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NDE are the national educational radio network presents special of the week from Yale University from its series called Yale reports to conservatism. Only a force against change a force for repression racism and poverty or are there unrecognized strengths in the conservative position. This week on Yale reports two faculty members of the Gayle law school will explain their position that conservatism has much to say about the resolution of the crisis today and that the failure to understand and hear to conservative philosophy contributes to the making of current tensions. They are Robert Bork and Ralph Winter Jr. professors of law. Mr. Bork when might begin to suppose that after 40 years of Left wing reform which seems to have made the society less satisfactory that the cause of the disease is the medicine. Indeed I think that's a major part of our argument. We ought to begin I suppose by asking what is a conservative political philosophy. There is at the outset a terrible difficulty about the use of words
because for people like ourselves who want to organize society with a minimum of government repression the only sensible name is liberal in the original classical sense of that word and people like Milton Friedman Friedrich Hayek continue to use that name for their position. But in the 20th century America the left wing collectivist have gotten that name away from us somehow. So it seems to me now perhaps necessary to follow William Buckley's advice and call ourselves conservatives just in the interest of communicating with people at the center of conservative philosophy. Bob I think our humanitarian values the desire to maximize freedom and prosperity and to facilitate social mobility. And I think that the touchstone for distinguishing conservatives from people with other ideologies is the conservative view toward the role of government. Conservatives are very skeptical of the ability of government to act in a controlled and efficient manner. Well as a matter of fact I would suppose at the center of any intelligent conservative position.
Is the idea of primary reliance upon the marketplace upon individual action. The conservative position in the sense in which we use the word is distinguished by its emphasis upon certain values and certain means. You've mentioned that the values are prosperity freedom and social mobility and those are values we certainly share with some other persons in the society. But in addition to that there is the important question of means which necessarily determines the value you get. And at the center of any intelligent conservative position is the idea of the marketplace. I think we have to distinguish conservatives from what we might call a left us the New Deal Loftis has the same values as the conservative that is his and humanitarian. He desires to maximize freedom and prosperity he values social mobility. But he doesn't really understand the market mechanism and he doesn't believe that the market can work effectively. He says he's terribly influenced by the by the Great Depression and the
mistaken belief that the free market costs that you raise. I suppose the central historical fact that has moved America to the left in the last 30 or 40 years which is the experience of the Great Depression and the fact it's been misunderstood that's fairly persuasive evidence now that the Great Depression was if not cause at least certainly deepened by the government's mistake in contracting the supply of money. At precisely the wrong time. So the free market did not have anything to do with causing the depression but rather with government regulation. That's right it was in fact the inability of the government to operate properly that did cause a depression and made it the severest depression in our history. But the New Deal leftist also has a problem although he states that he values freedom the means he chooses to maximize his values. That is government intervention in the market is quite often rather inconsistent with freedom. Well government intervention in the market necessarily means making people's choices for them.
Telling them how much and under what conditions they can get things and in that sense the New Deal leftist is in a dilemma because his means are absolutely incompatible with his ends. In all of that all of the writing by these people one finds I think a great deal of confusion as to what freedom is the New Deal leftest for instance. I believe strongly in the essentials of the First Amendment as a means of promoting the free flow of political ideals. Beyond that however confusion reigns he tends today for instance to think that some forms of individual non economic freedom such as sexual freedom ought to be protected. But it's never at OT clear why economic liberty is not an individual freedom to be protected or why the gratification of economic desires is not as protected as the gratification of sexual desire. An interesting thing about the First Amendment is that originally the case for free speech was made by analogy to the free marketplace. And now that
situation is turned around because the marketplace has become a much less free institution. And I suppose we could come back and make the argument for the free marketplace in terms of its similarity the marketplace for ideas. But why don't we go on from the New Deal leftist and we'll examine a little more detail in a moment to a new kind of leftist that has appeared in our midst in the last few years. I take it that you're speaking of the what is generally known now as the new left and certainly that has to be distinguished both from the conservative and from the New Deal leftist. The values of the New Left are not at all clear except a profound belief that society as it now exists is tolerable and must somehow be destroyed and that means that as far both as to values and to means the New Left must be distinguished from these other two broad groupings wasn't enough. I think it's fair to say that freedom really has very little weight and carried to its logical end. Totalitarianism would become inevitable. I would I would say that it's a classic case of
elitism wrapped in egalitarian clothing. The fact that the New Left is predominately totalitarian seems to me indisputable because the willingness to use violence against the majority of the society indicates that they're not concerned with democratic processes so much with their own results. If they ever did form their new society I assume they would have to keep interfering with freedom and suppressing it in order to get the egalitarian Islam they want so they will become if they had their way. I would think a rather thoroughly repressive society the kind of thing they say they object to know. I think that's right. I think we ought also to distinguish from both the conservative and the no Dale left us the group that we might call the radical right. These people are arbitrarily called conservative by some. Some others in fact though they have very little interest in freedom. The radical right wants government to help but to impose racist or other kinds of policies. Well I must say though I would
regard the radical right as considerably less dangerous than the left because there is as yet no sign that it has any desire or will to destroy society and it seems quite willing to try and work through the political process. However deplorable it would be if it were successful. Well perhaps the radical right's willingness to work through the established process arises from the fact that this just simply isn't strong enough to do anything else. The right wing is simply not a strong force in American society although we keep frightening ourselves with talk about right wing reactions. But let's get off the question of definitions I think we've outlined the major positions we're going to talk about and talk more explicitly about. The conservative ideology and particularly about the role the marketplace takes in that ideology. Yes central to all conservative thinking is a faith in the ability of the free market to maximize wealth for all by producing for consumers the goods that they value the most. Many have described the free market as a means
of creating what we might call consumer sovereignty. That is that the price system provides a means by which consumers can choose between competing goods and the allocation of scarce resources can be made. In contrast to notions of consumer sovereignty. Is So I mean that a person is Mr. John Kenneth Galbraith. All of whose writing seems to reflect a belief that consumer sovereignty is wrong that consumers make the wrong choices that consumers ought to be told what it is they want by some group or presumably some elite that is brighter than the average consumer. Mr. Galbraith doesn't say who the elite ought to be however if we're talking about the success of the market it's been said often but I guess it's been said so many times that the force has been lost from a world perspective. The market which in the United States has been freer than any other country has also produced. A society which is richer than any other country and that's not just a matter of
possession of natural resources. It's clearly a matter of the free enterprise system. It's been said recently that the gross national product in this country for example has increased as much since 1950 as it did in all the time from the pilgrims up until 1950 indicating that it's an accelerating process by which the market creates wealth. There's no question that the free market is tremendously successful in eliminating poverty. That's a turn of the century 50 percent of the of Americans who are below the poverty line whereas now the percentage is somewhere around 10 percent. And one ought to add that the poverty line in the United States would be considered great wealth in most parts of the world. We tend to emphasize the fact that minority groups remain below the poverty line and that of course is true but it's not true that all of those groups do in fact the American middle class is now receiving a larger and larger numbers from all of our minority groups. But that's
the kind of news that doesn't make headlines. But I think we have to talk about some of the classic examples of the ways in which the New Deal leftists have departed from the ideal of the market and have made things worse. And I suppose the single most dramatic example is the institution of the minimum wage laws. They are so politically popular these days that it's hardly worth while criticizing them except for the fact that they do quite obviously more harm to workers than they do good. It's clear in theory and even clearer in fact that when a minimum wage law raises the price an employer has to pay for labor he will hire less labor and typically the first Labor to go will be that which is least skilled. So the minimum wage law tends to shift employment from the least skilled to the more skilled. And that's particularly
apparent the case of black teenage unemployment. Professor Yobe Rosen has made a study which shows that the black and white teenage unemployment rates were the same up until the institution of the first effective minimum wage law. At that point the black teenage unemployment rate shot up and has remained above the white teenage unemployment rate ever since. No absolutely right Bob there's no question but the minimum wage law discriminates very strongly against unskilled labor and against people who are discriminated against because of race or ethnic. Graham It's incredible that the no deal left this could in the 1930s impose a minimum wage law on the under workers in the United States. Given the fact that the Union of South Africa had for some years before been using precisely this mechanism to impose a color bar the minimum wage laws have always been used in the Union of South Africa as a deliberate way of excluding black labor and their government has it expressly recognizes since the year
1925 I ought also to say that the minimum wage law tends to be a pro northern anti Southern Law by imposing a national minimum wage law. Congress has effectively retarded the industrialization of the song with I think rather about political and social and economic effects for the nation as a whole. Well politicians recognize that don't there often seems to me I've heard a number of senators campaigning in New York State and elsewhere on the grounds that they were going to get their constituents a national minimum wage laws so that factories wouldn't move south. Oh yes that happens quite often. The implication of the minimum wage law for another classic example of a new deal left this institution the trade unions are quite great. If an effective minimum wage law causes unemployment there must also be the case that an effective increase in wages brought about by union power will also cause unemployment statistics on employment in the coalmines are quite dramatic and the relationship between
increases in price and unemployment in the coalfields is quite clear. In fact John L. Lewis deliberately used wage increases to drive a large number of people out of employment in the coal fields. But what this means I suppose is that unions make their gains at the expense of unorganized workers. And I guess most New Deal leftist would say the answer to that is to organize everybody. But of course that can't work either can it. No because you have one of two results nobody would gain anything or one kind of union would be more powerful than another and it would be just a question of the more powerful union gaining at the expense of the weaker. Another classic example of leftist regulation of the market which has been a total failure is rent control. It is widely said today that there is a housing crisis in New York City. I take it that there are that people of all political stripes might agree that is the case. The New York Times story however
said that there are thirty thousand apartment building abandonments a year in New York City because of the rent control laws and the Times had a good example of one building that had been abandoned in 1058. It had been purchased for four hundred seventy five thousand dollars in one thousand sixty nine. It was sold for $5000 to another person who then abandoned it because the rent he received received didn't even cover his operating costs. The new dealers primary mistake is that he always tries to tamper with the market. That's right if you really wanted to do something that would help save poor people it would be infinitely wiser to have a direct subsidy something like the negative income tax which while it might have a general effect on the market would not have the kind of traumatic and direct effect that rent control and minimum wage laws has it's no accident I should think that the negative income tax was and was initially suggested by
Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago and is not an idea which came from the left. Well I think maybe we ought to explain exactly what the negative income tax is. It's a device by which every citizen in the society would turn in an income tax form various whose income fell below a certain level would then receive payments from the government rather than paying money to the government. However these payments would always be adjusted so that if the man could get work he would find it worthwhile to take work. Unlike many welfare programs in which you lose precisely as much welfare as you earn in salary that's right the negative income tax has a lot of other desirable features also. It does not involve government support of a large group bureaucracy which spends a great deal of time trying to engineer other people's lives. The money goes directly to the poor and they're permitted to spend it the way they want so that they can go
out and purchase anything they want with it which it seems to me gives them a good deal more freedom than other kinds of programs which would compel them to expend the money they get from the government in particular ways. I think we might now turn to the question of freedom within a free market system. Up till now we've been discussing the economic benefits the creation of wealth which we believe the free market is superior and create creating. As far as freedom is concerned the other value we want to maximize. I don't think it's only appreciated that the free market and the Puritan ethic are not the same thing. The right to say nonproductive hippie is protected by the free market just as much as is the right not to be compelled to support a nonproductive hippie when I want to contrast this with the result under socialism. Mr Brezhnev's recent speech on productivity of workers in absenteeism in the Soviet Union does not bode well for the Russian worker I said I should think and even less for the Russian hippie if there are any.
Also as far as freedom is concerned the left is in properly so concerned about the control of speech in a free society. How much free speech can there be however when the government controls all the jobs. Once the government controls all of the economy that has an enormous amount of power over people which can be used explicitly or at least sits in the background ready to be used as a threat and chills. Dissenting speech perhaps the relation of economic freedom to political freedom has been too little worked out I think. Historically the kind of political freedom we know in the West arose in a complicated relationship with the free market and with economic freedom and they fed upon each other they build each other. And there's no particular reason why we should suppose that if we do away with economic freedom political freedom will continue. It's possible of course to control economic activity and retain degrees of political freedom we see that happening in Great
Britain. We see it happening in Sweden but we shouldn't draw any great conclusions perhaps from these perhaps transitional areas. Great Britain is not yet fully socialized. Sweden isn't either and we might expect that as economic freedom declines. The inherent stamina in political institutions and ideals of democracy and so forth would sustain a large amount of freedom in those societies. But freedom in the tradition of freedom can be eroded slowly over time there was a time in this country when economic freedom was so important that it was even accorded constitutional protection by the courts and that time is now evaporated completely. And for those people who think that political freedoms are self-evident and cannot be destroyed. That story of the erosion of a tradition of freedom ought to cause some anxiety I think a good example of freedom under the free market
is Holl minorities make out in a free enterprise system no matter how much bias may exist in the populace against a minority. The market gives economic incentive to act somewhat at least as a neutralizing force. Consumers don't usually care who produced the product they're going to buy. Minority persons are free to enter and bid for jobs and the like where the government enters the market however biased is enforced through law and as a complete bar. South Africa schools in the southern United States I think are examples of what happens when government runs an activity under under cases like that under socialism. Minorities can be excluded completely because the government is running everything. I would think that it's as plain as the noonday sun on a clear day that if there is substantial bias within a society that that bias will be reflected quite plainly within the within the results of the political process and that those results will not be good for minorities at all.
That the least less power the government has the better off the minority Well I suppose if these things we're talking about are true and you are convinced they are we have to ask ourselves why the market has such a bad name and why we see a drift in this society to organizing things more and more by political means rather than by market means. Well off a lot of it just goes back to ingrained beliefs which have not been sufficiently challenge it seems to me the first we met we mentioned before which is the causes of the Great Depression. In fact the depression was caused not by the free market but by government intervention. The second thing I think is the persistent misrepresentation of working conditions during the Industrial Revolution. People I believe have grown up thinking that the sweatshop was a terrible terrible way of life and exploited the people who were involved in it. Yet every bit of evidence tends to indicate that people freely without any coercion at all move off the farms into the cities to go to work in factories. And in this country we have the example
of people coming over a great ocean to come and work in our factories I find it hard to believe that the conditions in these factories were in fact worse than the conditions people had to face before that. In fact it seems to me the evidence is quite plain that the working conditions during the Industrial Revolution however bad they may seem from our perspective today were in fact a sign of great progress. We're in fact better than anything that had occurred before. The difference I suppose is that when people were isolated on farms they lived lives of hard labor and exceedingly grabbed lives but they were not articulate and they were not a political force. It was only when they came together in cities and became a political force and interacted with one another that we began to hear of their. Hardships and the aspects of working Titian's they didn't like. That's right. And the final reason that the free market has such a bad image is the fact that within a free market large income differentials exist.
And the left I think has persuaded people that these differentials are not justified. I think it certainly is the case that people do mind they're very uneasy at seeing large income differentials because it seems to violate notions of equity if nothing else. On the other hand I think it's also clear that were we to try and reduce income differentials we would reduce the whole pie. We would reduce the total wealth of society because prices wages and profits are within a price system signals which bring human and material resources to act to the activities most valued by consumers. If one were to reduce the differentials one would reduce the effectiveness of the signal's resources would be misallocated and total wealth would be. Reduced. I think this is precisely the lesson of socialism in Great Britain. You might also be the lesson of the popularity of the academic life Ralph. I
think a lot of people find academic life so pleasant precisely because the kinds of income it provides can't be taxed at a time before high income taxes. I could make life perhaps less popular than it is now. Now the Academy offers a summer vacation sabbatical leaves the ability to work on what you want to work on rather than what a customer once worked on. And those are all nontaxable forms of income. Oh I think that's right. To the extent that one reduces the monetary differentials in income the differentials in non-monetary income that the pleasantness of the working condition the geographic location in which you live the kinds of people you're working with importance of those are dramatically increased and there is no way to equalize those. But still they want to be counted as part of the income they want to be counted as wealth so that in fact I would conclude that there is no way in fact to equalize wealth because you can't equalize the non-monetary conditions. One hears a great deal of controversy about the
schools today. All of the problems that are created we tend to forget I think that most of the problems are created because education is the greatest nationalized industry in the country. And all of the furor over the school seems to me to suggest that socialism is not working well. This particular case or you might have mentioned the cry that went up to nationalize the post office in the last strike. I think the Post Office is a good example of a nationalized industry. It apparently is the case that we have no idea right now how much it really cost for the government to deliver a particular kind of mail. That's that's just totally unknown because they don't keep that kind of record. The post office is really being run as a political institution and I know and I suppose that just mentioning the Long Island Railroad as another example of the inefficiency of government and running such things is enough. This is a family program or off the Long Island Railroad before somebody gets the idea that we're advocating turning the police department over to free enterprise or selling off the downtown streets in New Haven I suppose we ought to say that in a
conservative philosophy as in anybody's philosophy of course there is a proper role for government and their specific functions government can perform better than any marketplace can. The trick is to recognize those and confine the government's functions according to the theory. For example the first place the government has to set the rules of the game in a society. We talked about the fact that the government has to control the money supply. If it doesn't control the money supply we get depressions or inflations and people's expectations about the future are defeated. The government has to provide a contract system and enforce contracts so that people can interact freely and maximise their satisfactions. The government may choose to have and I trust laws which make the marketplace work more efficiently if they and I trust laws are well drawn. Well those laws will have to be well drawn only to stop activities which are in fact anti-competitive and not used to bring about some kind of supposed social goal such as small businesses and the like I would think though because everything
we've said up till now has been assuming that the system is a competitive system. If the antitrust laws were turned as some alleged they have been trying to other goals such as the protection of small business that then then they would there would be a force going in exactly the wrong direction. But there are other things which a government might legitimately do and still adhere to conservative philosophy. The government for instance ought to be able to prevent acts by individuals which have no social benefit apart from gratifying some of the individual involved but which harm other people who can avoid them. Murder assault. Profanity on public streets Republican decency the kind of thing that either positively harms or offends other people. And these other people don't have a chance to avoid them. There are some functions that a market simply doesn't take care of we could have mission defense. That's right we certainly can't expect every individual to willingly hire someone to engage in national defense that is something that quite evidently this
society has to do through group action. Pollution I think it was the really controversial issue today and the role of the government in controlling Not one cannot stop all trees from being cut down so that one can look at them and they still expect houses to be built with lumber. It's not that the Conservatives believe that the government shouldn't do something about pollution it's just that he recognizes that there is going to be a cost of doing something about it and that the cost is one in which society is likely to find quite as distasteful as the pollution itself. We have to recognize that it's essentially a political decision which we ought to make as a society ought to be made in Congress and not in some corporate headquarters. Today's conservatism explained by Robert Bork and Ralph Winter Jr. professors of law at the gala law school next week Mr Bork and Mr Winter continue their discussion and touch on strict and broad construction of the Constitution and the Supreme Court's scripts for these programs are available by writing to Gale reports 1773 Yale station New Haven
Connecticut 0 6 5 2 0. This program originates in Yale's audio visual center. NPR's special of the week Thanks Yale University for the recording of this program. This is any are the national educational radio network.
Series
Special of the week
Episode
Issue 30-70
Contributing Organization
University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/500-6688mp28
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Date
1970-00-00
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00:29:39
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Identifier: 69-SPWK-484 (National Association of Educational Broadcasters)
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Citations
Chicago: “Special of the week; Issue 30-70,” 1970-00-00, University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 29, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-6688mp28.
MLA: “Special of the week; Issue 30-70.” 1970-00-00. University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 29, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-6688mp28>.
APA: Special of the week; Issue 30-70. Boston, MA: University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-6688mp28