WE, meaning the white man, have "reservation fever," says R. J. Rushdoony, quoting an old Indian who thinks the descendants of his old conquerors are pretty far gone in stupidity. The "reservation" is the Welfare State—which means that it actually encompasses the planet with a few exempt bits of acreage labeled Hong Kong, the Bahamas, and West Germany. We want it easy—but a reservation implies that there must be some­thing outside the reservation to keep it going. Somebody has to do the work.

The subtitle of this Essays on Liberty: Volume XII (Foundation for Economic Education, $3.00 cloth, $2.00 paper) might be "On and Off the Reservation." It is a handbook of reservation practices, compiled more often than not with a bland imperturbability that is more effective than open sarcasm. It is also an arsenal of argument that will show any reasonably intelligent white man how to get off the reservation. If the Sitting Bulls of the "cradle to grave" state con­tinue to win their battles, it will only be because the contributors to this volume have been effectively boxed out by the reservation keep­ers. Even this possibility won’t help the Sitting Bulls in the long run, for a world given over to total reservation practice is a logical im­possibility. Let us repeat: some­body has to feed the reservation.

Looking about him at the steadily increasing amount of res­ervation practice—or socialism, to give it its exact title—that we now have, Leonard Read says there is no use in "engineering or planning socialism’s uprooting." I take it that he means you can’t legislate the TVA or the Federal Post Office out of existence. But what you can do is to look to the state of your own mentality. When we pursue high purposes, says Mr. Read in his essay on "Unscrambling Socialism," "natural forces do their clean-up work for us as a dividend for having set our sights aright."

Correspondence by Phone

Since my own mind always runs back from the abstract to the con­crete, I’ve been trying to think how "high purposes" can start private mail carrying to compete with the public post office when the law gives the government a mail mo­nopoly. Suddenly Mr. Read’s words about "natural forces" doing "clean-up work" struck home with the realization that few people write real letters any more. I know I don’t. It gets easier every day to by-pass the post office. You can be sure of keeping in touch with your "correspondents" by subscribing to an answering service. You can have a phone in the back seat of your car. You can even get "ship-to­-shore" facilities if you want to combine office work with cruising on the deep. All of this costs a bit more than dictating and mailing letters. But who knows, maybe there will be a "voice delivery" service tomorrow that will tape a businessman’s output of dictation for the morning and deliver it by telephone or wireless, to the in­tended recipients for a mere pit­tance. The costs of the privately owned telephone companies con­tinue to go down; the Federal Post Office continues to be in the red.

At some point people will stop writing all but the most routine letters.

So I’ll take Mr. Read’s word for it that "nature" is against the ex­tension of socialism as long as some men keep their wits about them and their minds clear. The working of this law seems to be assured as long as there is a bit of freedom permitted. In his essay in this vol­ume called "Flying Socialism," Sam H. Husbands, Jr., tells how the state-owned airways of Europe act as feather-bedding preserves for unnecessary employees. The British Overseas Airways Corpo­ration, a government monopoly, oc­cupies a position that is roughly similar to that of the privately owned Pan American Airways. Well, in 1963 "Pan American flew more than 2.6 times as many rev­enue passenger miles (8,069,397,­000) as did BOAC (3,023,470,000), but with only 20 per cent more per­sonnel." The figures comparing Air France and TWA, and the German Lufthansa with National, make the same sort of case for private enterprise. With 12,224 employees, Lufthansa gets 132,608 revenue passenger miles per employee. Na­tional, with only 4,416 employees, flew 390,816 revenue passenger miles per employee in 1963. Since the airlines, both public and pri­vate, use the same type of equip­ment, it is obvious that the private companies know how to use it bet­ter. But it is the private companies that have the incentive to take the leadership in technological as well as personnel improvement, getting there first with the best and safest planes. The pressure for rate re­ductions has come from Pan Amer­ican and TWA, which shows that "nature" forces its "clean-up work" as "a dividend for having set our sights aright."

A Couple of Questions

This twelfth volume of Essays on Liberty contains 49 separate contributions by 31 separate au­thors, and there is no possible way to be fair to everybody within the scope of a review. At the risk of be­ing specifically unfair to a couple of contributors, I’d like to argue that William Cage, in his "The Right to Pray," misses a constitu­tional point when he says that prayers in school are "outside the realm of government competence." No doubt they should be under any rational concept of a public institu­tion, which admittedly has no busi­ness discriminating against certain peoples’ opinions.

But our Founding Fathers were not concerned with complete ra­tionality or with universal philo­sophical consistency when they were writing the First Amend­ment; they were merely concerned with prohibiting something to the Federal government which they were quite willing to let the states do for themselves. Thus, the First Amendment says that "Congress" shall pass no law infringing on re­ligious freedom or establishing a state church. Patently it would be illegal under the Constitution for the Federal government to pre­scribe, or even to permit, prayers in any nationally supported school system. But, strictly interpreted, the Constitution says absolutely nothing about forbidding states or municipalities to allow prayers in their schools. They are not included in the word "Congress." Indeed, the Tenth Amendment (which was not repealed by the vague "equal rights" clause of a later amend­ment) would seem to guarantee in­dividual state preference in this matter.

I am not arguing against Mr. Cage’s libertarian logic here; I am merely defending the constitution­ality of something that he finds philosophically abhorrent. Carried to its logical conclusion, Mr. Cage’s argument would call for the aboli­tion of all public education, whether it is prayerful education or not. But the Founding Fathers were not perfect libertarians; they be­lieved in some public education, and Thomas Jefferson, for one, made provision for both moral and religious teaching in his blueprint for a state university.

With John C. Sparks’s "Zoned or Owned?" I have no real quarrel. Zoning is, as he insists, an in­fringement of the property right. It does not surprise me to learn that suburbs within the city limits of Houston, Texas, which does without zoning, have higher prop­erty values than the zoned areas that lie just beyond the municipal boundaries. But my quibble with "Zoned or Owned?" is this: what if you have used your contractual right to buy property in an area that has already been zoned? The zoning restrictions will have been funded, so to speak, into the price you have paid for the property. Thus, a sudden repeal of a zoning limitation (say, one that insists that three acres go with each home) might lop dollars off an in­vestment made in good contractual faith. The question here is whether a man has a right to keep a state of affairs which he has paid for in an honest deal made under a bad law for which he was not responsible.

The Nature Of The Ameri­can System by Rousas J. Rush­doony (Nutley, New Jersey: The Craig Press), 181 pp. $3.75.

Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton

Here is a vigorously written de­fense of the American system of decentralization, limited sovereignty, checks and balances, and constitutionalism—a system of government in which power is not concentrated in any one person or body of persons. Power is dis­persed, because no man—in the eyes of the Founding Fathers—can be trusted with discretionary power over his fellows. "Speak not of the goodness of man," warned Jefferson, "but bind him down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution." This settled conviction of the men who shaped our institutions reflects the Chris­tian view of man as a flawed crea­ture with great limitations; a being incapable of perfect knowl­edge and wisdom, denied a lofty, God-like objectivity, too self-cen­tered to meet the claims of uni­versal love.

It is in this sense of the term—cultural rather than sectarian—that Rushdoony argues that this nation was modeled along the lines of a Christian commonwealth. He recognizes that the "presupposi­tions of all man’s thinking are in­escapably religious, and they are never neutral." That is to say, everyone entertains a premise as to the nature and destiny of man, whether explicit in his thought or not.

In this book as in his previous works, Rushdoony gets down to bedrock; and whether you agree with him or not, he cannot justly be accused of inconsistency or su­perficiality. He contributes to our understanding of the system under which we live, and he makes it perfectly clear that those church­men who wish to replace the American system with some brand of collectivism for assumed Chris‑

tian motives are sadly mistaken. The free society is no utopia, but it is both a desirable thing in its own right and the only form of so­cial organization compatible with a religion which cherishes convic­tions about the importance of the individual person.

***

Through the Wringer

From Washington‘s eagerness to protect the consumer, you would think that clever manufacturers were constantly gypping the poor fellow, squeezing out his hard-earned dollars in return for a lot of new but shoddy products. So a recent research study is interesting.

Bjorksten Research Laboratories of Madison, Wisconsin, took a look at what happened to 27,000 new products that manufac­turers hopefully put on the market during 1964. It found that, in one of the most prosperous years in history, four out of every five new items were so unpopular with consumers that they proved unprofitable.

As a result of the failures, the researchers report, the unsuc­cessful manufacturers sustained losses totaling more than $3 bil­lion. Which may have raised some questions, in their minds at least, as to just who put whom through the wringer.

From The Wall Street Journal, August 24, 1965