Book Reviews

To document the situation, Pro fessor Walter Gellhorn of the Columbia Law School has written a small book called When A meri cans Cornplain: Govern'mental Grievance Procedures (Harvard, $3.95). My trouble with reading the book is that I kept bristling all through its 232 pages' at the author's assumption that the march of government to a million and-one social service goals can not be halted. "Organized power," says Gell horn, "makes the wheels of life go round, makes modernity feas ible. Restraint and coercion can destroy citizens' freedoms, but can 185 186 THE FREEMAN March also enlarge them - as they do when government acts affirma tively to protect physical well-be ing, to maintain social services that diminish life's pains and pressures, to ensure against the devastations of unemployment, ill ness, and old age, to provide ed ucational facilities and cultural amenities." The entirely valid complaint that, when a government tries to become "affirmative" about prac tically everything, it must end by provoking a universal destruction of values (with the currency be ing one of the important things to go), is not the sort of griev ance that Professor Gellhorn has in mind. He assumes that we must have an ever-increasing tribe of public servants, and that voluntary organizations aren't capable of supplying enough hos pitals, or art centers, or medical insurance, to take care of our needs. But it is probably churlish to mention the matter of Profes sor Gellhorn's basic political phi losophy, for it arp.ounts tocriti cizing him for not having written an entirely different book.

For the Salce 01 Argument Granting for the sake of argu ment the assumption that "mo dernity" is only "feasible" with a vast multiplication of govern ment-directed energy, Professor Gellhorn makes out a good case for developing "external" .critics of public administration. When citizens complain, the complaints all too often wind up on the desks of those wbo are being complained against. L.egislatures try to de fine the exact scope of adminis trative agencies, but it is impos sible to detail in advance the ap plication of law. Moreover, by fol lowing the absolute letter of the law, an obnoxious public servant can sometimes defeat the inten tion of it. Complaints can get lost in a run-around, and appeals outside the system to the courts can take forever and cost entirely too much. Since it is impossible to get administrators to give adequate satisfaction in meeting criticis~s of malfeasance and misfeasance in their own agencies, the Amer ican people have tended to treat their legislative representatives as their defenders against bureau cratic wrong-doing. Professor Gellhorn says that it is a good guess that well over 200,000 com plaints about administration reach Congressional offices·in the course of a year. Since congressmen are convinced that the way to win elections is to handle grievances themselves, they and their staffs get involved in never-ending case work. Very often the complaining citizen establishes his point. But 1967 GOVERNMENTAL GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES 187 tiny victories rarely lead to ge neric improvement over a broad front. The patterns of adminis trative policies or behavior do not change. Constituents' cases are disposed of episodically in individual congressmen's offices and, since neither the Congress as a whole nor its standing com mittees are aware of what has happened, nothing is done to keep it from happening all over again with different principals being in volved.

AI/Citizen's Protectorl/ Professor Gellhorn is enamoured of the Scandinavian concept of the Ombudsman. In Sweden, N01" way, Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand, the idea of a "citizen's protector" has taken firm root. It is even being tried in Japan and in the Soviet Union. But no single "citizen's protector" could pos sibly take 200,000 cases off the hands of 536 congressmen. Admitting the difficulties which deri ve from the size and com plexity of the United States, Pro fessor Gellhorn sees great merit in the national adaptation of the ombudsman system that has been proposed by Representative Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin. What Reuss suggests is that an "Administra tive Counsel of the Congress" be appointed by the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate to review citi zens' complaint cases. The Ad nlinistrative Counsel would un dertake revie\vsonly when mem bers of Congress requested them.

And the outcome of each case would be reported to the consti tuentby the congressman him self. Thus Senators and Represen tatives would continue to get creditfor casework. But the work load on Congressional offices would be reduced, and there would be a better overall focus on defects in statutes or administrative meth ods that generated the complaints in the first place. Police Review Board In U. S. county and municipal areas the idea of single ombuds men, or citizens' protectors, might be counted on to succeed. But an ombudsman must be impartial as between complainants and city or county officials. When New York City made a partial gesture to wards accepting the ombudsman idea by setting up a civilian police review board, the police felt they were being singled out among public servants for·discrimination. Gossip soon had it that they were dragging their heels. The taxi drivers began saying that police in Harlem or in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn tended to look the other way when help was needed to deal with un188 THE FREEMAN March ruly cab fares. The police, so the taximen insisted, wanted to stay out of trouble lest the citizens' re view board might second-guess them.

Professor ·Gellhorn steps rather gingerly around the subject of the citizens' review board as it is limited to the performance of single bureaus. But it would seem obvious that if New York City had had an Ombudsman to listen to any and all complaints about any office or department from that of the Mayor on down, the police would have accepted surveillance from him without murmur. And the taxicab drivers might have gone to the Ombudsman instead of cynically· talking to themselves. Professor Gellhorn'sprose suf fers from the constant staccato interruption of innumerable and frequently turgid footnotes. Of course, the reader is free to skip them, but some of them are essen tial to the unfolding of the argu ment. The· book would. have been a better artistic unit if the neces sary material had been incorpo rated into the text and the rest segregated in an appendix. ~ The Greatest Evil I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Mana gerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint.

It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern. c. S. LEW IS, The Screw tape Letters 1967 OTHER BOOKS 189 ~ CAPITALISM: THE UNKNOWN ID EAL by Ayn .Rand with Alan Greenspan, economist; Nathaniel Branden, psychologist;· and· Robert Hessen, economic' historian. (New York; New American Library, 1966, 309 pp., $6.50) Rev,iewed by Elizabeth Gillett IN HER NOVELS as well as in two re cent nonfiction books, Miss Rand has slashed through many cher ished cliches with radical new ideas.

Here, she and her fellow authors focus on the phenomenon that be sets both antagonists and support ers of capitalism, including busi nessmen: the fact that almost no one understands it. This book dev astates the anticapitalists and forcefully expands the arsenal of pro-free-enterprisers by consis tent, sophisticated deployment of novel idea weapons - especially the concept of laissez-faire. Many of capitalism's professed defenders have partly or fully swallowed the smear spread by its avowed enemies: that capitalism absolutely requires governmental regulation to assure any measure of justice to all concerned-and the more controls the better. Miss Rand and company show what a perversion of basic facts this widely held estimate is. They argue further that only laissez faire capitalism, with state' and economics totally separated, can naturally assure the greatest pos sible justice by providing an ob jective standard in a free market, determined by the voluntary choices of participants from among goods and services pro duced for profit to meet people's needs and desires. Force and fraud do get punished - when they oc cur; they are not pa~atioically an ticipated by imposed regulations.

The book covers many crucial economic and governmental insti tutions, myths, and labels. Among these, in that order, are: antitrust laws, regulatory agencies, foreign aid, patents and copyrights, and the gold standard; the alleged in evitability of monopolies and de pressions and the presumed accom plishments of labor unions and public schools; "self~determina tion," "extremism," "consensus," and "conservatism." Especially memorable, besides "The Nature of Government" and "The Roots of War," both of which appeared in THE FREEMAN, is Miss Rand's "Notes on the History of American Free Enterprise." In it she argues that the villains of transcontinental railroads were power-hungry legislators and their greedy parasites, not independent 190 THE FREEMAN March entrepreneurs. The old leftist bro mide about how cruelly women and children were exploited under early capitalism is exploded in an essay. by Robert Hessen.

The two final essays make an impressive climax. Miss Rand's "The Cashing In: The Student Re bellion" identifies· the Berkeley riots, point by point, as a cultural abscess fed by several fallacious trends calculated to distort or dis credit free enterprise. Nathaniel Branden's piece on "Alienation" brilliantly traces the psychological premises that must operate in a collectivist's mind. At the core of the book's theme rest the Objectivist views of man and morality. Among their revolu tionary aspects· are: reason as an absolute, an objective standard of value, and the rejection of altru ism for rational self-interest. The book also offers a precise index of topics, individuals, and publications, and a "Recommended Bibliography" of many works that contain relevant material. Readers mayor may not agree with all the book's basic premises. Yet anyone who believes he favors capitalism owes himself the ex perience of becoming acquainted with the unique arguments pre sented in Capitalism: The Un known Ideal. Whether or not he accepts them all, he will come away better armed than ever before.

~ THE CHRISTIAN ALTERNA TIVE TO SOCIALISM by. Irving E. Howard, (Arlington, Virginia : Better Books, 1966. 153 pp., $2.50) Reviewed by Nor1nan S. Rea'm THERE ARE TWO separate but related arguments supporting a free enterprise, limited govern ment economic system. One· is the pragmatic argument; the other the moral argument. Both arrive at the same conclusion. Consider ing the ends which the majority of men have considered most wor thy, capitalism is always in the long run more effective than so cialism. The present volume by the well qualified assistant editor of Chris tian Economics presents the moral argument from a strictly Chris tian point of view. "It is not by accident that communism assumes an atheistic view of the universe and a materialistic view of man. It is no accident that the Ameri can system grew out of a strong faith in God and a spiritual view of the nature of man."

Christianity insists on certain basic moral principles. Each indi vidual is of supreme worth. Every normal man has and ought to have freedom of the will. Every man has a responsibility to help his less fortunate neighbor. The use of force and violence by one man 1967 OTHER BOOKS 191 against another is immoral. Steal ing is wrong. , Irving Howard documents the socialist's denial of each of these moral principles. In reality, the socialist scorns the common man and talks only about "lower class es." He denies that man, using his free will, can make wise de cisions, and therefore the socialist planners must make decisions for him. If men will not do voluntarily what the planners think wise, then they must be forced to do so even though this means the plunder of private property in the form of taxes and the coerced redistribu tion of wealth. Socialism thus be comes the complete antithesis of Christiani ty.

The author defends the idea of "Christian economics" by insist ing that what one believes deter mines how he acts, and only the fundamental principles of Chris tianity can give an adequate moral foundation to capitalism, while they invalidate the fundamental principles of socialism. Such fac tors as land, labor , money, and government are all discussed from this basic point of view. Running through the whole book is a strong passion for freedom coupled with a strongly orthodox religious philosophy. "Freedom is not primarily a political concern, it is a religious one. Freedom is a quality of life that has its· roots in the worship of God, a worship which produces a man with a high sense of moral responsibility, who does not need external restraints and who will, therefore, make a society in which external re straints are reduced to a minimum and freedom enlarged to a maxi mum." ~ ~ OUR WESTERN HERITAGE and THE SCRIPTURAL STAND ARD IN ECONOMICS AND GOVERNMENT. Both by Edward P. Coleson, Ph.D. (Privately printed and available from the author, Spring Arbor College, Spring Ar bor, Michigan, 49283. $1.25 each, postpaid) Reviewed by George Charles Roche III As A COLLEGE TEACHER of history and philosophy, this reviewer re peatedly found himself confronted with a problem which many teach ers of "Western Civilization"

courses have faced: most of the in troductory texts and readings available for undergraduate survey courses in the heritage of Western Man fail to present a complete and meaningful picture of their sub ject. The Judeo-Christian roots of our· past, founded upon faith in God, belief in an objective stand ard of right and wrong, and an af firmation of the dignity of the in dividual, often are submerged in a 192 THE FREEMAN March sea of "modern" cultural relativ ism, behaviorism, moral subjectiv ism, and· the rest of the ideology which dominates the textbooks of our superscientistic age. Professor Coleson's books are en couragingly different. Clearly and simply written, well-documented, and containing a helpful list of suggested readings, these paper back volumes offer, within the com pass of approximately 200 pages each, a straightforward and sound introduction to many aspects of the religious, historic, and moral heri tage of Western Man. Throughout, the author relates that heritage to the problems we face today and lays a foundation for the reader to do some fundamental thinking of his own in·contemporary economic, political, and ethical questions.

Either or both books would make a genuine addition to many courses. in introductory "social science" on the college level. They would be· es pecially valuable as supplementary readingsfor courses already estab lished, but would also make good reading for anyone interested in the restoration of the values of Western Civilization. ~ Binders with Issues inserted for Calendar Years 1963 and 1964: HANDSOME BLUELEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS Either year Both $ 5.00 10.00 Binder only, $2.50 each THE FREEMAN Y' George Roche looks carefully at some of the proposals for the youth of America and warns of the dangers of such regimentation p. 195 Y An Illinois businessman turns to The Law of Bastiat (1850) for guidance back toward liberty in 1967 ....p. 203 Y' The President of Rockford (Illinois) College deplores the power-seeki ng ef forts of many groups in our time and suggests a search for a moral alternative p. 207 ,J" Granville Wilson (no relation to the Prime Minister) seems to understand the flight from Britain of talent stifled under socialism p. 215 Y' Harold Fleming, author of Ten Thousand Commandments, affords a preview here of some ideas to be cov ered by him in an expanded and up dated study of antitrust laws and 'their impact p. 221 ~ Back to Britain, briefly, as George Winder focuses on the latest bureaucratic bungling of "wages and incomes" policies p. 231 ~ But, as William Henry Chamberlin readily perceives, not all such bun gling is foreign; we have our own wid ening "public sector" - at public expense '" p. 235 Y' Check again the opening article by George Roche, and then see how Rob ert Tyson, finance chairman of U.S.