guess you and I have a rather different
notion of what "conservative" is. I do not
consider myself conservative, but I do consider
"conservatives" as the principled, sensible
Mark Hatfield kind of Republicans. There is
nothing conservative, principled, or sensible
about Dans Quayle or Burton, for instance.
Bob:
The Pride of Indianapolis, Danny Burton,
got his start in politics in those days,
running for Congress against Andy Jacobs as a strident
(meaning, foaming-at-the-mouth strident) proponent of
the war.
Right. Burton is a nutcase and an embarassment.
I don't know quite you mean by him being either
a Pride or "of Indianapolis", however. Andy Jacobs
of course was unbeatable, so the district Burton represents
is a gerrymander of the rich white suburbs (particularly
Carmel to the north of town). They say you could
elect a dog there, as long as he was a Republican dog.
In the last election, even after Burton's "scumbag"
remark over Clinton's affairs and then the public exposure
of his own lifelong commitment to "family values"
(his illegitimate son, whom he had not seen for years)
he won re-election handily because all the Democrats
could muster against him was an ex-con (I think had
served time for real-estate fraud or somesuch and when
he won the nomination by surprise, the Demos tried
everything possible to have his name removed from the
ballot and failed to stop him running as the Democrat).
Anyway, the city of Indianapolis is represented by Juila
Carson, a black woman and a Democrat who, as far as I
can tell, is of the never-met-a-social-program-she-didn't-like
variety.
My mother I know always voted for Andy Jacobs. Dad, on the
other hand as I said, would *never* have voted for a
Democrat for anything.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Puss in Boots
> It's already been pointed out that Milton Friedman suggested the idea
> of a guaranteed annual income to the Nixon administration, but no
> one's mentioned that the government actually did a controlled study in
> Portland, Oregon. There were "negative" results including a
> significant decrease in the number of people looking for jobs and an
> increase in the proportion of illegitimate births. For whatever
> reason, Friedman eventually withdrew his support from the plan
> proposed by the Nixon administration. I read this in a review in
> _Commentary_ of Milton and Rose Friedman's autobiography; I didn't
> read the autobiography itself. Anyway, it seems pretty likely that
> Nixon would have dropped the idea, even without Watergate.
The Portland study is news to me. Thanks for mentioning it.
Also for the scare quotes on "negative."
Phil:
> As I've said before, I think the left's opposition is due more to
> ideology than to convention. The idea behind the plan is that the
> government will try to fix problems indirectly by giving people money,
> rather than directly by giving people what they "really need".
Depends what problem you're trying to fix. The most direct
solution to the problem of poverty is cash. Liberals have
preferred to ignore poverty as a problem. Instead they've tried
to provide jobs. But being jobless isn't a problem -- the
trouble is not having money to pay for things like food and rent.
A job is an indirect solution, at best.
> I'd
> assume that when you adopt a guaranteed annual income and negative
> income tax, you'd abolish welfare programs like food stamps, Head
> Start, etc. -- once it's agreed that you should give poor people
> money, it seems hard to justify giving them additional goods or
> services rather than the money they could use to buy the goods or
> services themselves.
Agreed. Jens mentioned that when the idea was suggested in
Denmark, it was offered by a centrist party which argued it
would lower costs and eliminate bureaucracy by replacing various
complicated social programs with a simple cash payment.
> Then you'd have reporters zooming in on a family
> where mom and dad spent all the money on drugs and the kids still live
> in poverty. A problem that the government is doing nothing to fix!
> This would be taken as proof that the program doesn't work.
And _then_ you would have to get rid of the reporters, thus
demonstrating that the idea leads inexorably to fascism! No,
wait; that's Mike's argument. But my version is better-reasoned.
-- Moggin
Puss in Boots
> I wasn't questioning Bob's assertion that Nixon
> did propose this---I assumed Bob wouldn't have mentioned
> it in the first place if he weren't sure that Nixon
> had at at least one point advocated or embraced the idea.
> I, however, was taking exception to Bob's "as I'm sure
> you recall", because no, I didn't recall, and I do
> recall that that is not how it played out politically.
Bob's point -- mine, if not his -- was that the idea isn't
confined to either the left or the right. It also isn't
wildly popular on either side. The examples we've talked about
lately -- Douglas' "Social Credit," Nixon's negative income
tax, and the Danish _borgerien_ -- have come from the middle to
the right of the political spectrum.
Moggin:
>> It certainly hasn't been embraced by the left -- critically
>> or uncritically. The left doesn't even want to shake hands
>> with it -- there are exceptions, but generally speaking the idea
>> strays too far from convention to attract support.
Mike:
> I think this is so much nonsense. The idea
> has been a commonplace in political discussion
> among students and faculty at universities---which
> are most assuredly far lefter on average than
> the unacademic population---for at least the last
> 20 years. The thing that is unusual or shocking
> is to argue against the idea.
Don't be silly -- nobody is the least shocked by arguments
that you ought to work for what you get, that you don't
deserve what you haven't worked for, and so on -- those are the
accepted platitudes of our culture, in academia and out.
There's even a famous t.v. commercial where stately, plump
John Houseman hawks the services of an investment firm by
intoning, "They make their money the old-fashioned way." (Well-
timed pause.) "They _earn_ it."
The conceit of the ad is that earning money has fallen out
of fashion. The ad-men must have figured that would be a
widely effective pitch, since they put it on national t.v. I'm
inclined to agree. It's an idea with appeal to hidebound
conformists who feature themselves as rebellious individualists
-- a common type in the U.S.A.
Pound would be probably be more interested in the multiple
irony of Wall St. money-men selling themselves as productive
workers to folks who'd like to make money from their money with
all the effort of dialing a phone.
Anyway, the cutting-edge concept in what passes for a left
these days is the "living wage," which is nothing but a
minimum wage with a couple extra bucks in the kitty -- and even
that small thought causes controversy.
Mike:
>>> This Social Credit idea came up over in the living
>>> wage thread where moggin proposed a guaranteed annual
>>> salary regardless of whether one works or no.
>>> The question is, of course, whether he's thought
>>> about implementing it.
Moggin:
>> If the question is about putting it into practice, then you
>> must agree on the principle. But maybe you don't -- I'm
>> checking. Are you really persuaded that it's a good idea, or do
>> you still have some principled objections?
Mike:
>Huh?
Sorry I wasn't clear. Our previous disagreements centered
on the principle of the thing. Unless I'm remembering it
wrong, you were opposed to the very notion. Now you're talking
about how to implement it. Of course you're raising
questions -- but now they're practical ones. That's what makes
me ask if you're dropped your earlier objections.
Moggin:
>> Are you really persuaded that it's a good idea, or do
>> you still have some principled objections?
Mike:
> Yeah---the state control that necessarily would
> accompany it.
That's a practical complaint. You aren't objecting to the
principle: you're claiming that put in practice it would
produce undesirable consequences. I disagree, but we can argue
about that below.
Mike:
>>> For instance, would
>>> everyone get it, or just certain people? Would, say,
>>> $10,000 per head be enough (in today's dollars)?
>>> That seems maybe marginal for a single person living
>>> in a $500 a month apartment plus groceries and
>>> a car, er, or public transport. So, for instance,
>>> since my household is now comprised of 6 persons,
>>> only 2 of whom work, we would be guaranteed $60,000
>>> a year in income? In today's dollars, that's
>>> not far from what we see after we pay taxes now. But of
>>> course, silly me, if everyone got that much---$10k
>>> a head---, there'd be lots who, oh, say, for that
>>> much wouldn't want to work, say, waiting tables or
>>> cooking at all those fancy restaurants we eat out at all
>>> the time. So, of course, silly me, $10,000 *wouldn't*
>>> quite go as far then as it now does.
Moggin:
>> You're right, in a way -- many people would be less willing
>> to accept low wages to cook your food and clean your plates.
>> In a worst-case scenario, you might even have to do those things
>> for yourself. That might be why your parents were ready to
>> flee the country -- the prospect of washing their own dishes was
>> more than they could stand.
Mike:
> Then you missed the point. Actually, there were 2 points.
> The first point had to do with our giving everybody
> $10,000 per annum, remember? Turns out, though, that
> if we did that, then $10,000 would no longer be $10,000.
> So, the problem remains of getting the worth of $10,000
> in today's terms to people, which is what we supposedly
> set out to do in the first place. Maybe $20,000 would accomplish
> this, or have you done the numbers?
Still looks like my reply hit the target. You illustrated
your otherwise-unsupported assertion with the example of a
restaurant. In your view -- which I completely share -- hiring
servants would be more difficult. The people who now carry
your food and wash your dishes might decide to spend their time
differently. Freedom is like that.
Mike [re "the prospect of washing their own dishes"]:
> Nicely done, but it was a nicely baited nicely
> done. You see, cooking and washing dishes was a
> joke, just like the students cleaning their own rooms at
> UVa.
I wasn't joking: I honestly believe that the students and
faculty of UVA know how to locate the working end of a mop.
The Old Dominion doesn't have to hire a servant class to do the
mopping for them.
> More to the point (number 2) is that I
> (and not just I, but let us say lots of other
> people as well) need medical attention from time
> to time, and electricity supplied for me to be
> able to cook my own food in the customary ways,
> and I need clothing in the climate in which I live,
> and gasoline, and books and newspapers, and
> occasionally I even need to rely on jet-engine
> parts to get me from place to place. It's not
> just the luxuries of maid-service and restaurant
> service which will no longer be available at the
> old price.
Unless it is, of course. Costs haven't gone up -- not one
cent.
Mike:
>>> Unless maybe we could freeze wages
>>> and prices by law and dictate what jobs
>>> people shall have to keep on doing? Etc., etc.
Moggin:
>> If you insist on keeping a servant class, that could easily
>> be necessary.
Mike:
> No, if *you* insist on giving everybody
> $10,000 per annum---and on that $10,000
> being able to afford a single adult an
> apartment and groceries to eat---then some
> sort of *control* will be necessary. If you
> don't care about the $10,000 being able to
> afford room and board for those now-liberated
> servants, then, sure, you could just print the
> money and advertise the liberation that has
> been achieved. But if you want to *really*
> give every person enough for room and board---
> a living wage---I don't see how you can do it
> without a person's having to work to produce
> what is necessary to produce so that people
> can have room and board (i.e., namely housing
> and food). I also don't see myself (or indeed
> many others) volunteering to work to give others
> who do not work room and board if room and
> board is the most I could get. I.e., you've
> got a little problem.
The problem is with your reasoning -- you keep saying that
"*control* will be necessary" without showing that would be
the case. Seems like a dippy assertion to me. But then you've
been known to call servititude "freedom," so it makes sense
you'd call freedom "control."
You also seem to misunderstand the idea. _Of course_ work
would still be necessary -- nobody argues it wouldn't. But
the smart thing is to reduce the necessity to a minimum -- that
would give people the most freedom in deciding how to spend
their time.
Douglas was an engineer by trade: in his view it was just
good sense to make the most of the available resources. And
he was a moralist by nature -- he thought that "making the most"
included removing poverty and encouraging freedom.
The present system fails on both counts. Social Credit is
Douglas' alternative -- a way to get the most good from
mankind's productiveness and ingenuity. Which means, basically,
giving everyone the greatest possible freedom to pursue the
good as they see it. Howzat go again? "Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness."
Mike:
>>> No doubt
>>> moggin has thought this all through, and cranked through all
>>> of the partial derivatives with a complete economic model,
>>> but I kind of admire at least the quality of Pound's honesty
>>> better---he saw that *control* would be necessary and
>>> openly embraced Mussolini because of it.
Moggin:
>> Again with the half-truths and the insinuations. I haven't
>> said a word and already I'm guilty of some unspecified
>> dishonesty.
Mike:
> I have been responding here to your earlier call---on the UVa
> "Living Wage" thread---for a living salary to be paid
> to people regardless of whether they work.
Fair enough -- I'll stand by everything I said. But you're
making a false accusation.
> This is why
> I joked about the students cleaning their own rooms
> being a nice touch.
You were joking? Damn. I thought you really liked it. So
you think that Virginia really _should_ pay for maid service?
Then do you feel they should pay a living wage, or do you oppose
that, too?
> The real problem of course isn't
> maid service, but when the students' roofs start falling
> down on top of them and crushing students. Or earlier
> when there isn't food available for them to buy, or even
> earlier than that when there isn't water fit for them to
> drink (because the construction workers and the farmers
> and the water-utility people won't make enough extra
> by working to induce them to do their respective jobs).
Correct me if I'm wrong (as if I've gotta ask!) but I seem
to recall that you teach physics for little or nothing: I
think you said something about a token salary. Which means you
do that work with practically _no_ financial inducement.
You also home-school your kids -- that must involve a huge
commitment of time and energy. But you do that work, too,
without any financial inducement. In both cases you contribute
voluntarily, and you're glad -- I presume -- to do it.
The present system is founded on coercion. For most folks
the rule is you don't work, you don't eat. That's highly
controlling. Those farmers and construction workers don't work
merely because they've been _induced_ to: they work under a
threat. The threat is that they won't be able to eat or keep a
roof over their heads. As Kenner says, "These are not
conditions of freedom."
> The students maybe do know how to push a vacuum
> cleaner around, but there are expertises they don't have,
> and they will *need* those expertises to be exercised
> affordably on their behalf.
Sure.
Moggin:
>> Anyway, Pound liked Mussolini for various different
>> reasons, including his swamp-draining policy and his
>> willingness to accept responsibility -- something Pound felt was
>> lacking from contemporary U.S. gov't. Instead of a huge
>> bureacracy answerable to no one, Mussolini was there to take the
>> credit if things went well and to hang by his heels if they
>> didn't. Il Duce didn't live up to all Pound's expectations, but
>> he did keep his end of that deal.
Mike:
> Right. In other words, Pound wanted the *control* necessary
> to achieve his social goals to be exercised.
Yep, those are other words. Not other words for mine, but
definitely other words. I said Pound wanted the swamps
drained -- also that he wanted someone willing to accept
responsibility. Mussolini wasn't under Pound's control or even
under his influence. And Pound felt that bankers and
bureaucrats exercised as much control as Mussolini; the salient
distinction, to P, was that Mussolini was accountable.
> What I
> have been insinuating to you is that in order to achieve
> giving *everyone* a living wage regardless of their
> working or not, you will need to implement a system
> of control over human beings very like a fascist system
> of control.
I thought you made that part pretty clear: you insinuated
that I was dishonest and that Pound embraced Mussolini's
fascism on the grounds above. You're wrong on both counts -- I
was on the up-and-up, and while Pound unquestionably did
embrace Mussolini, he didn't do it on your reasoning. At least
not that I know about -- I'd be very interested to learn
otherwise.
> You won't need the nationalism or militarism
> necessarily. Or the anti-Semitism. (Although there are those
> political theorists who claim that in practice you can't
> order people about very well unless you give them some
> cause like war to keep them interested in obedience.)
So the system that you're describing may not be "very like
a fascist system of control." It could be any old system as
long as it was sufficiently controlling -- fascism per se isn't
the issue.
> But
> you will need the corporatist power and the micromanagement
> of all kinds of things now left to the market (to people).
If the market is people, then corporations are, too. It's
all people, all the time. That's not my feeling, but I can
work from there. Market: people lead their lives according to
the decisions of other people. Corporatism: people decide
how other people should lead their lives. Not much there for a
person to choose from.
> What I say is dishonest is to pretend you can do the one
> (give to people enough money so that they can have room
> and board without working for them) without the other
> (dictating that people must produce enough affordable
> room and board to go around). What I say is dishonest
> is to call the current voluntary system "wage slavery"
> and to refuse to call what you have proposed *real* slavery.
Exactly -- you're calling me "dishonest" because I fail to
agree with your conclusions. Or more accurately, because I
don't share your prejudices. Another entry in the Mike lexicon.
As a note, Douglas' idea is to reduce the necesary work to
a minimum by exploiting increases in productivity. Back in
1919 he calculated -- don't ask me how -- that three hours work
daily from adults 18 to 40 would do the trick.
Seven decades later, a U.S. economist named Herb Stein
said proudly that more than a hundred million Americans "get up
in the morning and go to work" each day. If they had been
able to sleep late, _then_ he would have had something to boast
about.
-- Moggin
Puss in Boots
[...]
>> Pound's interest in Social Credit was based on his personal
>> experience as a poet: he couldn't make a decent living from
>> his work. (Ditto for Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, and Gaudier-Brzeska.)
>> He also noticed that he wrote best writing for the Muses and
>> worst when he was producing articles to make money. The problem
>> needed a fix. Douglas had it.
>> Douglas begins with the observation that in the modern West,
>> poverty isn't caused by a shortage of resources -- there's
>> plenty to go around. But most people receive their portion as a
>> paycheck in return for work done. That makes employment a
>> system of government -- and not a democratic one. It also means
><> that anyone without a job is in trouble -- something
>> increasingly common as technology allows more work to be done by
>> less people.
>> No need for that to be a problem, tho -- if technology lets
>> more people do less work, so much the better! That's all to
>> the good. The trouble comes entirely from linking livelihood to
>> labor: breaking that chain is central to the Social Credit
>> program. Labor-saving devices should _save people from laboring_.
>> An obvious idea -- but Douglas has been one of the few to
>> suggest it."
Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net:
> A good summary of Social Credit (which jibes with
> what I've read of Pound---all the poetry and translation,
> much of the literary criticism but none of the
> specifically economic writings---as well as Kenner's
> sympathetic treatment of Pound's economics in _The
> Pound Era_).
I wouldn't give me nearly that much credit -- what I wrote
was accurate as far as it goes, but as a summary, it sucks.
It doesn't even begin to sum up Social Credit -- something that
I doubt I could do, since I've never studied Douglas. All I
know about the subject comes from my interest in Pound -- minus
that, "Douglas" would mean Mike Douglas to me.
_The Pound Era_ is wonderful -- I'd recommend it to anyone.
Same for anything of Kenner's. It _is_ very sympathetic to
Pound, making it unlikeable to people w/out Kenner's sympathies.
> But my point is the *equally obvious*
> corollary that the second you don't like what the market
> is and is not valuing, and you don't wish to use the slower and
> more difficult method of putting your own money where your
> mouth is and abiding by what that gets you (e.g. burning
> the candle at both ends to fit in both the writing of
> great poetry and your day job), then you are left to
> *dictate* to other people what it is they
> shall and shall not value. The same problem obtains
> with the game of "hidden economic costs" as with
> "social credit"---namely, sez who? And what are you
> gonna do about it?
Those two methods are one and the same -- you can abide by
the demands of the market, or else you can abide by the
demands of the market. That's not much of a choice. There are
many ideas on what to do about it. Douglas has a good one:
fit the system to the people who use it rather than the reverse.
In your terms, that means letting people decide what they
"shall and shall not value," instead of requiring them to shape
their lives to the the dictates of the marketplace.
-- Moggin
Ted Samsel
: Gore Bob wrote:
: > The Pride of Indianapolis, Danny Burton, got his start in politics in
: > those days, running for Congress against Andy Jacobs as a strident
: > (meaning, foaming-at-the-mouth strident) proponent of the war.
: >
: Oh, I do hope we see more of him in this next campaign. I love lamb.
: Like a hungry coyote.
Keerful. Sometimes they're stuffed with cyanide & strichnine. Acme
supplies such "pizens" to the upwardly mobile transhumantists to
keep their woolies safe.
Michael S. Morris
Moggin:
Those two methods are one and the same -- you can abide by
the demands of the market, or else you can abide by the
demands of the market. That's not much of a choice. There are
many ideas on what to do about it. Douglas has a good one:
fit the system to the people who use it rather than the reverse.
In your terms, that means letting people decide what they
"shall and shall not value," instead of requiring them to shape
their lives to the the dictates of the marketplace.
Nope. Douglas's idea means *forcing* people to decide
to value what they do not now choose *in their own self-directed
lives* to value, which is precisely requiring them to shape
their lives to Douglas's dictates. The marketplace is far
different, because it is *the people's* dictates, besides
the fact that it isn't at all as dictatorial as you like
to paint it---you *do* have the option to write great
poetry by candlelight, you don't under Douglas.
[I would certainly agree with your recommendation of
_The Pound Era_. And I was personally happy with
Kenner's sympathy with Pound, and sympathetic explication
of Social Credit. But, before Kenner, if I were to have
made a desert-island-ten-book-list, Pound's _Cantos_
would have been on it for me. I see them as such a break
into a high, hard-chiseled art against the background
of "methinkest I fain would feel poetical today"
versification that, say, Sassoon was coing out of. So
anyway I came to Kenner already enthusiastic about Pound,
and found more than one aspect of Pound illuminated for me
by Kenner. However, I must add that later I felt a little
bit betrayed by Kenner (and Davenport, too), who, in his
enthusiasm and sympathy for a great poet, elides I think
the more bug-ugly aspects of Pound. Maybe he figures
everyone already knows that stuff already, but, anyway "that
stuff" took me quite by surpise in later
discussion (hereon I believe it was with Mikhail), and when
I looked into it in Humphrey Carpenter's _A Serious
Character: The Life of Ezra Pound_, it became obvious
that Pound was rabidly anti-Semitic in those Italian radio
addresses. I mean, it is not like Pat Buchanan's public
pussy-footing around with veiled and deniable baitings,
but froth-at-the-mouth racism. And apparently Pound was
voluntarily and independently so, since the Italian
fascisti weren't especially anti-Semitic or out to
encourage him in it.]
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
midtown neon
neon, m.
Gore Bob
I'm arguing that conservative opposition to the war was (at least in
my opinion) largely a chimera- a statement that requires at least one
important qualifier; it all depends on what specific time period you're
talking about. In 1966, nearly everyone supported the war, though with
varying levels of enthusiasm (except, of course, for those loons at
Ramparts). Opposition to the war grew gradually (and was widely
considered to be a bleeding-heart liberal thing) until the Tet offensive
in early 1968; opposition at that point became widespread- the left-right
dichotomy was no longer over whether or not to prosecute the war to the
fullest, but over how soon to end our involvement in it, and on what
terms.
Nixon made no promises or commitments concerning the war during the
1968 campaign; he "had a plan," he said, to end the war, but he refused to
divulge that plan even in its broadest outlines (in my opinion, this is
what nearly cost him the election); essentially, as with a Rohrshach test,
voters could write their own hopes and wishful thoughts into Nixon's
ambiguous statements, with no fear of contradiction on the candidate's
part.
Once elected, it soon became apparent that Nixon's strategy for
ending the war involved widening it (to include Cambodia and Laos) and
intensifying it (both through ground operations and a resumption of the
bombing of North Vietnam). Troop levels were not increased, but neither
were they decreased, nor would they be for another two years. The
widespread impression, in other words, was that Nixon had gone back on his
word, and was flat-out pursuing an attempt to win the war (when he had, in
fact, made no such commitment in the first place).
With the approach of the 1972 election, and no end of the war in
sight, it became apparent that Nixon was paying a political price for his
war policies. His poll numbers (measured against Ed Muskie) didn't look
good and, in another arena, the majority in favor of his policies in
Congress dwindled with the vote on each anti-war amendment. It was this
political peril (real or imagined) that appeared to concentrate minds in
the White House on the search for alternative approaches, which resulted
in a new rapprochement with the Soviet Union, the opening to China, and
the announcement of "Vietnamization."
This may have been Nixon's plan all along, but I personally beg leave
to doubt it.
> What the conservatives were against was the Peace Movement,
> but maybe you are confusing being against that
> particular faction---being against, say, draft dodgers
> and Jane Fonda and the like---with being somehow in
> favour of "the war"?
>
Oh, I get it; the people who were howling at me to get a haircut were
expressing disagreement with my life-style choices, and have been deeply
misunderstood all these years- had I been willing to get a buzz-cut like a
decent human being, I would have found out that they opposed the war at
least as vigorously as I did? Gosh, and to think that never occurred to
me!
Bob Gore
Obanothersong:"Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore," by the
great John Prine.
tejas
Well, shoot, bubba, THE GREEN BERETS is on tonight on cable and you can
repent at the altar of the other son of Ioway, Marion Morrison. I did,
and
I haven't felt this good since we used to get the Dan Smoot Report and
we'd listen to the Rev'd J. Charles Jessup on XERF, Del Rio, Texas.
That's
an AM border blaster; same on Wolfman Jack got his start on.
Oh, sorry. You have no cable.
Jim Collier
>
> Well, shoot, bubba, THE GREEN BERETS is on tonight on cable and you can
> repent at the altar of the other son of Ioway, Marion Morrison. I did,
> and
> I haven't felt this good since we used to get the Dan Smoot Report and
> we'd listen to the Rev'd J. Charles Jessup on XERF, Del Rio, Texas.
> That's
> an AM border blaster; same on Wolfman Jack got his start on.
>
> Oh, sorry. You have no cable.
And no wonder!
He started in Del Rio, eh? I thought it was one of the Tijuana
stations, XEPRS, commonly called "Express". I first heard him about
1958. In "American Graffiti," he's in some small California
town, presumably Modesto or Petaluma. In reality, Mel's Drive-in
was on South Van Ness Ave., practically at the geographical center of
the City and County of San Francisco. That Mel's, like Ira Bleu, is
long gone. Another one on Lombard St. is still very alive.
It is now the best coffee shop in San Francisco at which to read.
(Well, that's my opinion.) Zim's, another good place, is long, long
gone, and so are the Doggie Diners. End of Northern California barf.
San Diego had the interesting arrangement that its long time ABC-TV
station, Channel 6, XETV, was in Tijuana. Another radio station,
XETRA ("Xtra"), is a big sports station in English for the Los Angeles
market. It was the first of the all-news stations 35 years ago before
the CBS-owned stations went that way. It was also the first AM stereo
station.
Those patent medicine and fundie types didn't broadcast from Tijuana
though. Border blasters were a Texas thing. Billy James Hargis was
carried by a station in Inglewood. (Or did we decide he was Billy Jim?)
Probably the only bisexual Christian Anti-Communist Crusader in
existence. Or maybe not.
Jim
Puss in Boots
>>> ... the second you don't like what the market
>>> is and is not valuing, and you don't wish to use the slower and
>>> more difficult method of putting your own money where your
>> mouth is and abiding by what that gets you (e.g. burning
>> the candle at both ends to fit in both the writing of
>>> great poetry and your day job), then you are left to
>>> *dictate* to other people what it is they
>>> shall and shall not value. The same problem obtains
>>> with the game of "hidden economic costs" as with
>>> "social credit"---namely, sez who? And what are you
>>> gonna do about it?
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots):
>> Those two methods are one and the same -- you can abide by
>> the demands of the market, or else you can abide by the
>> demands of the market. That's not much of a choice. There are
>> many ideas on what to do about it. Douglas has a good one:
>> fit the system to the people who use it rather than the reverse.
>> In your terms, that means letting people decide what they
>> "shall and shall not value," instead of requiring them to shape
>> their lives to the the dictates of the marketplace.
Mike:
> Nope. Douglas's idea means *forcing* people to decide
> to value what they do not now choose *in their own self-directed
> lives* to value, which is precisely requiring them to shape
> their lives to Douglas's dictates.
You're fantasizing. Politically, Social Credit comes down
to libertarianism with an ingredient libertarians leave out:
liberty. (That's my analogy -- I don't know how Douglas or his
followers would like it.)
> The marketplace is far
> different, because it is *the people's* dictates,
Well sure. When _das Volk_ give the orders, it's fine and
dandy.
> besides
> the fact that it isn't at all as dictatorial as you like
> to paint it---you *do* have the option to write great
> poetry by candlelight, you don't under Douglas.
Of course you do -- you even have money to buy the candles.
Or pay the electric bill. That's why Pound liked the idea.
His writing didn't make enough to support him, even when he did
hack-work, so he was keenly aware of the shortcomings of a
market economy.
> [I would certainly agree with your recommendation of
> _The Pound Era_. And I was personally happy with
> Kenner's sympathy with Pound, and sympathetic explication
> of Social Credit. But, before Kenner, if I were to have
> made a desert-island-ten-book-list, Pound's _Cantos_
> would have been on it for me. I see them as such a break
> into a high, hard-chiseled art against the background
> of "methinkest I fain would feel poetical today"
> versification that, say, Sassoon was coming out of.
That's exactly Pound's view. I wouldn't call it a fascist
aesthetic, but there's a link to his fascism. Pound felt
poetry in English had become terribly humid and muddy. He
wanted to drain the swamp it had stumbled into: to replace the
marshlands of Swinburne's watery versifying with "a high,
hard-chiseled art," as you say. That's why he translated Anglo-
-Saxon poetry: he saw it as a bracing contrast to the
assonant oozings of recent times.
(Not-so-incidentally, Pound brings up Sassoon in the radio
broadcasts precisely to point out that he isn't Anglo-Saxon:
Pound's exact phrase. "No Sassoon is an Englishman racially.")
Translated into political terms, the same feeling drew him
to Mussolini. Pound credited Il Duce immensely for having
succeeded in draining the Italian swamps -- the task that Pound
was attempting in English poetry. Herculean work, like
cleaning the Augean stables, which needed Herculean men willing
and able to get rid of the muck.
You're right that Italian fascism didn't emphasize
anti-Semitism, but the Final Solution was driven, in part, by a
similar impulse. To the Nazis, the Jews were vermin and
insects that required extermination -- the Holocaust was, among
other things, an effort to cleanse Europe of impurities.
One critic -- I forget who -- says Pound's final rejection
of fascism doesn't come til very late in the Cantos when he
makes his peace with the wetlands and writes hopefully about "a
little light, like rushlight/to lead back to splendour."
> So anyway I came to Kenner already enthusiastic about Pound,
> and found more than one aspect of Pound illuminated for me
> by Kenner. However, I must add that later I felt a little
> bit betrayed by Kenner (and Davenport, too), who, in his
> enthusiasm and sympathy for a great poet, elides I think
> the more bug-ugly aspects of Pound. Maybe he figures
> everyone already knows that stuff already, but, anyway "that
> stuff" took me quite by surpise in later
> discussion (hereon I believe it was with Mikhail), and when
> I looked into it in Humphrey Carpenter's _A Serious
> Character: The Life of Ezra Pound_, it became obvious
> that Pound was rabidly anti-Semitic in those Italian radio
> addresses. I mean, it is not like Pat Buchanan's public
> pussy-footing around with veiled and deniable baitings,
> but froth-at-the-mouth racism. And apparently Pound was
> voluntarily and independently so, since the Italian
> fascisti weren't especially anti-Semitic or out to
> encourage him in it.]
As I said, Kenner gives a sympathetic -- also a
Pound-o-centric -- account. Likewise Davenport. No, you can't
count on them for a rounded picture. But I'm surprised that
you were surprised by Pound's anti-Semitism -- I thought it was
common knowledge. It was front-page news when _The Pisan
Cantos_ won the Bollingen prize. It also turns up now and then
in the Cantos themselves.
Pound didn't pussyfoot on any topic: that was Eliot's job.
He did it superbly -- his _Selected Essays_ are on the
_National Review_ list, and they're a worthy choice. But let's
go back to Pound. His opinions about the Jews were more
forceful than firm. Sometimes he talked about "Jewspapers" and
muttered darkly about conspiracies -- others he denounced
racism in general and pogroms in specific. He even referred to
his own anti-Semitism as a "suburban prejudice," although
that recognition came to him late.
You're right about his independence from the fascists. In
the radio broadcasts Pound was speaking entirely on his own
account, telling the truth as he saw it without directives from
the Italian government. Some young fascists Pound _did_
associate with found themselves in jail -- apparently Mussolini
didn't appreciate their political views.
-- Moggin
Robert Teeter
: There's even a famous t.v. commercial where stately, plump
: John Houseman hawks the services of an investment firm by
: intoning, "They make their money the old-fashioned way." (Well-
: timed pause.) "They _earn_ it."
: The conceit of the ad is that earning money has fallen out
: of fashion. The ad-men must have figured that would be a
: widely effective pitch, since they put it on national t.v. I'm
: inclined to agree. It's an idea with appeal to hidebound
: conformists who feature themselves as rebellious individualists
: -- a common type in the U.S.A.
: Pound would be probably be more interested in the multiple
: irony of Wall St. money-men selling themselves as productive
: workers to folks who'd like to make money from their money with
: all the effort of dialing a phone.
There's an update featuring on NPR/PBS (either
the Lehrer NewsHour or "Marketplace"). The investment
company mentions some vaguely futuristic idea, then says,
"Opportunities abound. Now let's get to work." Wasn't it
Ronald Reagan who criticized "throwing money at problems"?
Gary Lee Stonum
Jim Collier <nospa...@home.thx> wrote in message
news:372BBB19...@home.thx...
<some other stuff snipped>
The town in "American Graffiti" seems pretty clearly to have
been based on Modesto, where George Lucas grew up. As did
my cousins, who are a bit younger than him, and who once
tried to explain to me the in-jokes that only Modestoans
would understand. I don't recall that the in-jokes were
especially clever, but that may just have been the infinite
condescension toward Modesto that we from the big city of
Sacto always maintained. Well, we had to feel superior to
someone . . . and Turlock would have been too easy.
Gary
--
=== Gary Lee Stonum ===
http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/faculty/stonum.html
"Every word should be a blow: every thought should
instantly grapple with its fellow." --Hazlitt
Francis Muir
> Wasn't it Ronald Reagan who criticized
> "throwing money at problems"?
"problems" was his key word for poverty.
--
Francis Muir
Ted Samsel
: long, long
: > gone, and so are the Doggie Diners. End of Northern
: California barf.
: >
: <some other stuff snipped>
: The town in "American Graffiti" seems pretty clearly to have
: been based on Modesto, where George Lucas grew up. As did
: my cousins, who are a bit younger than him, and who once
: tried to explain to me the in-jokes that only Modestoans
: would understand. I don't recall that the in-jokes were
: especially clever, but that may just have been the infinite
: condescension toward Modesto that we from the big city of
: Sacto always maintained. Well, we had to feel superior to
: someone . . . and Turlock would have been too easy.
Poor Turlock. Caught betwixt Sackatomatoes & Fresno.
Gore Bob
On Sat, 1 May 1999, tejas wrote:
> Well, shoot, bubba, THE GREEN BERETS is on tonight on cable and you can
> repent at the altar of the other son of Ioway, Marion Morrison. I did,
Oh, no, I've been Barry Sadlered again! (Sgt. Barry Sadler, for the
uninformed, was the earlier incarnation of Lee Greenwood, before he
ruptured his vocal chords by trying to swing a claymore two-handed. His
enduring misfortune was that his greatest hit was successful only in a
cover version performed by Nancy Sinatra. Now you know).
Marion M hails from Winterset, which is the county seat of Madison
County, the place where all those bridges are (well, three of them,
anyway); the visitor in a hurry can get two pilgrimmages in at one blow.
Just down the road apiece is Van Meter, birthplace of Bob Feller.
Down the road more than a piece is West Branch, birthplace of Herbert
Hoover and site of the H Hoover Presidential Library and Museum (be sure
not to miss it- the museum is pretty hilarious. They knew a thing or two
about spin control in those days of yore, too). Hoover is Ioway's only
contribution to the nation's highest office (as Morrison is their only
contribution as big-shot movie star- do we sense a trend, here?); it's
unlikely they'll be given another chance.
> I haven't felt this good since we used to get the Dan Smoot Report and
> we'd listen to the Rev'd J. Charles Jessup on XERF, Del Rio, Texas.
> That's
> an AM border blaster;
Nobody I knew ever listened to Jessup, though he sounds like a kick
(see the great profile in a recent New Yorker). Let's not forget Bill
James Hargis, if we're talking evangelists, and HL Hunt for fruitcake
politics.
same on Wolfman Jack got his start on.
ObKeyword: Oxnard
>
> Oh, sorry. You have no cable.
No, but I still have a chain that can be yanked...
Bob Gore
Robert Teeter
Ackerman, B. _Stakeholder Society_, Yale University Press ('99), $26
0-300-07826-9
"This provocative book outlines an ambitious proposal to put our
collective money where our rhetoric is: give every American a one-time
grant of $80,000.00 when he or she reaches early adulthood." (Publishers
Weekly)
Michael S. Morris
Francis intones re RR:
"problems" was his key word for poverty.
O Pshaw! And you consider it not to be
a problem?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
tejas
>
> I just ran across an ad for a book (!) on this theme:
>
> Ackerman, B. _Stakeholder Society_, Yale University Press ('99), $26
> 0-300-07826-9
> "This provocative book outlines an ambitious proposal to put our
> collective money where our rhetoric is: give every American a one-time
> grant of $80,000.00 when he or she reaches early adulthood." (Publishers
> Weekly)
What about us folks in their 50s? 'Twould come in handy. Much less
stressful than playing the Lotto or hanging at the dog track.
Then again, the sucker born every minute chestnut comes to mind.
"Ya wanna buy a duck?"
tejas
>
> I just ran across an ad for a book (!) on this theme:
>
> Ackerman, B. _Stakeholder Society_, Yale University Press ('99), $26
> 0-300-07826-9
> "This provocative book outlines an ambitious proposal to put our
> collective money where our rhetoric is: give every American a one-time
> grant of $80,000.00 when he or she reaches early adulthood." (Publishers
> Weekly)
What about us folks in their 50s? 'Twould come in handy. Much less
stressful than playing the Lotto or hanging at the dog track.
--
Jim Collier
>
> Gary Lee Stonum <gx...@po.cwru.edu> wrote:
>
> : long, long
> : > gone, and so are the Doggie Diners. End of Northern
> : California barf.
> : >
> : <some other stuff snipped>
>
> : The town in "American Graffiti" seems pretty clearly to have
> : been based on Modesto, where George Lucas grew up. As did
> : my cousins, who are a bit younger than him, and who once
> : tried to explain to me the in-jokes that only Modestoans
> : would understand. I don't recall that the in-jokes were
> : especially clever, but that may just have been the infinite
> : condescension toward Modesto that we from the big city of
> : Sacto always maintained. Well, we had to feel superior to
> : someone . . . and Turlock would have been too easy.
>
> Poor Turlock. Caught betwixt Sackatomatoes & Fresno.
Hmm, does Turlock figure in something literary? I'm suprised
you know of the place, Ted. It's famous for one thing, and it
ain't chicken, although Lilian Zackey (the Frank Perdue of the
West Coast) probably has a pullet surprise around there, too.
Jim
Ted Samsel
I know people who had jobs teaching there in the '70s & '80s.
They left. I also know someone who went to HS there in the
early '60s who now lives in Alabama.
Michael Zeleny
>Robert Teeter wrote:
>> I just ran across an ad for a book (!) on this theme:
>>
>>Ackerman, B. _Stakeholder Society_, Yale University Press ('99), $26
>>0-300-07826-9
>>"This provocative book outlines an ambitious proposal to put our
>>collective money where our rhetoric is: give every American a one-time
>>grant of $80,000.00 when he or she reaches early adulthood." (Publishers
>>Weekly)
>What about us folks in their 50s? 'Twould come in handy. Much less
>stressful than playing the Lotto or hanging at the dog track.
"When you're ripe, it's time to go!"
John Silber, a Kantian ethicist running for governor of Massachussetts
in 1990, opines on rationing health care services to senior citizens.
Cordially -- Mikhail Zel...@math.ucla.edu * M...@ptyx.com ** www.ptyx.com
God: "Sum id quod sum." ** 7576 Willow Glen Road, Los Angeles, CA 90046
Descartes: "Cogito ergo sum." * 323.876.8234 (fon) * 323.876.8054 (fax)
Popeye: "Sum id quod sum et id totum est quod sum." **** www.alonzo.org
established on 2.26.1958 ** itinerant philosopher * will think for food
Ted Samsel
: >> I just ran across an ad for a book (!) on this theme:
: >>
: >>Ackerman, B. _Stakeholder Society_, Yale University Press ('99), $26
: >>0-300-07826-9
: >>"This provocative book outlines an ambitious proposal to put our
: >>collective money where our rhetoric is: give every American a one-time
: >>grant of $80,000.00 when he or she reaches early adulthood." (Publishers
: >>Weekly)
: >What about us folks in their 50s? 'Twould come in handy. Much less
: >stressful than playing the Lotto or hanging at the dog track.
: "When you're ripe, it's time to go!"
: John Silber, a Kantian ethicist running for governor of Massachussetts
: in 1990, opines on rationing health care services to senior citizens.
Don't pay any attention to him. He's from San Antonio.
Crispus Attucks
Gary Lee Stonum wrote in message <7gk6o8$9rh$1...@alexander.INS.CWRU.Edu>...
>The town in "American Graffiti" seems pretty clearly to have
>been based on Modesto, where George Lucas grew up. As did
>my cousins, who are a bit younger than him, and who once
>tried to explain to me the in-jokes that only Modestoans
>would understand. I don't recall that the in-jokes were
>especially clever, but that may just have been the infinite
>condescension toward Modesto that we from the big city of
>Sacto always maintained. Well, we had to feel superior to
>someone . . . and Turlock would have been too easy.
Hear tell Modesto is breathing new life as a charming very-exurb of exurban
San Francisco.