The Dissenters; 4; William F. Buckley, Jr.

Did you find a need, did you find a vacuum? National Educational Television presents The Descenters. Conversations with the editors and publishers of Political Opinion Magazine. This week, William F. Buckley Jr., editor of National Review, a conservative publication and host of his own syndicated television program, Firing Line. Interviewed by Donald Fauser. The circumstances are not oriented journalism. Consider it as the editor of National Review and on your program Firing Line to be considered a one of the major dissenters in the United States today, and I wonder if you'd spell out some of the areas in which you dissent most avidly with consensus society, with the United States domestic policies today and or foreign policies. Well, beginning with the domestic point, it seemed to me reasonably clear that in the

past 40-50 years there was a bifurcation and politically people began to do what H.R. Mankin called a substitute political for economic means of self-agrandism. That is to say, there was a sort of adorning consciousness of the political instrumentality by which people could vote wealth to themselves, provided somebody got around to creating a surplus. And this had the effect of undoing the sort of generic liberalism, which is probably the most striking event of 400-500 years earlier, namely the adorning realization by individuals that they could govern themselves, that they could strike out for themselves, that they could make decisions that affected their own lives.

And this, this seemed to me a centralization, social centralization, which would cut the whole energy circuit of civilizations and keep people from maintaining the kind of self-dependence that results in creativity and infeed them. And it's that trend, I think, that conservatism has been very much a alert to. You feel, and at the profit motive, is a more natural motivation for man to aspire than for him to try to do this collectively in a political way. I wouldn't accept your formulation, because there's nothing wrong with the collectivity so long as you have a total acquiescence in it. If you and I decide jointly that we want to stroll down Park Avenue together, there's nothing wrong with considering ourselves as a collectivity engaged in that particular

pursuit. But the trouble is the democratic practice, at some point, starts counting noses. And if you and I and Mr. Briggs here decide to do that, and we decide that the majority shall decide whether we stroll down Park Avenue or do something else, then instantly we are coercing somebody. And the problem of a democratic society in terms of the libertarian paradigm is the minority that doesn't want to go alone. Now, I don't take myself any satisfaction out of coercing a minority to go along when it doesn't choose to go alone, unless it's absolutely necessary for the safety of the community. But it seems to me that that presumption of presumption in writing the individual to do what he wants to do is simply widely disregarded in our society, and labor unions of course being a classic example. But one manifestation I see here is such thing as the graduated income tax, and what indeed

you're doing there is to take away from a few and give to the many for the public good. Now, it would seem to me that if we were to follow your philosophy, logically, we wouldn't have such a thing as graduated income tax. Absolutely not. I think that the graduated income tax is an institutional form of continuing class warfare. In the first place, I think people don't understand, a lot of people don't understand, but the kind of money that's drained from the rich, as a result of this deeply progressive tax, is totally exiguous. It doesn't matter anything at all. If you take all of the money raised between, let's say, the 50% level and the 91% level, which is where it stood a couple years ago, it amounted less than a billion and a half dollars, i.e. in the vicinity of one and a quarter percent of the national budget.

So it isn't as though you need that money. What you seem to need is to penalize people for making a lot of money. Now it seems to me that one of the blessings of equality is that people ought to be equally free to make money and to keep the money there and subject to the exactions that are necessary to take note from one society. Now, if one could say, well, society simply can't proceed without that money, then you might appeal to the authority of the previous criterion I gave, namely the safety of the state. But this is, I say, is completely missing. You find in the rhetoric of the left not that the money is needed, but that they just don't want anybody like H.R. Hunt to have it. What of the housing come as a hundred million dollars a year? Well, I think most things about Mr. Hunt are deplorable. But I just don't think that any of my business to build laws, whose function is to victimize

somebody that I have not to find totally admirable. Well, but the question, I guess, is if you're to try and have any kind of egalitarianism in society, where are you going to get the money for to build roads, to... Here's another thing about it, another thing that's not widely realized is that in any generally affluent society, for instance, our own, it is almost always the poor man who is being... That is to say, the burden of taxation falls most squarely on the shoulders of the lower middle class. The secretary is the subway workers, the elevator of people. They are carrying the lion's share of the load, and always will, because a society is never going to become so affluent that there will be enough Rockefellers and H.R. Hunt's round to carry anything like the load of our government, which is now, as you know, in

the 70 of 150, 160 billion dollars a year when you count in state revenue. But the corporation... Professor Friedman has shown that with the exception of one or maybe two of our grandiose state welfare and federal welfare programs, they actually have the effect of subsidizing the middle class at the expense of the lower class. If you like just one example, free education in New York. Now, it is absolutely predictable that anybody who's to college in New York is going to have a higher salary, a higher income by the time he's 25 or 30 years old, than, for instance, the average taxi driver, or the average elevator operator. And yet, we've got this free tuition imperative here, and the net effect is the ironic one that poorer people are being made to take sacrifices for the advancement of richer people. Now, this is one of those ironies which, in a curious of a metaphysical sense, is almost

built in to any redistribution system, Russia, you know, where we're going to have really quality, where we're going to have the paradise of the working class. What do you have there? You have a second time, it makes ten times as much money as a private, whereas in the United States, it's the ratio of three to one. You have a max paying 12 percent interest for people's savings. These, as I say, are ironies, but tend to happen when a society overreaches what are its proper ambitions, its proper ambitions are ready to get out of the way. Well, that's only to say, really, that the Soviet Union has failed, but it's not necessary that other countries fail in the same approach. Well, I don't know one that hasn't. People always say Sweden, let's look at Sweden, that's the successful socialist, well, the trouble with pointing Sweden is that there are no, in a scientific sense, controls how would Sweden have failed if they didn't have this heavy taxation, if they didn't

have this government participation in so many other prizes. I think Sweden has proved that democratic socialism is possible under certain conditions, and this I disagree with, but I don't think the Sweden has proved at all that this is a means by which to attain the highest form of civilization, let alone the highest form of general affluence. You have stated in the past that the federal government is most adept at collecting taxes, but not at dispersing them. I was calling Moynihan. That's right. That's right. You might be mentored. Well, yes. That's a strange bedfellar. Do you understand he's sharing my bed, not I, is? Do you think he's moving? Well, he's a very honest man. He's a rugged, as I said about him before, he's a sort of, he's a PT, a 101 liberal, actually wears it, you know, and he considers himself a liberal, but he's also. He also believes that the whole functional liberalism is its claims to rationality and pragmatism,

and the rationality, the pragmatism shows that many of the pretensions of modern liberalism simply don't work out. One of them being, for instance, the notion that the Great Society could actually reach into every ghetto in the country and sort of restimulate a self-generating ethos. It was going to sort of drag everybody out, but it doesn't work. And it was Moynihan also, no, I guess it was Goodwin, who said, we have to face it, we liberals, that the conservatives came by something intuitively, that we liberals have needed to get by the force of intellection, namely the suspicion of the government. So I think it is true that everybody, everybody, everybody, Kennedy, the Goodwin, Moynihan, people, all of a sudden discovering the last couple of years, things that they thought goldwater was a lunatic for affirming even as recently as three for years together. You mentioned in the National Review the use of corporations, especially in insurance

companies, in helping to rebuild slums. I wonder if you'd speak to that, what you see as a cooperation or coordination between the federal government and private industry here. Do you see that as a step in the right direction? Only in this sense that the federal government has been the principal inhibiting a source for the development of public housing, and that is to say it is exercise a negative influence how, in two ways, one, by granting monopoly privileges to labor unions. The cost of construction, for instance, in New York City is going up 14% per year. How in the hell do you expect poor people to build houses that they can afford to pay for if it increases by 14% plus what you need to do to borrow the money? There's 21% per year, mind you.

Now I'm all in favor of electricians making as much money as they can possibly make, but I'm not in favor of they are making money by the force of oligopolistic extractions on the community. I think that other people, even if they're negroes, ought to be allowed to be electricians, and plumbers and bricklayers, and yet, in point of fact, we know that New York City is a union town, as I assume Boston is, as most towns are, and are protected as such by who do you know, old friend, the federal government. We also know that the federal government's tax structure is so heavy as necessary to be accounted for by the building trades industry. It's all very well to say let's have high or high taxes, but inevitably, of course, those taxes have passed along to the consumer. And my point is that it's extraordinary how well, in fact, American enterprise has acted even under the strain of that particular overhead, but it has meant that people are paying them off a lot of money for housing that they need in other aspects. There's, of course, a third factor, and Henry George, of course, I think, had the most

sublime intuition concerning it. And that is that land is the one non-expansible element in that particular equation leading to wealth, which is why I myself am in favor of an extremely high taxation aimed at land speculation. But the argument, I guess, is if the unions earn more money, and if they charge more money for buildings, that indeed the economy must be able to bear this cost, or somewhere, it would stop. Well, in some way, it has stopped, asked the people who are the four or five families who share single rooms in Harlem, whether it stopped, and the answer is, of course, it did. As far as they're concerned, they can't get a post-seasoned housing for the price that they are able to pay. One of the reasons they can't is because they can't be produced. One of the reasons they can't be produced is because electricians can be making $28.25 an hour, and one of the reasons they're making $28.25 an hour is because you and I, if you want to become electricians, we find it very, very difficult to crack that union.

It's paternalistic, it's self-protected, and it simply aborts the whole process of supply and demand, which should make it attractive for people to become electricians and plumbers and bricklayers, considering that they are in short supply. Let me ask you, if I can, a rather hypothetical question. That is, if you had your brothers, would you rather have done in this country, what kind of a form of federal government state relationship would you see, how effective, how influential would the federal government be in the lives of people? And how much of this would be of what is now a federal function would be absorbed by states and or local communities? You ask awfully cosmic questions. Well, what I'm trying to get out, I guess, is in a rather general way, what you see wrong with the country today, and as a dissenter indeed, in this country, how you would change it, how you would alter it. Well, I have to answer of course, theoretically, and theoretically, I think the best articulation

of a sound principle government was done by the poops in encyclicals dating back to Rare and Novarm, on a principle they call subsidiarity, and the principle of subsidiarity says the following, that nothing should be undertaken by government, which can be done by private association, and nothing should be undertaken by a higher echelon of government, that can be undertaken by a lower echelon of government, so that applying that test to the federal government, you ask yourself, what is the reason why Washington, D.C. should be financing a study of juvenile delinquency in New York City? The answer is of course, none at all, no reason at all, at least by that standard, however, you'd run into this difficulty, and that is, since the federal government has developed

this wonderful gathering system, tax gathering system, and attends to preempt the taxable income, can the state of New York, or the city of New York, or other states of the union afford themselves to put up the money, to attack problems that are distinctly local? So you see a situation in which the federal government has got to exercise itself inhibiting influence, I think it's rather a pity that Congress doesn't exert itself more, and simply cut down the uses of money, or else, lease their money-raising facilities to the states in effect, the hell of plan, or whatever you want to call it, in order to return money to the states, with which they themselves can undertake these functions. Well, one of the reasons that the federal government had seen, anyway, that one of the reasons that the federal government assumed so much power was simply because there was a feeling that states were not, in fact, in solving their problems. Well, I'm not sure that they've heard it.

It's an interesting observation because among other things, it completely challenges one central faith in democracy. If an individual state isn't solving a problem, it may be because that state doesn't consider it a problem worth solving, or at least worth solving at the price of heavy taxation, or at the price of a particular kind of legislation, or it may be that the particular state feels that it is so impoverished on April 16th of every year as to leave them without the resources to solve that particular problem. Now one of the difficulties, of course, with interventionist government of the kind that we have in the government is that they're always discovering problems, and they're always discovering rights. Of course, you can't discover a problem without discovering a sort of a duty to solve it, and you can't discover a right without discovering somebody else's correlative obligation. And this importance tends to be, to result from the kind of millenniarism that is identified with utopian liberalism, and it's also important, however, the grubby demands of politics.

This lesson was wandering around the country in the late 50s, with a sort of a jaded concern over the fact that people weren't dissatisfied enough, and he pointed to all sorts of dissatisfactions which he wanted to transform from abstract dissatisfactions and to felt dissatisfactions. And the whole notion was, of course, to spur the government on into trying to decide some new means by which to seduce the support of the voters. And this is, of course, a power situation, and they're always going to find something to do. What is the democratic platform going to offer the people in 01976, free-hot, and yet don't we know almost instinctively that they're going to have to think of some free, something to offer us on into the future? Well, the question is, there's been discovering problems. Well, that's true.

Your false teeth, for instance. But the problem is. It's going to be discovered by government. Well, the democratic party in 1773, the problem I see, you see, is that if the federal government is best at raising money, then it must also disperse that money somehow, even if it were to disperse it to the states, then the question is, why not raise it in the first place? Why not not raise it in the first place? Well, yeah. That's an interesting point, you see, but the problem is that what you say is that the states don't see what needs to be done. I guess what I see happening in the United States is a gradual homogenizing of the country so that there is less difference between New England, Massachusetts, and Alabama, and the South, and that somehow, disbursements have to be made to try and equalize the opportunities in those various disparate parts of the country. This is what I see is happening in the homogenization, because it seems to me that by and large, in the way they voted, people believe that this is the way they don't believe in. They don't believe it at all.

You know why they don't believe it? Because the overwhelming majority of the voters really believe that there is a spontaneously generating dollar in Washington, D.C. And this to me is so manifest as to be a political certitude. In New York City, simultaneously the same constituency will instruct its local legislators to say no to more taxes for schools this year, and they'll instruct their federal legislators to pass a federal aid education bill, which has the effect of taxing three times as many dollars from them, only one-third of which are remitted to them, as would be taxed if they went into it as a process of auto taxation. Now if you were to say to these people in New York, look, the net effect of this proposed legislation is to take money from you and simply give it to Alabama or Mississippi or Hawaii or whoever. And I think it's awfully philanthropic, obviously, and we really do appreciate it. Now let's proceed with the business.

Do you think that it would be instructing their legislators? Is that the answer? No, they wouldn't. If they actually understood the economic mechanics, what it is they were doing, they would probably say no. Now, maybe they should say yes, and under certain times they should say yes. But it's also true that our concern is for quality education, who really says that New York can benefit Mississippi more by shipping money on down there or by raising the level of New York education. I think a very good case can be made for the latter rather than the former. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I do. And the idea of egalitarianism and education neglects the fact that the quality of education in New York is something that might ultimately redound to the benefit of Mississippi infinitely more than, as I say, simply a truckload of dollars going down the area. I think the only argument I could think would be that the disparity between educational levels in both of these places would lead to major dissatisfaction on the part of the people in Mississippi.

Good. That's what we want. Precisely the first step to progress is major dissatisfaction. It seems to me that maybe then you'll get the kind of situation you find in the ghettos today. No, no, no. If you get major dissatisfaction, you get things like reform. But you see, one of the troubles in Mississippi, for instance, is that so, so obsessive is the federal spending problem that allocations are made with reference to it. If you get Washington DC and sets the legislature in Mississippi, look, we will put in, we will put in nine bucks for every buck you put up for highway building, whether there's enormous temptation to have highways, great, big, super highways running from nowhere to nowhere because it's a way of getting nine or ten to one on your money, in fact, well, but that means that they do have to put that one dollar up and they put so many of those one dollars up to claim those nine dollars that they tend to neglect that which they would otherwise perhaps not neglect such as education. You tell me what the National Reviews stand on the Vietnam War is, indeed, in the confrontational receipts with communism.

Well, we have supported the war not enthusiastically, but for different reasons as you would suppose from the reasons that say liberals un-enthusiastically support Vietnam War. Our notion is that it is strategically unintelligible to get that excited about Vietnam unless Vietnam relates to a worldwide situation and that it makes schizophrenics of us all on the one hand to proceed against Vietnam on that assumption and on the other hand to cozy up as we have been to the Soviet Union as though it represents that no threat conceivable or potential at all. If Vietnam is something to worry about, it's something to worry about because it is part of a worldwide movement. If it isn't part of a worldwide movement, we have no more reason purifying the politics of South Vietnam than we do those of pop-a-docs, Heidi. In fact, the deal we ask considering that Heidi is close to our own shores. But you find that it is.

Yes, I think there's no question about it that the invasion of South Vietnam is a part of the general exuberance of the communist movement which has got to be checked. And I think Mr. Ross Kovalga made a very, very good point that all those people who worry about Lyndon Johnson's credibility gap should do a little thing about America's credibility gap. And in fact, we make promises and we should make any promises that don't relate to our own security and then fail to redeem them. What kind of a credibility gap are we going to have as a potential ally? Well, what about the threat of the Soviet Union? Do you see a threat of the Soviet Union and any of those two? Sure. I think you'd feel one rather keenly if you haven't been one of its slaves. Do I as an American? But those slaves are less slaves. All I'm trying to get at is if there has not been a change. They're less slaves. Yeah, there's some way between say the Greek slaves and the Roman slaves in terms of kind of dealing with the exercise. But of course, I feel a threat. I feel a threat whenever anybody that I don't control has hydrogen bombs that can land over my roof. And it seems to me indisputable that the Soviet Union has such bombs, indisputable that

they continue to maintain a military machine and an extraordinary cost in terms of their own level of living and that they presumably do that because they are fired to do that by something. But what that something is, of course, is an aggressive imperialistic ideology of Elton Jean, which incorporates in its future not only designs for the people of the Soviet Union who designed on you and me. What do you propose as alternative policies in this country? Well, the alternative policy, it seems to me, is to make it quite clear that people don't fuss with the security of the free world with impunity. It seems to me clear that if we descended resonantly and devastatingly on people who do that kind of thing, that people wouldn't do that kind of thing in the future, it seems

to me that the dilemma in Cuba is a brilliant example of the perversity with which we accomplish things in order to persuade the Soviet Union to withdraw missiles that had brought there in the first instance. We promised, never to liberate Cuba, so that the status, who had, he was not restored around the contrary of the Soviet Union. In fact, we forwarded the Monroe Dockland as such a way to protect Soviet interests in this hemisphere. Now, if we had made it clear by moving decisively against Castro, that this kind of thing is not going to happen, if we had made it clear by moving decisively against communists at East Asia, using primarily a causation manpower to do that, then we would have made clear lessons that would last perhaps over a period of decades and generations. We learned this from Lord Castle, where the Congress of Vienna, and we learned it previously under the Roman Empire, and Nemo may like acid impunity, nobody moves against me with impunity,

so this is the responsible way for an essentially, not an imperial power, but a power that has an imperial responsibility as to act. But the problem now is that there are two imperial powers, really, and it's a standoff. I know, no, no, it's not, yeah, it's only a standoff, but I'm not advocating this point because I think it's unfeasible to do so, it's a war of liberation, and I think that one has to recognize, be more or less, de facto sovereign to the Soviet Union over zone territories. There was a time when I think we could have secured the freedom of Poland. I think at this particular moment it is simply unlikely as a historic effect that we can affect the freedom of Poland. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.