CLASH OF CULTURES

The prominent conservative, Patrick J. Buchanan, has published yet another book, “Day of Reckoning.” He relates that he was a friend of the famous economist Milton Friedman, who tried to convince him that he was wrong in objecting to free trade: Friedman argued that if some Japanese were ready to give you a working television set in exchange for pieces of green paper, you should take advantage of the deal! Buchanan, in contradiction, prefers to make his own television – or, at least, to pay another American resident to make one. Being a conservative in the post-modern sense of the word – that is, one who advocates what he may call regulation, but is in truth dictation – Buchanan wants to see tariff barriers to stop the best man winning. He does not trouble himself to give any reason why he denies the paper-and-pencil proof that David Ricardo devised, almost two centuries ago, showing that free trade advantages both nations, even if one is less efficient in producing ALL goods: still less does he mention what caused the War Between the States, i.e. the 1860 Lincoln-Hamlin platform, “Protection for American Industry.”

Within Buchanan’s memory, these United States – and no other nation -- explored the Moon. How was it done? Someone asked an astronaut what he thought about when he was in space, and he replied that he thought that his safe return depended on a thousand systems, every one of which had been engineered by the lowest bidder. Our scientists and engineers and designers and draftsmen and machinists and craftsmen and pilots explored the Moon, half a century ago: the Russians are still confined to our gravity well, the Chinese have not even put men into orbit (because they still dare not try to utilize liquid hydrogen as fuel.) Why, then, in the twenty-first century, can we not earn our livings triumphantly in competition with all comers?

One has to wonder how Buchanan proceeds from his study to the t.v. studio: has he never noticed that the highways have maximum instead of minimum speed limits, that there are STOP signs instead of YIELD signs, that the signals are stop-on-red instead of go-on-green, that the tolls are the same at peak and off-peak hours, that the double yellow lines are laid down to prevent the traffic making the best use of the lanes, that expensive aircraft are spend time queuing on taxiways or stacked up on approach, that minimum wage statutes make it difficult to start a productive career, that the gambling and sex and narcotics industries have been reserved to the criminal underworld, that the majority of children attend schools that are subsidized by the taxpayers, that almost every profit-making transaction is taxable, that aggressive competitors like Standard Oil and the Aluminum Company of America and General Electric and Microsoft are victimized by anti-trust enforcers, that the money given to the U.S. for the common defense and the general welfare is being diverted to the United Nations and Israel and Egypt and a host of other clinging parasites, that in almost thirty of the States there is collective bargaining but individual remuneration? (The Soviet Union, which he, of course, despises, had collective bargaining, but remuneration also was collective; the labor unions know very well which members are the Stakhanovites.)

Buchanan asks us to believe that a nation whose several governments flagrantly worship waste can nevertheless survive by relying on its own resources, even when other nations can produce goods either cheaper or quicker! And it has never occurred to him that if the United States resorts to armed force to keep their goods out of the country, those countries may feel that they also are entitled to use force to pursue their aspirations – “if goods can’t cross frontiers, soldiers will.”

However, war is another subject on which Buchanan has quite singular ideas. He wishes that the United States had not taken part in World War I; in plain words, he would like the aggressor to have been rewarded with victory in March, 1918! So now, one can call oneself a conservative without accepting the dictum, supposedly of Edmund Burke, that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." He says the same about W. W. II; in truth, in 1940 Roosevelt was frightened out of his wits by the prospect of confronting the combined fleets of the German, Italian, French and Royal navies. Of course, Buchanan never mentions that W.W. II occurred only because Buchanan’s forefathers, the Republican Senate, refused to allow President Wilson to lead the United States into the League of Nations.

If Buchanan were indeed a conservative, in any ordinary sense of the word, what would we see in his pages? One blazingly obvious reform that is long overdue would be for the several States to follow the U.S. example and exclude office-holders from voting in elections: the reason why we see the worship of waste propagating so successfully is that the tax-spenders, the police and prison guards and parole officers and patrolmen and national park wardens and U.S. prosecutors (all of whom are violating their oath to uphold the republican form of government, which requires all officers to be elected) are voting together with – or, rather, against – the tax-payers.