Schall Nature of Government

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Rethinking the Nature of GovernmentJ A M E S V. S C H A L L

The polls say many of you want to send me amessage. But after November 7, I may notbeinthe Senate any longer to receive it. Believe me,Ive gotten the message, and youre right.Washington has gone overboard, and Im sureIve made my share of mistakes. But in truth,your priorities are mine, to esto p the waste,cut the spending, cut the taxes.-C,hnr!or H. E---, J , TV C nmp~i i ;~Commercial in Chicago, Nov. 3, 1978.

TkE PASSAGE of the now famous Proposition 13in California (J une, 1978), with its startlingpolitical repercussions throughout the nation,has provided, it now appears, amuch neededoccasion to rethink fundamentally what we ex-pect of government in the Western world. Pres-ident Carter, initially, had presumed to see allof this as another California aberration, butGovernor Brown was more astute. He simplyconverted himself immediately from oppositionto advocacy of the Spirit of 13and proceeded toannihilate the Republican candidate who, byrights, ought to have found the issue anaturalone with which to defeat the then vulnerableMr. Brown. Mr. Brown, rightly or wrongly,then, is well on his way to becoming the na-tional expert on how to implement anew spiritin the people.

TheEconomist in London, in its attentivereflection on all things American, saw in theferment arising out of the California initiative amore profound, philosophical issue involved.The present, or coming, tax revolt will not be

aimed like the Boston tea-party at unrepresen-tative colonial or foreign government. It will beaimed at the efficiency of allegedly representa-tive government at home. In looking at thevarious cutting proposals designed to save taxmoney, it is clear that the major opposition hascome from various levelsof employees workingfor government itself, from the highest to thethat people wantthe servicesbut do not want topay for them. However, another kind of suspi-cion seems to be possible: DO the peoplereally want these services?In a representative editorial, a respectedjournal from one of Californias middle sizedcities made these very penetrating observa-tions which serve to elevateapassing ballot tosomething more permanent:

!ewes?.Theq l l Z l p .P r? t ism d e ngnin 2r?dagnin

Overgovernment is the rule, not the ex-ception, Not only do the Congress and thelegislatures pass laws people do not want,the bureaucrats find a way to make theinitial regulations even more onerous. . .. tis a sad commentary when the average work-ing family, not the multi-millionaire inves-tors, seeks loopholes to find a t ax shelter toprotect i ts minimal earnings. T hehomeowner can move upward under the taxsystem, but gets absolutely killed when hemoves downward. I t is little wonder thepeople are upset. The people want less gov-ernment, but they want i t done better at acost they can afford.*

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The citizen, then, has begun to ask not only-What do we get for our money?-but aso--Why should it be exclusively governmentmoney by which we expect so much to beprocured? The word is out. M any of the thingsgovernment does can be done more effectivelyand inexpensively outside of government withless political control. One of the reasons pri-vate and parochial schools have had such ahard time of it, I have always suspected, is thatthey can provide equal and often better productfor less than half the comparative cost. Few inthe educational lobbies and unions want thisknown.

In other words, then, government itselfneeds to be subject to the most rigid and rigor-ous criteria of what it has wrought through itsown expanding activities which are not, andcannot be, equated simply with other actionswithin the general society. The eighteenth cen-tury American tradition of suspecting that gov-ernment may still be what we most need protec-tion from is not that misplaced after all. Butthis time, the issue arises not so much fromgovernments coercive or police powers butprecisely from its benevolent and spending-for-aid instincts. Even more frequently itarisesfrom the exaggerated notions of rights asconceived by government employees them-selves, people who do not hesitate to use theirpower against the general well-being of thepublic when their interests conflict with thelatter. Ironically, the old individualist notion ofrights seems most to flourish in bureau-cracies designed theoretically to prevent theextreme dire consequences of rights, seen asclaims, from injuring the ordinary run of thepopulace.Indeed, in a remarkably pertinent series ofessays-Doing Good: The L imits ofBenarqlence-it has been forcefully argued thatwhat we are most in need of protection from isprecisely the social services provided by acompassionate government.* There is, thus, akind of paradoxical relationship between aProposition 13with its limiting of governmentexpenditures and our own capacity to remainfree from the adverse consequences of the gov-ernments efforts to do good. And there is akind of moral and religious feeling in this

society-ne growing by bounds in the ThirdWorld-which seems unable to distinguish be-tween the desire to aid some person or peopleand the consequences of the plan or programdesigned to meet this want. A rchbishop HelderCamara in Latin A merica, for example, is fondof rejecting materialist socialism, while optingor hoping for a human type of socialism that,without the illusion of a paradise on earth, willbring about a society without oppressors nor~ppressed.~here is never any wonder aboutthe capacity of the second option to meet thegoal intended, nor whether the elimination ofoppressor and oppressed is also utopian.

The very doctrines which have inspired ourphilosophy of government, consequently, es-pecially those in the progresSive-liberal-socialist eras, are now being examined not fromthe side of their admittedly good intentions butfrom the side of their actual consequences.Those still aware of the Augustinian traditionin social theory will not be overly surprised thatintention and performance do not always andnecessarily conform. But Augustines powerfulvoice is little attended to, unfortunately. Pro-fessor Deanes Political and Social I deaso St.Augustine ought stil l to be required reading forall bureaucrats, politicians and, not least ofall,professors.6 The parallel betweenThe L im-its o Benevolence and Bellocs The ServileState, recently reissued, ought not to passwithout notice to those fascinatedby the Chris-tian tradition. Nor should the similarity be-tween the rates-poor laws dilemma of nin-teenth century England and the welfare-Proposition 13type enigmas of a modem statelike California be ignored.When Professor M arkus asked in his essay,Their Brothers K eeper:How is it . . . hat good peopl decent,upright, and well-meaning citizens-ancontinue when they act on behalf of othersand in the name of some higher principle ofsome benign intent, to behave so badly,coercively, and callously, so at odds with

what they understand to be their good inten-t i ~ n ? ~.he asked a question as old asoriginal sin andthe scholastic distinction between the end ofthe agent and the end of the act.

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just tolerable, in the mine-strewn ideologi-cal battleground in which the poor three-quartersof the world aresoon to advance. l 5

There is, then, a valid relationship betweenthought on government in developed countriesand those seeking a better life. Under-development isusually and largely due not tolack of resources or even educated talent, butrather to the ideas chosen by the people ontheir own initiative, the exploitation theory ofthe intellectuals largely used against their ownpeoples.The rethinking that most needs to be done,however, must first be accomplished in theWest itself. I hold a view of human nature andinstitutions that locates virtue and vice ulti-mately in individual free choices. Thus, ifthere is such a thing as social sin-a mostdubious and dangerous concept from anyview-it must be understood in terms of iden-tifiable, recognized choice made freely byknown human persons. Social sin is veryclose to collective guilt, and this is ever nearthe justified pogrom, the political removal ofthe cause of the social sin. Consequently,political and economic forms, however perfect,can be corrupting in practice, while quite rick-ety, even shady structures, as Burke taught,can often be made to work quite well. Christiansocial thought ought to be most acutely awareofthis strange dichotomy because it inherits boththe Augustinian and Thomist theses aboutpolitical rule, the one that locates its origin inevil, the other in reason, but both of whichmust include and be aware of the other. NoAugustinian could ever doubt the limits ofdoing good; no Thomist could ever hold that thegood is not what ought to be done.In this connection, then, it is interesting tocall attention to the remarkable little treatiseSew-Reliance by Roger H eckel.lG For varioushistorical and intellectual reasons, modernpapal social thought has often emphasized thegovernmental-responsibility side of Christianthinking about government. Rerum Novarwm,Quadragesim Anno, Pacem in Terris, andPopulorum Progressio, I think, can be seen asefforts to think squarely and frankly about thepositive side of government, what it can and

ought to do. l M odem Catholic social thoughthas always been critical of the negative sideofclassical liberal thought on the purpose of gov-ernment. However, this same social thoughtpresupposed and was, indeed, based uponthe family-that institution receiving currentlymore and more belated attention because it hasbeen so positively discriminated against bygovernment in modem times.18 Moreover, itwas also based upon the viabil ity of subsidiar-ity and voluntary groups. And while there isstress in this thought on personal initiative andautonomy as the driving force of a healthysociety, especially in Pius XII, Father Hec-kels essay marks the first concerted effort tospell this out precisely in this tradition. l 9 Andthe reason this can become the central issueofgovernmental reflection in our time is becauseit is clearly this issue-the need for and neces-sity of self-reliance at every level, local, state,international-that seems to come close to thecause of the failures in the public order we areexperiencing.2oThe co-relative of this, moreover, is that thehired substitutes for self-reliance are simplytoo expensive or too inefficient or too graspy todo the job and, in their corporate capacities,often work against the very common good theywere instituted originally to serve. Self-reliance here is no longer that individualismwe so much hated in classical liberal theory,but precisely the growth of personhood andlocalhood and statehood and, indeed,worldhood, which is the expression of thenewness and uniqueness born into each personand family of persons. Heckels principles arewell worth reflection:

1) Self-reliance is a decisive movingforce in the construction of a new interna-tional order; 2) it penetrates and inspires allaspects of human activity involved in suchconstruction; 3) it grows in understandingand finds its driving force in elementarysocial combinations which are autonomousand self-determining; and 4) the horizon ofuniversal solidarity toward which self-reliance aims is neither astatic nor a remoteobjective. In and by itself, it is a force ofattraction and cohesion for groups andpeople.21

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This is not altogether Small I s Beaut@, ofcourse, but it does reflect a growing feeling thatwhat is wrong is precisely the too-much-doingof things in the only way government, becauseof what it legitimately is, can do things. Self-reliance insists there are alternatives, thatthere ought to be alternatives, that these aregenerally preferable to doing most tasks by thestate and its apparatus. This is especially thecase when in practice the interpretation ofhuman rights imposes a theory of moralityand value quite at variance with the traditionaland religious value structures of the majority ofthe people in their own lives.22

Interestingly, in this context, wearenoting arenewed interest in and popularity forbusiness-that bete noir of socialism and thesecond phase of l iberalism. Not only does Mil-ton Friedmans name appear in the most as-tonishing of places, but also our businessschools are jammed to the point of makingM acraes Law-an announced shortage inany job field will produce a surfit in that samefield in five years-fully operative. M oreover,business itself, with the recent Supreme Courtdecision on its own freedom to argue itsviewsin public, is now maintaining that it is ethicallyresponsible, usually more so than comparablegovernmental agencies. Even J ohn K ennethGalbraith wrote in The Harvard Business Re-view aDefense of the M ulti-National Corpora-t i ~ n . ~ ~nd what I l ike tocall the two cheersbooks-W. Beckermanns Two Cheers forEconomic Growth and Irving K ristols TwoCheers or Capitalism-make a clear and force-ful argument for the validity of the system it ismost fashionable to be against.24 ProfessorsBrannen and Molander, furthermore, statebluntly: Those cri tics who continue to charac-terize the American business executive as apower-hungry, profit-bound individual, indif-ferent to the needs of society, should be put onnotice that they are now dealing with a strawman of their own making.25 And I suspect thatmuch of the venality that is found, especially inthe Third World where the claim is that busi-ness operates differently there, arises morefrom imposition of the countrys own mores orpower structure than from exportation ofcapitalist ideas. If capitalists sin, as no doubt

they do, it is not so clear that recipients areinnocent.Thus, acase can well be made today that thetype of self-interested individualism so oftencondemned by the left historically is now moreoften found in the employees of the publicsector and in various unions. The current mailstrikes and controversies about them in theUnited States, Canada, and most other devel-oped countries-this is just an i nstanceareimportant primarily because they force us toquestion more openly whether governmentalmonopoly of the post really serves the public inthe best and cheapest way now that there is nolonger any assuredly effective legal way to pro-tect the public interest against them. As Nor-man M acrae has often suggested, few if anygovernmentally provided services should begranted apart fromanopportunity of the privatesectors to do this same thing better and moreinexpensively.From a Christian viewpoint, moreover, Ithink, thcre is also a deeper lesson which theGaylin study on doing good suggests. EdmundFuller in The Wall Street J ournal pinpointedthe issue when, in a review of the Gaylin book,he noted the question of whether true charitycan ever really be institutionalized. Mr. J ohnK ippley of the Couple-to-Couple League haswondered recently out-loud to me whether ornot the causeof growth n government is not theresult of adefault in the private sector, espe-cially the spiritual sector. We look with someenvy at the private social service systems of theMormons and the clear academic freedom fromgovernmental control that a Brigham Y oungUniversity really can have when it refuses allgovernmental aid. A gain and again, Catholicsin particular are often compromised on essen-tial religious issues of their own definitionsbecause of the nature of governmental aid andits control requirements. Historically, there isa considerable irony inallof this because manyof the social service elements in moderngovernments-health, welfare, care-are atbottom secularizations of Christian instinctsand institutions. What the tax revolt todaysuggests, I suspect, is that without charity,things are very expensive. What it also mightimply, asColin Clark hinted in San Francisco,

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is the appearance of a demographic problem inwhich the ever fewer youngarerefusing to payfor the ever growing proportion of expensiveoldsters.26 All of this again brings up the prob-lem I consider the essential one that recentpolitical theory in its exclusive concern withjustice ignores, namely, the inadequacy ofprecisely justice itself to touch those areaswhose spiritual origins do not, and cannot, liein this grim virtue. J ustice, if I can put it thatway, is, if not killing our society, at least isbankrupting it.27To be critical of justice, no doubt, especiallywith all of academia still reading J ohn RawlsATheory ofjustice, seems almost impoli te, if notindefensible. Y et, I think, the recent reactionsto government and its costs lead back by vari-ous intellectual routes to precisely this issue ofthe inadequacy of justice and its secularizedappearance in the welfare and service ends ofthe modem state. Y ears ago, I wrote an essay inThe Commonweal called, The Necessity ofI do not want to retract herewhat I wrote then in another context, except tonote that governments necessity is preciselythat, a necessity. I ts purpose is to acknowl-edge a larger place for those things-usuallythe most important and productive ones-thatarenot strictly needed. Thus, if we are not tobe mere romantics, our rethinking about thenature of government must return to questionsof self-reliance, initiative, true productivity,competition, that can clearly establish what isnot worth what it costs because we can actuallylearn what things do cost.Behind this, furthermore, lies not an indi-vidualist theory but a personalist one, one ar-guing for the legitimate necessity of govern-ment only when it argues for its limitations.Taxpayers revolts in recent times have arisensymbolically because the people who havebeen most hurt by the inequities of our theoristsfelt that they had no means at their disposalother than the vote to remind government andthe literally millions who work in itsemployment-the cost of paying, housing,equipping and pensioning off the federal bu-reaucracy is more than 100billion dollars ayear, J ack A nderson pointedly calcualted-that they themselves are not the end of govern-

ment, that the common good, in spite of its badname among the class-strugglers, is more im-portant than the doing good to achieve it bybureaucratic means in public empl~yment.~There is a proper proportion, to be sure, butthis is precisely the issue, what is the propor-tion? Wil liam Simon, in hisA Timefor Truth,has remarked that every cent earned by theaverage American during the first four monthsof the year goes to federal, state, and localtaxes, while government now consumes morethan 35%of the GNP, a figure worth recallingin the light of the previously cited remark thatonly in countries where the tax percentage isless than 15% is there much growth takingplace.The contrary view that this rethinking ofgovernment is really not at issue was perhapsbest argued by The New York Times, after theCalifornia vote:

Half the statesarealready trying to figureout how to limit general taxes. . ..Half thestates also want to clamp a similar lid onWashington with a constitutional amend-ment to prohibit deficits. .. Stripped of itsrhetoric this movement isa rejectionof lib-eral values, a potent outburst of conser-vatism. . . .What is wrong with the tax revolt is not itsstated objectives. Surely legislators are tooeasily pushed into subsidies and supportprograms by powerful groups of con-stituents. By definition, the most powerfulgroups will retain influence and theweakest-the poorest-will be made to paythe price of arbitrary !imitations.30

Again this view argues benevolence and doinggood as a reason not to limit overly expensivegovernment. The question at hand, however,now seems to imply a drying up not somuch ofmoney but of incentive and energy in thoseclasses out of which the funds for this doingsuch good ultimately derive. The poor would behit in either alternative, and the suspicion ismore forcefully made that the loss is greaterduetolossof incentive than the kindof fearTheTimes worried about.31This latter point was recently argued inanother way by Tom Bethell, who noted that the

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average American truck driver makes morethan the average college professor-an aberra-tion of absolutely the firstclass!Truck drivers,workers, thus, are harder hit by taxes thanprofessors. This being, of course, against thenatural order of things, further governmentgrowth and care a la poli tical benevolence willneed to arise. T here is, then,

a form of propaganda being urgently pro-moted by a new class of academics, bu-reaucrats and lawyers, and its long termeffect would be to put the allocation of re-sources and wealth under political ratherthan market control.In short, the productive sector of theeconomy finds itself subjected to a longbarrage of dubious data about the era oflimits, environmental pollution, car-cinogenic substances and delicate eco-systems.Curtailed output by the productive sectoris the covert agenda of the new class. I f itstactics are successfully applied over a longenough period, the market system will beso

uru*afjr;d--...-- :kit BC&TC xs&Te3 hXJ.=ec heallocated by policy makers. T hat way, youcan be sure, professors . . .will earnmorethan truck drivers.32This reiterates the growing realization that thesurest way to prevent development and im-provement for the poor is to espouse certainstatist ideas about how to help them. The es-sential need for government, in other words,should not derive from doing good unto others,even though the rest of us should indeed dogood and unto others.Y et, in thinking about government, in con-clusion, it is well to turn again to Europe, thehistoric origin of most of our thinking aboutcivil rule in the first place. Futurologists nowgenerally concede that many vigorous parts ofthe Third World are in fact advancing rapidly,asthe ASEAN countries have already shown.33The productive center of the world seems tobemoving to East Europe with its controlled laborcosts and to the Third World rapidly at worklearning how to do things more cheaply thanexpensive Western labor can. We mostly wantthis improvement to happen, of course. A s

Richard J anssen recently wrote of Europe:The central image tentatively coming intofocus is that of a post-industrial society inwhich relatively fewer productive workers areheavily taxed to support relatively more pen-sioners and others left jobless by the exodus ofheavy industry.34 Behind this relative demo-graphic decline of all thewhite races, at leastasapercentage of the worlds population, thepoli tical question of Europes ability to formapolitical unity is still, as Henry Fairlie hasargued, critical:

Europe at first was Christendom and thenit was Empire, and assuch was the guardianand missionary of its civilization. But nowthere is no Christendom and no Empire. . . .It has been the curse of the movement forEuropean unification that from the begin-ning the emphasis has been on economicunity, so that a great part of the politicalgenius of Europe has been exhausted inhaggling about the price of tomatoes.35

So from California to Europe and the ThirdWorld, what we need most to think about isprecisely what government is capable of doingand whether doinggood i s really its main func-tion as it is now its main cost.The northern European governments begin-ning perhaps with Bismark have pioneered sys-tems of benevolence but since World War TI ,when benevolence becamea right, these samegovernments have been proportionately free ofmuch of the classic political obligation of hav-ing to defend themselves. The haggling overthe price of tomatoes has been, in fact, aluxury made possible in part by someoneelsesarmy, and this someoneelsehas now apopula-tion in which fighting for someoneelsesprob-lems isdefinitely unpopular. The Europe thatwas Christendom and is no longer Christen-dom, this E urope has taught us both benevo-lence and the limits of state power. Edward S:Corwin once wrote that The distinctive contri-bution of the Middle Ages to modem politicalscience is the notion of all poli tical authorityasintrinsically limited. This Europe taught usthat benevolence arises from spiritual sourcesthat are not first nor primarily political. A s wehave watched the cost of state sponsored be-

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nevolence soar and its spirit often become cor-rupt, especially in lethal policies to controlbirth, and life, and death, we areunavoidablybrought back to the philosophical discussion ofthe nature of government and whether thisnature comprises the higher things of thespirit and the lower things of the price of to-matoes and the salaries of truck drivers.Thomas Aquinas, in his famous Treatise onLaw, spoke surprisingly often about A u-gustine, almostas if to remind us that the mostcorruptible of corruptible things is our own zealfor doing good, a zeal which above all othersneeds to be controlled by the results ofwhat ourefforts and policies for benevolence do ac-The Ecomonist, London, J une 17,1978.2TheSamaCrluSeminal, July 13, 1978.A local California Assemblyman,Henry M ello, summed it up this way: The people aregiving us a message-less taxes, less service, less waste,and more efficiency and make it work. The Capitola,California, Green Sheet, J une 17, 1978.3Cf . the authorsSecond Thoughts on Natural Rights, F aith and Reason,Winter, 1975-76, pp. 44-59. 4W. Gaylin, DoingGood:TheLimts o Benevolence (New Y ork: Pantheon, 1978).%ted in Jose Maria Maybrink, A rchbishop Camera Says. . ,The Sun F rancisco Monitor, October 26, 1978.6Herbert Deane, The Political and Social I deas o St.Augustine (New Y ork: Columbia University Press, 1963).In this regard Professor J ohn Easts essay The Poli ticalRelevance of St. Augustine, Modern Age, Spring, 1972,pp. 167-81,should not be missed; nor should ChristopherDawsons two essays on Augustine in St. Augrrstine (NewY ork: Meridian, 1957), pp. 11-78. In Gaylin, ibid., p.42. C. the authors T he Y ellow Peril Reconsidered:Unorthodox Considerations on Declining Populations,Vital Speeches, July 15, 1973.On the 250th A nniversary of A dam Smith, TheEconomist had these pointed observations: Inflation nowthreatens to destroy the full employment which has beentaken for granted for two decades. What has caused thiscrisis? A modem Adam Smith might identify three crucialfactors:1)The postwar creation of aman-managed internationalmonetary system, of fixed exchange rates and a fixed goldprice which allowed A merica, as the dominant economicpower, to flood the western world with dollars.2)The rapid erosion of pure private consumption asashare of national product in every major country. Pureprivate consumption is financed direct from earnings andproperty income and excludes consumption financed fromstate transfers. . . . Governments of capitalist countriesnow frequently lay their hands on, to spend or give back,almost a half of all income generated in the productionprocess.3) The swing of political power to the masses has notbeen accompanied by an equal awareness of the facts of

c o mp l i ~h . ~~n an erawhen our welfare costsmore than our army while other armies lookstronger and stronger, when our populationpolicies have killed more human life than allthe wars and accidents we have ever been input together, our central philosophical prob-lem is to rethink clearly what it means to gov-ern.One conclusion only, then, seems unavoid-able: There are things that indeed do not be-long to Caesar. If we are to save Caesar, wemust again learn what they are. In the mean-time, we are not to forget Augustine, whowarned us what was in our hearts besides be-nevolence.economic life. Electorates collectively demand, andpoliticians attempt to deliver, more by way of publi c con-sumption than individuals in aggregate are prepared toconcede. Organized labor, operating its own restrictivepractices, is able to bid back resources earmarked forpubli c use, generating inflation in the process. This is thebasic struggle of the aff luent society which looks to thestate to deliver butter but insists on drinking the cream.Where nationals succumb, the excess of world liquidityand the vastly increased international interdependenceensure that the resulting inflation is rapidly passed on toothers. J une2,1973,p. 17.sCommentary, March, 1975,pp. 31-44. T his appendage is more onerous for thosecountries that have chosen Western or Eastern socialistmodels than those that have chosen capitalist ones. CJHobart Rowan, Significant Rebound in the Third World,The Washington Post, October29, 1978. Cf: PresidentNyereres Statement on Western M anoeuvres in Africa,The Dai ly News, Dar-es-Salaam, J une 9, 1978.12J . Nye-rere, Ujamaa: EssaysonSocialism (London: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1968);Man and Development (London: Ox-ford University Press, 1974). My favorite passage fromNyerere isthis: This brings me to the final problem whichI refer to today-the problem of incentives. For it is all verywell to say that members will live together and worktogether for the common good; it is all very well to say aleaders job is to see that everyone does his fair share. Butwe are not all angels, and it is not unknown for everyone todo a fair share on a communal project just because every-one does as much as the laziest member, and no more!What kind of organization, or what kind of rules aboutdistribution of returns, should be recommended to groupssetting up together, soas to ensure that between them theyproduce the maximum? For if there is no difference inreturn, is it not likely that the good and fast worker may gettired of putting his best efforts forward while anothermember merely does the bare minimum which keeps himin the scheme?Ujamaa,pp. 185-86. Had Nyerere reallyunderstood his own words, Tanzania, I suspect, wouldhave been well on itsway tomodernization by now. 13Alex-ander Solzhenitsyn, A World Spli t Apart: Harvard A d-

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dress, TheNafwml Review, July 7, 1978,p. 839. 141n-tewstingly, the recent visit of the Chinese Premier to apanseemed to indicate that the Communist Chinese them-selvesare beginning to realize something of the importanceof this data. %he Economist, May 13, 1978. IsRogerHeckel, Self-Reliance, Vatican City, 1978.Father Heckelis the Secretary of the Pontif ical Commission on Justiceand Peace. Cf. the authors The Pragmatic Encyclical(OctagesirnaAdueniem,) Worldviau, Summer, 1971;Onthe Non-Existence of Christian Political Philosophy,Worldview, April, 1976. %$ R. Butts, Whose Family:Y ours or the States? The Times, London, J une8, 1978;C. L asch, The Fl ight from Feeli ng,Marzist Perspectives,Spring, 1978. S E. F.Schumacher can in many regards beconsidered a kind of revitalizer of much of the centralsensibilities of classic Christian thought. C$ in this con-text again, Si r Ernest Barkers well-known essayMedieval PoJitical Thought, in The Social and PoliticalI deas of Some Great M edieval Thinkers, F. J. C.Hearnshaw, Ed. (New Y ork: Barnes and Noble, 1923),pp.9-33.2oCertain strands of Marxismarebusily trying also tosave the legacy of small and local groups. From anotherposition, Reo Christensons remarks are worthy of atten-tion here: I t i s this writers belief that the greatest threat toAmerican democracy comes not from overpopulation orcommunismorexecutive power or legislative weakness orstructural defects in the systemormaldistribution of powerwithin societyorchallenges from the Leftorthe Right. Thegreatest threat i s from the decline in self-discipline and theerosion of confidence in our legacy of moral values.Heresies: Right andL eft (New Yor k: Harper), 1973,p. 46.21&J .J .!, i ; . .231-L - Y - _ _ _L O.IL-.:.I. un rw l u r Ixcjlmc-Lnv-utm~~~,CKIIYC: olPi;rcMulti-National Corporation, The Haruard Business Re-view, March-April, 1978. %$ the authors Conser-vatism and Development, Cultures et Devehppement,Louvain, #2, 1977, 315-34. %$ Bartolomeo Sorge,Capitalism, Scelta di Classe, Socialism (Roma: CoinesEdizioni, 1974);M. Novak, Democratic Capitalism: AnUnderpraised and Undervalued System, Worldview,J uly-A ugust, 1977, pp. 9-13; Irving Louis Horowitz,Death and Transfiguration in the Third World,Worldview, September, 1977, pp. 20-25; P. T. Bauer,Western Guilt and Third World Poverty, Commentary,J anuary, pp. 31-38; P. T. Bauer, Foreign Aid: An In-strument of Progess? Occasional Paper, London, Insti-tute of Economic Affairs, 1966;Norman Macrae, Ameri-

cas Third Century, The Economist, Survey, October 25,1975; rving K ristol, Human Nature and Social Reform,The Wall Street J ournal, September 18, 1978; PaulJ ohnson, Has Capitalism a Future? The Wall StreetJ ournal, September 29, 1978; P. Beckmann, Whal At-tracts Intellectuals toSocialism? (Boulder: Golern, 1978).25Isthe Ethics of Business Changing? The HarvardBusiness Review, J anuary-February, 1977,p. 681. 2ELec-ture at University of San Francisco, J uly 22, 1978. C$the authors The Limits of Law, Cornrnunio, Summer,1975. 28The Necessity of Government, The Com-monweal, November26,1954. "SariFrancisco Chronicle,July 4, 1978.3TheNew York Times, J une 6, 1978.31C$the authors A usterity and Creativi ty, Welcome Number4,000,000,000 (Canfield, Ohio: A lba Books, 1977).pp.61-78. 32The New York Times, May 31, 1978.3W$ Her-man K ahns The Nezt 200 Years (New Yor k: Morrow,1976).Richard J anssen, Europes Future . . . .TheWall Street J ournal, July 6, 1978.35Henry Fairlie, TheRoots of Europes Current Identity Crisis, The San F ran-cisco Chronicle, June 28, 1978. c$ N. Weyl, WorldPopulation Growth and the Geography of Intelligence,Modern Age, Winter, 1978.George Kennans recent con-version to a pessimistic view seems worth citingalso: Poorold W est: succumbing feebly, day by day, to its owndecadence, sliding into debil ity on the slime of i ts ownself- indulgent permissiveness; its drugs, i ts crime, i tspor-nogaphy, its pampering of the youth, its addiction to itsbodily comforts, its rampant materialism andconsumerism-and then trembling before the menance ofthe wicked Russians, all pictured assupermen eight feetid:, i k i r iIrierrrd problems aii essenriaiiy soived, and withnothing else now to think about except how to bring damageand destruction to Western Europe. This persistent exter-nalization of the sense of dange-this persistent exaggera-tion of the threat from without and blindness to the threatfrom within: this is the symptom of some deep failure tocome to terms with reality-and with ones self. WesternDecadence and Soviet Moderation, Letter toDi e Zeit , inDecline ofthe West? George KennananaHis Critics(Wash-ington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1978),pp. 89.3@$ the authors Political Theory and Political Theol-ogy, Lava1 TGologiqueet Phibsophique ( Quebec: FLv-rier, 1975),pp. 25-38.Cf also the authors The PraiseoSomo Bitches: On the Worship of God by Fallen Men(Slough, England: St. Paul Publications, 1978).

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