Books and the Arts (May 1979)

The ecology con

Jeff Riggenbach

The Environmental Protection Hustle, by Bernard J. Frieden. The MIT Press, 211 pp. $12.50.

The environmental or “ecology” movement is one legacy of the decadent ’60s which might seem at first glance to have outlived its usefulness. It is scarcely possible, of course, to gainsay the root claims of the movement—that human beings, like any other living creatures, must live with the environment, not against it, if they wish to live at all; and that the tastelessness and shortsightedness of which human beings sometimes seem uniquely capable have already begun to damage their environment, both aesthetically and hygienically. Only the hopelessly insensitive could fail to see the harm done to the great natural beauty of the city of Los Angeles, for example, by photochemical smog—or to feel, in their eyes and lungs, the harm that such smog does to the organism in the enviroment.

But root claims, alas, have had little enough to do with the sociopolitical development of the environmental movement since the ’60s. By the early years of this decade the movement had been institutionalized and bureaucratized in the form of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (and a dozen or more lesser clone agencies in the various states). And it wasn’t long before these agencies were busily using the rhetoric and the public opinion clout of the movement to advance causes which few environmentalists actually supported.

The closest parallel probably lies in the history of another ’60s movement gone wrong, the civil rights movement. Few if any of the flower children who demanded equal rights for blacks a decade ago were trying to build a society in which it is no longer possible to obtain certain kinds of employmment (especially desirable white collar and professional employment) unless one is black. Few if any of them dreamed of a society in which reverse discrimination has become a fact of daily life, and in which individuals are not judged on their own individual merits but on the ridiculously futile basis of how much prejudice was directed against their great grandfathers. How then did it come to pass that the monstrous absurdity called affirmative action is the most conspicuous product of the civil rights movement of the ’60s?

The answer may be given in a single word: cooptation. The most significant political achievement of the ’60s, after all, was the successful cooptation by the left of the grassroots, anti-war, anti-draft, anti-authoritarian, pro-personal freedom movement we know now as the counterculture. And this cooptation was accomplished in the same way it is now being un-accomplished in the ’70s—issue by issue and constituency by constituency. The left had traditionally associated itself with oppressed peoples; it was easy as pie, then, to go before the inexperienced leaders of a new grassroots civil rights movement and offer ideological and practical political leadership and assistance and convince these longhaired young radicals that they were in fact leftists themselves.

But, as has been noted, there were actually big differences between the approaches to civil rights activism of the youthful demonstrators and their self-appointed mentors. And millions of people who took to the streets to abolish the laws mandating racial discrimination saw their collective political influence used to pass affirmative action laws—which have done much to better the condition of professional bureaucrats and tighten the government’s growing stranglehold on employment in this country, but which have done almost nothing for the blacks they were ostensibly designed to help. Since 1964, when affirmative action was born, the teenage black unemployment rate has almost doubled, and the percentage of non-whites in the labor force has shrunk steadily at the same time that the percentage of non-whites in the population as a whole has grown.

The history of the environmental movement is almost chillingly similar. In the beginning there was the unexpected, virtually overnight metamorphosis of a lunatic conservationist fringe into a genuine mass movement with millions of (mostly young) constituents, most of whom were demanding, in effect, “What is this? You can’t go on polluting these rivers and lakes and streams and releasing poisonous gases into the sky. We have to live here!” Then came the cooptation, in which the leftists (mostly of the Establishment liberal type) jumped on the bandwagon, took over the reigns and took the first available turn in the direction of more government regulations and control. And if the affirmative action program is at once the most conspicuous and the most dreadfully unrepresentative product of the spirit of the civil rights movement of the ’60s, then the environmental impact statement must be the most conspicuous and unrepresentative product of the spirit of that same decade’s environmental movement. For just as affirmative action has enriched the bureaucracy without doing one whit of good for blacks, so the environmental impact hustle has enriched the bureaucracy (and the special interests whose satisfaction helps keep the bureaucrats in their jobs) without doing one whit of good for the environment.

Consider, as one case in point, the passage of laws requiring environmental impact statements from developers who propose to create new single family housing. MIT Professor of Urban Planning Bernard J. Frieden has done so, and has published his conclusions and the data on which they are based in a splendidly readable and informative book. The Environmental Protection Hustle is concerned principally with the impact of new environmental legislation on single family housing in California, where the environmental movement first got started and has built its largest, most vocal and most durable following. As Frieden sees it, that impact has manifested itself mainly in housing prices. Everyone knows that the cost of single family housing is higher in San Francisco than in any other city in the country, and that the cost of such housing in Los Angeles and San Diego is not far behind. The astronomical cost of a single family home in California is the central fact which lies behind the unbearable property tax assessments which lie behind Proposition 13. But according to Frieden, it is in this as as in so much else: as California goes, so goes the nation. “California is not a national aberration,” he writes. “There are enough examples of anti-growth tactics to show that what happened in California [during the 1970s] was part of a national movement.”

And what exactly happened in California during those years after the fatal institutionalization and bureaucratization of the environmental movement? Well, first there was a sudden, unexpected, dramatic leap in the number of buyers in the housing market, as the leading edge of the baby boom generation began looking for homes of their own. Then came the inevitable market adjustment to this abruptly swollen demand: the price of the average home skyrocketed. And as if this didn’t make things bad enough for young would-be homeowners, a move was already afoot to make them much worse. As Frieden depicts it, while an entire generation “was beating the bushes trying to find affordable housing in the suburbs, another group, smaller but influential, was doing its best to stop suburban homebuilding wherever possible—or at least to make sure that whatever was built was expensive. This coalition against homebuilding consisted of suburbanites who feared it would bring higher taxes and damaging social consequences, environmentalists concerned about the impact of growth on the natural landscape, and local government officials sympathetic to these views.”

But the diversity of their actual reasons for opposing new suburban homebuilding notwithstanding, almost all the new opponents of growth who became active in California during the early ’70s went public under the banner of environmentalism. As Frieden writes.

Many growth opponents use environmental arguments to mask other motives, such as fear of property tax increases or anxieties about keeping their community exclusive. Environmental rhetoric has become a valued currency for public debate, with much greater voter appeal than arguments that appear more narrowly self-interested. As a result people who are not environmentalists in any sense often borrow it for their own purposes.

This hypocrisy is perhaps most flagrantly noticeable when anti-growth “environmentalists” adopt positions openly in conflict with their avowed principles. “Environmental groups,” Frieden writes, “have helped to stop a series of housing developments located within short commuting distances of the main job centers around San Francisco. The result has been to push home-building farther out to scattered sites at the fringes of the urban area, where the new residents will use more gas and pollute more air while they drive longer distances to work.”

In other cases, environmental groups have taken positions which strongly suggest the presence of a hidden anti-growth agenda behind their agonized efforts to protect the ecosystem.

Sierra Club chapters, for example, have opposed some suburban housing on the grounds that it would generate unnecessary long-distance commuting; have opposed other housing near suburban job centers on the grounds that it should be located closer to the central cities; and have opposed new housing near the central cities on the grounds that it would use up scarce open space there. Another California environmental group, People for Open Space, has objected to housing in the valleys near San Francisco because the valley soil is better suited to farming, and it has opposed new construction on the hillsides because it claims hill developments will increase the chances of landslides, floods, and fires.

On occasion, environmental groups oppose residential developments on grounds which can only be called frivolous. Frieden reports on one environmental impact statement which “made an issue of alleged danger to a rare snake whose presence in the area was never verified, and to a presumably rare red-legged frog that turned out to be neither rare nor endangered.” Yet it is almost certain that some housing developments have actually been stopped by such frivolous objections, so slipshod and politically biased are the local hearings which judge their validity. “Local reviews,” Frieden writes,

do not provide a balanced interpretation of the consequences of growth. They consistently exaggerate the problems that new housing might create. The public hearings have a theatrical quality that encourages speakers to simplify and dramatize all issues, including those of growth impact. In addition, the technical studies that local governments sponsor in order to analyze development impacts are themselves unbalanced. They lean heavily on speculative assumptions about events that nobody can foresee very clearly, and the results owe more to value judgments and political orientations than they do to scientific research.

The results of all this “environmentalism” have been devastating to millions of would-be owners of homes. The home prices which had already begun to double in the early ’70s because of increased demand had almost redoubled in some areas by the mid ’70s because of the environmental protection hustle. “Between 1972 and 1975,” Frieden writes, “environmental lawsuits alone challenged developments containing 29,000 new housing units, in an area [San Francisco] that normally builds only 45,000 units each year.” It doesn’t take much imagination or much knowledge of economics to see the effect that would have on home prices in a market already overcrowded with buyers. Frieden argues that the environmental protection hustle is largely responsible for the passage of Proposition 13, because, as has been noted, it drove up prices—and tax assessments—at a time when they were already intolerably high.

And let it be reemphasized that this situation is not unique to California. All over the country, Frieden tells us, the environmental protection hustle “has made a clear and substantial contribution to the escalation of new home prices; yet its success in discouraging homebuilding has failed to produce important environmental benefits for the public at large. Instead it has protected the environmental, social, and economic advantages of established suburban residents who live near land that could be used for new housing.”

Yes, just as the civil rights activists of the ’60s never wanted a society in which it is impossible to get a job unless you’re black, so the ecology activists of the ’60s never wanted a society in which you can’t buy a home unless you have a family income of around $50,000 a year. The best laid plans of mice and men, it seems … especially when their execution is entrusted to the State.

Blueprint for a nuclear war

Jack Shafer

Dropshot, by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, edited by Anthony Cave Brown, Dial Press, 330 pp., $12.95.

By 1949 the no war, no peace of the cold war appeared to many to be packed with Soviet victories. Northern China and most of Eastern Europe had fallen to the Communists. At home in the United States President Truman urged universal military training and loyalty checks, sponsored the Marshall Plan, and seized the railroads against the threat of labor trouble. Britain was broke. Berlin had been blockaded. Revolution shook Ecuador, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Albanians mined British warships in the Corfu Channel. Marxist uprisings in Greece, Indochina and Indonesia and political maneuverings of the Communist parties of France and Italy all portended world revolution. The House Un-American Activities Committee was born. Communists exerted real influence in the U.S. labor movement. The NATO treaty was signed, as was the Warsaw Pact. And in 1949 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics detonated its first atomic bomb. Total war between the hostile and competing ideologies of the USSR and USA seemed inevitable.

Against this backdrop of world “instability,” Plan Dropshot was formulated. Authorized by the National Security Act of 1947 (the same legislation that brought you the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency), the Joint Chiefs of Staff began to plan for world war with the Soviets. Described by editor Anthony Cave Brown as “the flow sheet for Armageddon,” Dropshot was written in late 1949, postulating January 1, 1957 as the day World War III would break out. The date was totally arbitrary, used for planning purposes only. Dropshot provided for the atomization of Russia, invasion and occupation of the world’s largest nation, and the destruction of world Communism in the case of Soviet “aggression.” Curiously, Dropshot does not define what constitutes “aggression.” Is it invasion, threat of invasion, build-up? Dropshot gives no answer.

Dropshot was neither the first nor, presumably, the last of the war plans. In his editor’s prologue, Brown acquaints us with a whole family of such war plans. The Rainbow and Pot of Gold plans were drawn up by our Army and Navy for potential war with Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. General Eisenhower produced a plan for war with the Soviets in late 1945 while still Commander-in-chief of the Allied forces, dubbing it Totality. The Pentagon’s Joint Intelligence Staff wrote an air war study fifty-one days after the Russo-American alliance ended with the surrender of Japan. The Staff envisioned the atomic bombing of twenty Russian cities if war broke out between the USSR and the USA. The plan intended to destroy the Soviet capability to wage land war. Other war plans carried such catchy code names as Broiler, ABC 101, Charioteer, Cogwheel, Gunpowder, Dualism, Doublestar, and Fleetwood.

The unnamed framers of plan Dropshot conceived a political, economic, and psychological war directed from Moscow whose natural line of development would be massive armed conflict. Dropshot’s authors wrote:

Never before have the intentions and strategic objectives of an aggressor nation been so clearly defined…. The ultimate object of the USSR is domination of a Communist world. In its progress to this goal, the USSR has employed, and may be expected to employ, the principle of economy of force.

Dropshot speculated that the Soviets would invade Western Europe from Poland with 100 line divisions, 5,000 combat tactical aircraft, 1,800 long-range bombers, and 2,500 transport planes. The planners concluded that the Soviets would smash Allied forces at the Rhine, overrun France and reach the Pyrenees in less than three months.

Conceding the initial land battles to the Soviets, Dropshot was basically a defensive plan, well in line with the Anglo-American tradition that sneak attacks are somehow “unfair.” Once attacked, the United States intended to begin Plan Trojan, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) aspect of Dropshot. Trojan called for an air offensive of 300 atomic bombs and 20,000 tons of conventional explosives dropped on 200 targets in 100 urban areas by B-29s and B-50s from bases in Britain. Our forces were to “secure and control” sea and air lanes and limit the battle to the European and Asian continents. The Dropshot planners hoped for a short war in which the USSR would be ruined by the SAC attack against its administrative, rail, manufacturing, and mining centers. Because Russian bombers had the same range as American bombers and the Soviets were rapidly building their own nuclear arsenal and the planners figured the Russians would stage an invasion of Britain once the continent was secured, it was decided that the United States could hold the British bases for no longer than 60 days. If the Trojan plan failed to accomplish its objectives the United States was prepared for a long, drawn out war, an Orwellian war of (in the words of editor Brown), “… two exhausted giants hurling missiles at each other from time to time in an interminable and inconclusive war that ruined the world.”

Plan Trojan came under the scrutiny of a further Joint Chiefs study. Lieutenant General J. E. Hull was charged by the Chiefs to see if SAC could win the air war in the 60 days before the Russians took the British bases. Hull’s study is an interesting postscript to Dropshot. Because of the miserable state of intelligence about the Soviets, Hull and his group had to evaluate two different hypothetical levels of Soviet defense capability. The high level posited a modern air force, a sort of Russian Luftwaffe; the lower level posited a Russian air defense of Russian WW II caliber. This ignorance of Soviet capabilities permeates Dropshot. Brown provides frequent editor’s notes that correct Dropshot’s errors. For example, Dropshot estimated 1800 long-range Soviet bombers when they only had 700.

Hull’s group ran aerial tests, conducted war games, and performed computations to anticipate every possible American and Russian contingency. Hull’s study concluded that even under the best conditions (low level of Soviet defense and night raids) that SAC would be unable to complete Trojan given the casualities forecasted.

Hull’s group also examined the logistics of such an aerial bombardment and discovered the campaign could not be supported by the supplies of aircraft, parts, fuel, ordinance, personnel, and transportation that would be existent on May 1, 1950. Even the airlift required to bring the British bases up to Dropshot-Trojan rank was outside the ability of the Military Air Transport Service. Finally, Hull reported that the British bases were so vulnerable to air attack that once the Soviets realized the build-up of these bases and the poor level of air defense they would attack and thereby preempt Trojan. in short, Hull found Dropshot a recipe for the loss of WW III.

The importance of Hull’s study was not lost on the Pentagon. In large measure, we owe the speed, reliability, and proliferation of SAC forces to the Hull study. SAC did not come up to Trojan standards until the late ’50s and early ’60s.

After Phase I of Dropshot, which essentially is the Trojan operation, Phase II, a time buying period, was to follow. Phase II was to build up the war-making potential of the United States so the Pentagon could initiate Phase III, a major land offensive in Europe. Phase III required manpower of 6.25-million men in uniform and another 8-million in merchant marine and other services. It is debatable whether or not the United States and Canada could have come up with that many men given the fall of Western Europe.

Dropshot is complete in its pessimism. The weak military stance of the Western powers is obvious. SAC was unable to complete Trojan. The American and British forces in Europe were situated in a posture of occupation rather than one of defense and very vulnerable to attack. A USAF report stated in 1950 that the Air Force could not defend the continental United States from one-way suicide bomber missions from Russia. Soviet sabotage in the United States was widely feared and the eventual invasion of the United States was given a chance of success, never minding the mind-boggling logistic problems involved. In fact, the only tactical advantage Dropshot gave the United States was the U.S. Navy’s over the Red Navy.

Then why didn’t the Soviets launch WW III? By all U.S. estimates they had a good chance of winning. The period between 1948 and 1957 would have been the best time for such a war before the introduction of ICBMs and mutually assured destruction (MAD). Their intelligence was better than ours. Our nuclear arsenal was incomplete to properly atomize Russia. Biological warfare, sabotage, and coventional warfare all gave Russia the edge. So why didn’t they start WW III? Perhaps for the same reason they don’t today. Murray N. Rothbard has cogently noted in his newly revised edition of For A New Liberty that the Soviets have never expanded their borders, but merely defended old Russian imperial gains. As Rothbard notes, Marxist-Leninist ideology is expansionist, but assumes that the “victory of Communism is inevitable—not on the wings of outside force, but rather from accumulating tensions and ‘contradicions’ within each society.” For Rothbard, the Soviets’ major priority is defense against attack, with the domination of the world a distant second. And the border the Soviets are most sensitive about, and rightfully so, is the western border, the site of three major invasions of Russian soil in the last century. As Rothbard points out, it is possible the Soviets may contradict Marxist-Leninist theory, but if the Dropshot premise is that the Soviets plan world domination through their Marxist-Leninist ideology, surely a closer examination of the “peaceful coexistence” nature of that ideology should be taken into account.

In all fairness it should be pointed out that Dropshot was not an evaluation of Soviet intentions, but an evaluation of Soviet capabilities. Perhaps that is the subject of a study not yet declassified. Also, one wonders how close possessing a plan for war comes to constituting an active intention to wage that war. In 1948 Stalin referred to American war plans against Russia and the Russian representative to the United Nations, Andrei Vishinsky, charged America was planning atomic war with Russia over Berlin. Still, there is nothing in Dropshot to suggest it was a preemptive plan to destroy the Soviets before they got too powerful. If such a plan exists, I doubt it will ever be declassified.

Brown glosses over the fact that the United States planned to use nuclear devices on Russian territory in the event of a conventional Russian assault. Actually this tactical decision should come as no surprise. For all the lip service the United States has paid to the principle of never being the first to use nuclear weapons in combat, the fact remains that only one nation has. Ask the Japanese. Could it be that our leaders did not find the use of nuclear weapons so abhorrent until our nuclear monopoly was broken?

Brown wonders why Dropshot was released at all. As he writes in the prologue,

… I am bound to conclude that it was folly to release this document. It should have been burned, buried, or preserved in some secret vault, for it cannot endear America to Russia…. The Russians will argue that Dropshot constitutes an example of America’s continuing bellicosity toward Russia and that therefore Russia must maintain and expand her armed forces.

Released by a 1977 Freedom of Information request and the Government’s decision to declassify, Dropshot is now public property and available at the National Archives for fifteen cents a page. Brown entertains several possibilities for the disclosure of Dropshot. Maybe Dropshot was a blind designed to hide another plan, or a detente torpedo. Brown finally decides Dropshot was released because it is obsolete. Conceivably, Dropshot was designed as an alarmist document to instill fear of the Soviets in the hearts of the President and Congress, a fear that could pump up the military budget. As Rothbard has written, “… war and phony ‘external threats’ have long been the chief means by which the state wins back the loyalty of its subjects. War and militarism were the gravediggers of classical liberalism; we must not allow the state to get away with this ruse ever again.”

Was Dropshot the beginning of a 30 year-old ruse, a ruse that still places millions of U.S. troops and billions of U.S. dollars in defense of a Europe under no real threat of Soviet attack? Do American and Russian sabers rattle in harmony? Libertarian foreign policy, still in its infancy, can profit from a detailed analysis of Dropshot. A “flow sheet for Armageddon” is not something you can ignore.

Jack Shafer is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

The machinery of Chicago

David J. Theroux

The Machinery of Freedom, by David Friedman. Arlington House, 240 pp., $10.

Within the last few months, two major introductory works on libertarianism have been reissued: Murray N. Rothbard’s For a New Liberty and David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom. Both were first published in 1973, when the libertarian movement had not yet established itself as a major American intellectual and political entity. Both authors sought to push libertarian theory to its logical conclusion by arguing for a purely stateless society, in which government activity is replaced by free private institutions.

Since 1973 the once obscure libertarian movement has grown into an influential group of organizations holding immense promise for redirecting the future course of society. Indeed, an argument can now be made for the view that the libertarian movement has “grown up,” with a more intellectually sophisticated, professionally-oriented new generation of people at its helm.

However, while the new edition of Rothbard’s For a New Liberty is a revised and expanded edition, updated to reflect the considerable advances since 1973, David Friedman’s book includes no textual updating at all, only the addition of a helpful index and some useful revisions in the appendix of organizations and references. In addition, where For a New Liberty places libertarianism in a broad historical context, and offers a persuasive strategy and vision for the future, The Machinery of Freedom is more a collection of insights and suggestions blended together as a refutation of many popular myths about the concepts of private property, individualism, and free market capitalism.

Despite this approach, The Machinery of Freedom is still a very important and useful addition to the library of works seeking to dismantle state power. The new hardcover edition is a reprint of the earlier Harper and Row Colphon paperback. The book is divided into three parts: “In Defense of Property,” “Libertarian Grab Bag, or How to Sell the State in Small Pieces,” and “Anarchy is Not Chaos.” About one third of the book consists of revised columns and essays published many years ago but still very relevant to the themes they treat. (Some are even more relevant than before: “Open the Gates” is an excellent demolition of the case for immigration laws; short, concise and to-the-point.)

Throughout Machinery, Friedman offers creative analyses of a myriad of economic and social ideas and issues. His style is personable, non-pejorative, easy-to-read, and he provides the reader with an optimistic and intelligent discussion of many sensitive social matters. He presents excellent arguments for privatizing schools, streets and natural resources; for deregulating utilities, the professions, transportation, and communications; and for legalizing drugs and alternative lifestyles. In addition, he effectively contrasts socialism to capitalism, citing Ludwig von Mises’s definitive refutation of the case for collectivist economic planning. Furthermore, in discussing socialism’s appeal he shows how such values as love, equality, and brotherhood are unattainable outside a political system of voluntarism.

In fact, Machinery provides the very best “Chicago School” attempt at legitimizing libertarianism as a political system. In many ways, David Friedman goes far beyond Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, attempting to set forth a more thorough treatment of liberty in all its ramifications. As a result, the book offers one of the best insights into the nature of the Chicago School ideology. However, this defining feature of the book also severely limits its effectiveness.

To the Chicagoan economist, economic and political analysis can only be made on a utilitarian basis; the relative merits of various government policies are evaluated on a more-or-less cost-benefit basis. At the outset of the book, although Friedman declares his support for the concept of private property, including a passing mention of self-ownership, he sidesteps the problem of establishing any specific criterion for just property titles, pointing out that “libertarians disagree” on how just ownership is acquired, leaving it at that. He emphasizes the importance of rules, without addressing the question: What rules? Thus, instead of taking up some of the criteria argued for by figures like Nozick in his Anarchy, State and Utopia, or Rothbard in several places, he avoids the problem. It is particularly unfortunate that this feature of the first edition is carried over into this second edition despite the interluding work of such natural rights theorists as Nozick, Rothbard, Tibor Machan, Eric Mack, Ronald Dworkin, Henry Veatch, David Norton and others. This shoving aside of normative considerations is, alas, something we find all too frequently among economists who do not, apparently, regard moral judgments as “scientific.”

In attempting to interpret social problems in terms of the concept of private property entitlement, we must first have a theory of what such a relationship means. The reason a theory or criterion of justice in property entitlements is so important is that the entire controversy in political theory is not only over the fact that all human behavior requires controlling and directing physical entities, but is also over who should control and direct what physical entities and why. David Friedman’s tacitly utilitarian justification for property rights is simply not sufficient. Why indeed should each individual possess even the right to self-ownership in his person, as Friedman claims? Why shouldn’t I rightfully own New York City, the Pacific Ocean, or even David Friedman? Why shouldn’t the automotive factory worker own the crankshaft he has installed? Why shouldn’t the United Farm Workers own the lettuce crop of California? Why shouldn’t the Shah own the nation of Iran? Why shouldn’t Carter or Brzezinski own the American people (a question, indeed, which has apparently never occured to them, at least)?

The point is that there is no way to know who should own what without a criterion, that is, a clear ethical theory to guide us in our judgments of what constitutes justice in human affairs. Otherwise, any definition of “ownership” could be substituted for self-ownership and be evaluated in Friedman’s fashion. As a result, Machinery cannot adequately justify a libertarian society. In fact, Friedman’s Machinery implicitly recognizes this fundamental problem in the book’s occasional uneasy assertion of ethical considerations.

But even Friedman’s utilitarian cost-benefit analysis itself suffers. As Hayek, Buchanan, Lachmann, Mises and others have shown, costs and benefits are subjective valuations continually altered over time by countless diverse individuals, with the assessments of the importance of government programs necessarily shifting from individual to individual. Hence, the trucking industry’s cost-benefit analysis of the ICC might be quite different from that of the average consumer. Similarly, the cost-benefit analysis of a military draft is quite different for the Pentagon than for an 18-year-old male.

Instead of attempting to register some inter-personal utility optimum for society, Friedman should have applied the methodological individualism of this subjective cost theory to show who benefits and who loses from government programs. As a result, we could have learned not only who benefits from government intervention, but in fact, who is responsible for various forms of statism. From here we could map out the exact workings of the American corporate state system, who controls it and why, where it is and is not vulnerable, and how we might act to combat it. Friedman considers none of this, disputing instead the very existence of a “ruling class” in his disingenuous chapter “The Economics of Theft, or the Nonexistence of the Ruling Class.”

The second major feature of Machinery which suffers from Friedman’s “Chicagoan” ideology is perhaps the most serious and reflects Chicagoan thought most dramatically. In contrast to the Austrians, as neoclassicists and like Keynesians, Chicagoan economists approach economics as the study of a series of strictly static relationships in which all human tastes, knowledge, and choices have been pre-arranged and are unchangeable. In this manner, economics becomes the comparative study of different states of equilibrium. As a result, how or why human beings can move from one state to another is never considered, nor, more importantly, is the fact that such states can never actually exist. An end state in which all desires are satisfied, all prices come to rest and action ceases cannot exist without the termination of human life. Life is a continuous process of action, and if we are to understand ourselves, our society, and comparative political systems, we must study the cause and effect relations of such action.

The relevance of Friedman’s ideology in Machinery, Chapter 31: “Is Anarcho-Capitalism Libertarian?” Here the avoidance of normative considerations and reliance on “positive” predictions is most harmful. George Stigler has correctly pointed out that assuming that the world instanteously moves from one static equilibrium to another necessarily means that those social situations existing in the world at any one moment must be optimal. If we are always at equilibrium, given our limited knowledge and other resources, any political system, government policy, or act of violence must be optimal. As a corollary, only in a world of perfect knowledge could people be sufficiently equipped to want and be able to institute a free society! Hence, Stigler claims that inflation only reflects the fact that those people who actually prefer inflation want it more than those who do not. Similarly, one must suppose that concentration camps, mass murder, war and slavery have also been “optimal.” But in considering things this way, the Chicagoan makes no distinction between government and private enterprise. To him, both are merely competing “firms” on the market—coercion no longer becomes a meaningful concept, merely another of various forms of market behavior. And those oppressed by government power have actually demanded it, because their choices have not indicated any preference for an alternative.

From such a worldview, the Chicagoan economist as a Chicagoan economist is not moved to abolish government programs. Instead, he desires to make government more “efficient.” And, the difference between our society and any more libertarian society is merely the degree of efficiency of each individual firm (government included). Hence, Friedman can discuss whether a “stateless” society can be libertarian. And, in other writings, he can discuss the “optimal size” of nation-states (See “A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations,” Journal of Political Economy, 1977).

In Machinery, Friedman also considers the likelihood of private law enforcement being libertarian. But we can see that his society of private defense agencies which enforce antilibertarian law is completely indistinguishable from the justice system which exists today. In other words, if all governments are merely “firms” on the market, don’t we already live in a society of “anarcho-capitalism”? Since all defense agencies will necessarily defend certain geographical areas, whether they be the area occupied by a single human being, a residence or an entire proprietary community, there actually is no distinction. Hence, Friedman’s entire discussion becomes irrelevant to the very important question of what a free market in police, courts, etc., is and whether it is stable and desirable.

In direct contrast with this approach, Rothbard’s For a New Liberty insists on a necessary precondition to a system of free market defense, namely the Rule of Law codification of justice in property rights disputes. As a result, all private defense agencies could only be defined as such and allowed to operate so long as they adhered to the libertarian Rule of Law. All others would be outlaws subject to direct criminal prosecution.

In addition to these problems in Friedman’s approach, others arise apparently as a consequence, leading Friedman into developing a variety of antilibertarian policy pronouncements. In discussing public education, he opposes tax credits, tax resistance, and other more radical schemes to combat public schools. (He even opts for taxes in general as long as it is the U.S. government doing the collecting and not the Soviet Union.) He defends a government enforcement of educational standards. He blueprints a proposal for the most efficient methods of assessing and collecting taxes, and opposes civil disruption of government operations.

Particularly disturbing is his cost-benefit analysis of pollution and national defense as “public goods.” As mentioned above, the concept of “public goods” is a meaningless one, since all goods can only be defined and consumed by individuals, not “publics.” Where someone is forced to bear the costs of another’s enterprise, then an inefficiency in the only definable sense exists. Property titles must then be more clearly defined and enforced before such inefficiency—such as pollution, for example—can be eliminated.

His discussion of national defense is even weaker in that the concept of the United States as a “nation” is defined solely by the U.S. government’s claim to rightfully “own” a certain geographical area. Society’s demand for defense is considerable, but only so far as the defense of individuals is concerned, not the Federal government’s seizure and occupation of land. In the light of the incredible success of popular, decentralized defense forces and guerrilla warfare from the American Revolution to the present, his further dismissal of popular militias is totally unjustified.

Similarly, his case for a Soviet threat of nuclear blackmail is also weak, since such a threat would run exactly counter to the only reason any world power might have to conquer American society, i.e. to exploit it economically.

Finally, unlike Rothbard, Friedman’s unwillingness to perceive the State as an enemy in itself prevents him from developing any coherent libertarian strategy. Instead, he concentrates on a piecemeal discussion of the merits of the voucher plan, more efficient local government, and the case for nuclear weapons. Again, failing to recognize the subjective quality of costs and benefits, he declares himself solely a “mercenary,” uninterested in any strategy for public organization and resistance. And his strategy for “selling the state in pieces” fails to recognize the ferociously strong commitments of some groups—classes—in clinging to state power to gain wealth and privilege, i.e. the nature of the “class struggle” inherent in state affairs. No social movement, libertarian or not, can ever achieve sweeping social changes on such “gradualist,” opportunistic terms. Like other successful movements, libertarianism is a call for radical social change. Without the demand of such radicals as the abolitionists for the end to black slavery, slavery could not have been eliminated. Without the colonial refusal to comply with mercantilist tax and tariff laws, the American Revolution could never have defeated the British. Friedman’s strategy is not a strategy for victory, but only the echoing from the discredited decades of American conservatism. Perhaps this is why David Friedman can refer to himself as a “Goldwater anarchist.”

Although The Machinery of Freedom is valuable indeed for many of its arguments supporting private property alternatives to government, Friedman’s fundamentally flawed Chicagoan thesis fails to justify a libertarian society. It not only misrepresents the libertarian ideal, but calls for a conservative assessment and strategy for resisting State oppression.

David J. Theroux holds a Masters degree in Business Economics from the University of Chicago.

Bless the children

David Brudnoy

This is neither the dawning nor the waning of the age of Aquarius, as if you hadn’t noticed. But as we search after our lost youth and sometimes find it the second time around, we—no royal “we,” that; I’m asking you to join this conspiracy of the no longer peach-fuzzy in a somewhat cold examination of Them—recognize how lovely and irrelevant are the myths that sustain us. We are not far enough away from adolescence to recall clearly how agonizing it was, or (at least in my case) from college to recollect how gloomy some of those bright college years actually were, too caught up in the still insidious cult of Youth to appreciate fully the occasional advantages of non-youth. But unless we have a particular affection for movies about elderly drifters and their cats and dogs, we are obliged, at the movies, to form some attitude toward and come to terms with some comforting or disturbing images of the generation supposedly enjoying this, the best of all their possible worlds.

All of this preamble is by way of avoiding the task at hand, which is now really at hand: coming to grips with Hair, a movie almost embarrassingly enjoyable, constructed out of the better bits and pieces of a ridiculous (and ridiculously memorable) stage play of the same name. Hair is everything The Wiz wasn’t: a successful translation from stage to screen, an enlarging that didn’t result in elephantiasis, a magnification of a preposterous conceit into a delightful communal joke cum affectionate memento of an age that never was, albeit an age that, all things considered, would likely have been greatly to be preferred to the age that was. I write as a hippie manqué, which is to say, a rather priggishly right-wing hippie at a time when the combination was less oxymoronic than moronic. And I would like to slide around the main theme for a while before grappling with it, in order to set in a plausible context this very special film that stands out of the current crop of youthy films like a Watusi among pygmies.

Youths don’t write movies about youths: they don’t, as a rule, write, at least nowadays, anything readable. This is a given: adults, in a greater or lesser state of nostalgic myth-making about their own past, create the films that purport to tell us something worth knowing about the young. Not too much need be said of the television images of youth, in the prime-time situation comedies that have made of John Travolta and Henry Winkler folk heroes to their historical period. David and Ricky Nelson are not so much buried in memory as stuffed into snug trousers and allowed to stay up after their bedtime. It boils down to little more than that. The allowable range for The Kids on TV is from A to B—adorably delinquent to bubbling with enthusiasm. It is not an expansive range, for all that it is fleshed out with all the variation of your choice of tooth paste, and mine.

In movies the television canons prevail but are not all-inclusive (just as, in fairness, an occasional “problem” program is permitted on television, by way of framing the acceptable with undesirables). The relentlessly cloying hand of the television censors is absent, as is, accordingly, the felt need to express every “outlandish” action via innuendo and every other distressing emotion by suggestion, preferably just before a commercial. On the movie screen the forbidden may be permitted, and is.

Of the recent films worth mentioning, several have attempted to dramatize some facet of youth “culture,” this of course quite expectable given the American love affair with youngness. All have been caricatures—Hair is too, however charming—and all have so excluded other facets of personality and attitude that their one-dimensionality emerges as artifice in the most unfriendly sense of that once more versatile and flattering word.

Fast Break has taken Kotter of “Welcome Back, Kotter,” given him a new name, and a slightly different job, and parlayed stupid writing, unabashed condescension, and formulaic plotting into an exceedingly popular film that has drawn enchanted audiences to slobber before it. Gabe Kaplan is reborn here as a basketball coach sans basketball team, handed the chance to rescue a backwater college from the doldrums by recruiting a team and leading it to thrilling last-second victory over State. He scoops up four Negroes, one of whom is a female who manages to pass herself off as a male until she must reveal her gender or leave her admiring beau convinced that he is incurably queer; and having spirited them out of New York with promises of greener pastures in farther zones, sets them to dribbling and scoring and, as if there were ever any doubt about the outcome, to winning. The heroic characters in Fast Break are reduced to Jock, with a little bit of Horny thrown in to make the most out of the limp little subplot concerning the young lady who goes by the name of “Swish” and is thought of as you know what. The film is a vehicle for Gabe Kaplan to play Gabe Kaplan playing Kotter playing basketball, and it serves as well to reduce its young valiants to the objects of his coaching genius. Maybe the movie’s popularity stems partly from the fact that a goodly number of American young people see themselves primarily in terms of how well, or how ill, they manage a sport. Fast Break tames its blacks, integrates them with scrubbed pink hicks, asserts the saving grace of Love, and rolls in the bucks.

So much for Youth as Athlete. Youth as impediment to adult pleasure is served up in Your Turn, My Turn, a French comedy currently enjoying a modestly successful run here and there. While Agnes (Marlene Jobert) works inventively to cheat on her husband with Vincent (Philippe Leotard), who is divorced, their children—her little boy and his little girl—manage inevitably to crawl into the picture and spoil the fun. The movie shares with many other French films that cross the Atlantic a sophisticated and cynical attitude toward the marital vows, and as such is itself primarily a variation on a very tired theme. The interesting aspect is its relentless loathing of children: oh there is no abusing of the children, no harsh words, just a succession of increasingly exasperated Gallic shrugs and ever more imaginative dissembling to get around the kiddies and into the bed. If W. C. Fields had been reborn as a French director today, and elected to transform his hostility to Baby Leroy into a contemporary, chic, stylish little item for the art house trade in the States, he would have fabricated something resembling Your Turn, My Turn. It is unforgivable to portray young children as monsters, but it is clever to portray them as party-poops. So much for Youth as spoilsport.

Youth as gang member is a subject matter ideally suited to the cinema. Whether set to music and given dancin’ shoes, as in West Side Story (another brilliantly successful stage show converted splendidly to film), or outfitted with a Greek mythic skin and inflicted on the nation as The Warriors, the exuberance of youth is worked into some conflict situation and let loose, in effect, to flex, strut, and maim. The Warriors, for all that it dragged every would-be cinema censor out of the shade into a momentary glare of righteous indignation, is a fairly tame item compared to what, we are promised, is soon to come. A spate of gang movies is almost upon us, and if industry promotional material is to be believed—and in such matters it is usually reliable—and if the stills woven so convincingly into the March After Dark piece by Stephen Schaefer, “Hollywood’s Sons of ‘Saturday Night Fever,’” give an adequate sampling of the next wave of these features, we shall soon be awash in bloody sagas of restless, rootless youth expressing itself through mayhem. Schaefer’s article surveys the landscape, and it looks, at least to me, bleak, gory, and vast. If I correctly understood The Warriors, and if I can read between the lines in what I’ve read of the movies soon to appear, the reduction here is to Youth as Alienated Combatant.

Of Youth as Lover nothing, I imagine, need be said. This is as old as the hills, even when given a little twist here (blind skater beloved of her adoring childhood sweetheart: Ice Castles) or a little quirk there (deaf dancer romanced by her rock singer lover: Voices) or—but surely nothing more need be said.

Of Hair nothing can be said that would alter to any substantial degree the idea that the movies are best prepared to give us a cliché and let it go at that. The Age of Aquarius cliché was not exactly invented by the musical Hair a decade ago, but it was enshrined by it, and as stagey, as unidimensional, as silly as that cliché was in the musical sensation, it was then and remains now a more appealing cliché than most of the others we find ourselves confronting on the screen. Gerald Peary, the estimable lead reviewer of a Boston weekly called The Real Paper, accurately captures the Hair of blessed memory as follows:

Hair on stage had been banal enough, a titillation for visitors to New York who wanted to see what that sexy hippy life was all about anyway. It was a literal freak show with a hush-hush extra, the famous nude scene with nubile, bare-assed young bodies spaced out over the big stage. I mean, the play was a very clever fraud. Those were theatre hippies, Broadway song-and-dance kids who put on long-haired wigs and were willing, for the price of fame, to take off their clothes. … Hair was a play for our curious parents, or for our romantic younger brothers and sisters … Hair was an immediate artifact, hardly more germane to our daily lives than a Neil Simon suburbanite comedy.

Just so.

Peary dislikes the movie and makes a good case for his dislike. He is the only critic I respect enormously who felt so strongly that the movie failed, and his objections to it are worth more than a passing glance. But I found myself reacting to the movie in a quite different way. Director Milos Forman, a Czech émigré, took the self-congratulatory material of the stage play and transformed it into a rollicking put-on. A decade, at least this decade, from 1969 to 1979, is a very long time indeed, in an era of incessant change. Hair on screen takes on the coloring of a nostalgia piece of the first order: it throws in just enough of the historically accurate (those mammoth “love-ins” in the parks; the anti-war, or rather anti-draft rhetoric; the costume party approach to hippy dress; the we-hate-the-Establishment-and-aren’t-they-drippy amour propre of the protagonists; the conversionist mentality of those who when faced by a straight kid from the sticks shift instantly into the missionary guise to save the naïf from himself) and then wraps all that up in fantasy, Twyla Tharp’s choreography, and the mock-rock lyrics and showy tunes that made a very rich man indeed of Galt MacDermot.

Hair permits us to jump back ten years, at least to jump back to a 1969 that seems infinitely more joyous than the 1969 we lived, yet creates a deliberate space between us as rememberers and us as romanticizers. We know that it is all hogwash, elaborate and lovely and sweet, and we are jarred at the end by the intrusion of death—just to keep us from forgetting that the price of Vietnam was untold misery—but we are rocked in a cradle of affection and grace that defangs even the barbaric antics of the head hippy, one Berger. The antithesis in Hair is dramatic but sugar-coated. The “straights” versus the hip: on the one hand the parental generation scandalized by the intruding youths; on the other hand the young man from the farm who comes to New York to be inducted, and the society girl who comes to fall for him and thus to fall in with his new-found friends in their feathers and bows. Claude (John Savage of The Deer Hunter) shows us eyes to look straight into his virginal soul: he is so pure, so nice, so patriotic—meaning, so gung-ho to join the Army and go kill gooks—that he draws Berger (Treat Williams) and his merry band of the unworldly like honey the flies. They cannot resist the urge to enlighten him, and enlighten him they do: his baptism is by pool, in the raw, at night, the literal shucking of his inhibitions by the mere act of stepping out of his shorts. He goes to the Army nonetheless, and here Hair creates its most amusing juxtaposition of song to scene. “Black Boys, White Boys” is taken from the park to the induction center. First three girls sing the praises of lads of the other race, and then the recruiting officers repeat the ecstatic lyrics, until in short order a frothy little ode to interracial coupling becomes a devastating exposé of the repressed homoeroticism of the military mind. Not that we are meant to assume that that is all there is to the military mind—or are we? Of all the familiar songs that the movie places in new surroundings, this is certainly the most effective as satiric comment.

Hair triumphs on several levels. It utters one last shout of approbation for a vanished (or at least fast-vanishing) breed of semi-rebels; it gently closes the door on a remembered non-happening; it ribs the Powers and sends up the powerless; it gives the finger to the War and closes with the only honest memory any of us can carry away from that fiasco: the snuffing out of young life and the cynicism a bungled venture engenders; it invites us to inhale deeply of the flower they thought they had plucked and held up for America to adore in place of the rifle; and it leaves us to wander among the weeds that linger.

LR’s film critic hosts “The David Brudnoy Show” on WHDH-AM and hosts “Nightscene” and is critic-at-large on WNAC-TV (CBS) in Boston. He writes a syndicated newspaper column and reviews books and restaurants for several magazines. © Copyright David Brudnoy 1979.