Book Reviews

before he became Hitler's minis ter of propaganda and public en lightenment, had enough intelli gence to know that he was dealing in evil put-ons, which is a left handed compliment that we need not extend to some of the "intel lectuals" placed on exhibition by Mr. Beichma:n. Many of them know not what they do. But it is the effect of the "big lie" that is important, not the motivating intent. Constant repetition of Goebbel sian stuff has people believing (1) 1972 LIES 571 that America is a Fascist country, (2) that America means genocide, (3) tha t "the Bomber Left is a moral force," (4) that the American worker is a "honky," (5) that our political system is a fraud, (6) that our values .are materialistic, (7) that America usually spelled Amerika - is in sane, (8) that the American peo ple are "guilty," and (9) that what our country needs is "a vio lent revolution." Of course, the ave,rage Dayton, Ohio, housewife who is the unassuming heroine of Richard Scammons's and Ben Wattenberg's The Real Majority wouldn't believe even the least of the nine big lies, nor would her machinist husband. But the so called intellectual betters of the Dayton housewife swallow the Goebbelsian bait whole, which is one good reason for withholding Federal assistance from our insti tutions of higher learning. Why, indeed, should the taxpayers be called upon to subsidize the lynch ers?

Attention-Getters Speaking of the intellectuals who .justify bombing and arson as necessary attention-getters, Mr. Beichman calls it a "terrifying logic" as "we move from the old literary explosions of small intel lectual coteries to the infatuation of a new young avant-garde with the power that comes out of the barrel of a gun." Mr. Beichman says it is "small wonder" that a weary European visitor was moved "to make the bitter joke, 'When I hear the word gun, I .reach for my culture.' " But culture, in this era of the "counter-culture," is a weak shield. Editors who should be defending our cultural heritage sell out merely to be "with it." Anything and anyone can make the cover of our mass magazines. It's women's lib (the female chauvinistic kind) one week, gay lib the next, and Yippie Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman the. week after. "Ideas," says Mr. Beichman, "no longer 'trickle down' over a period of time." Instead, they are gobbled up uncritically by pub lishers who, "obeying some edi torial tropism," accord the crazi est notion "the most respectful hearing with color photographs as well." Says Mr. Beichman, our "literary avant-gardists in Amer ica are in permanent danger of being overrun by their own eager middle-class followers."

Raceless Genocide The lies, however, remain lies. How can you call America a Fascist country when anyone in it can say anything, no matter how outrageous? How can our de fense of the right of individuals 572 THE FREEMAN in South Vietnam to live without being overrun by their neighbors to the north be called "genocide"? After all, the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese are Orientals together, and our par tiality for the Orientals who pre fer liberty to slavery has nothing whatsoever to do with race. The distinction is moral and intellec tual. The stories of police "genocide" against the Black Panthers were repeated uncritically in our best newspapers. But when one inquir ing reporter, Edward Epstein of the N ew Yorker, tracked the lurid tales of "twenty-eight murdered Black Panthers" down, the num ber shriveled to six incidents in which Panthers were killed by police, and in four of these inci dents fourteen police were shot or killed by the Panthers.

Ends and Means Did this constitute a "national scheme . . . to destroy the Pan thers"? Or was the Panthers' law yer Charles Garry, who first float ed the twenty-eight figure, guilty of indulging in a "numbers game" entirely comparable to Senator Joe McCarthy's waving of a "list of Communists in the State De partment" that came to 146 or thereabouts and was never sub stantiated? To say, with the Bomber Left, that violence is necessary to make ideological and political points is to say that the end justifies the means. Some professors (Cornell and Harvard have had their trou bles with them) have made ex cuses for this notion, but it is hardly a universal axiom even among pragmatists. Mr. Beich man quotes a covey of academics who rationalize the work of the bombers by indulging in "fog banks of nauseating verbiage" that abound in such phrases as "America has spawned the radi calism it deserves." The "kids"

are absolved because the "System" is "bad." But our Bomber Left violence has lacked "the important ingredient of modern revolution an apparat." Mr. Beichman says the "days of rage" of the New Left are little more than Blanquist putschism, the crise de nerfs of "gesture children." The "gesture children" get the headlines, but they are not America. If our political system is a "fraud," how does it happen that a Lyndon Johnson, when Presi den t, can lose control of his party machinery? How can a Nixon come back after two disastrous defeats? How can a McGovern, moving up from nowhere, suddenly win ten primaries? For better or worse, our party "system" certainly ac commodates change. As for our "materialistic" values, Mr. Beich1972 LIES 573 man quotes Alfred North White head on Prometheus, who "did not bring to mankind freedom of the press. He procured fire, which obediently to human purposes cooks and gives warmth. In fact freedom of action is a primary human need."

Not Peculiarly American The final triad of "lies" - that America is "insane," "guilty" and in need of "violent revolution" is too surrealistic to demand much refutation. It was one man, not a multitude, that pulled the trigger on John Kennedy, and it was the one man, not the city of Dallas, that was mad. And, looking at Soviet Russia, Red China, Cuba and North Vietnam, what does violent revolution get you? Com pared to the new tyrants, the Kaiser and Czar were liberals, as Max Nomad once pointed out. The "honky" American worker may not have traveled, but he knows with Mr. Beichman that "racism, tribalism, communalism, religious hate" are less troublesome in Michigan towns than they are in "India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan, Japan, Ceylon ... the Soviet Un ion and China," all of which have repressed minorities. What distinguishes America, says Mr. Beichman in summing up, is that "Americans happen to be ashamed of their prejudices, while almost everybody else .is busy explaining the rationale of racial and religious discrimina tion, and why it is impossible to end them overnight." The very fact that we are an apologetic people proves that we are not fascists, not genocides, not hon kies, not insane. More than others, we are still seekers, looking for a perfection that nobody will ever find.

~ HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH by Marvin H. Edwards (New Rochelle, N. Y.: Arlington House, 1972, 318 pp., $9.95) Reviewer: Allan C. Brownfeld AMERICANSpresent a curious spec tacle to the world: Citizens of the freest and most prosperous nation on earth engage in ritual hand wringing over the alleged "crises" they find everywhere in their so ciety. Nothing is right, and of the things that are wrong none has come under sharper attack lately than the private practice of med icine. The near unanimity within the body politic about the existence of 574 THE FREEMAN September a health-care "crisis" is frighten ing. President Nixon has pro claimed it, and the only point at issue in the present debate is "which plan" should· be enacted to alleviate it. A presidential candi date has proposed a total sociali zation plan, and even the Ameri can· Medical Association has a plan in which doctors receive govern ment money but avoid government controls. The sickness of Ameri can medicine is the common as sumption.

The hollowness of this assump tion is demonstrated in H aza,rd0 us To Y our Health, a thoughtful and complete analysis of the charges leveled against American medi cine. The author, Marvin H. Ed wards, editor of Priva,te Practice magazine, concludes that, "There is no medical crisis in the United States, but there may be one soon. Experience with government health programs in this country and elsewhere makes it ominously clear that a national· health insur ance program may well result in a severe doctor shortage, overcrowd ing of hospitals 'and physicians' of fices, long waiting lists for hospi tal care, inadequate facilities, loss of privacy, Federal bankruptcy, and, eventually perhaps, discussion in this .nation of the need for mercy killings of the aged to re duce the unbearable costs of gov ernment medicine." Mr. Edwards notes that medi cal care is far more costly under a nationalized system than under private auspices. If the experi ences of European countries are indicative, people tend to overuse and overcrowd .existing medical facilities because they seem free.

Germany has more hospital beds per number of inhabitants than the United States, but all hospi tals are overcrowded throughout the year. The average hospital stay is twenty-four days, com pared to six to eight days in Amer ica. Part of the reason is that there is a lack of interest by the patient in regaining health as soon as possible, and doctors have no concrete feeling for the costs that could be avoided if the hos pital stay were shortened. In addi tion, the cost of the bureaucratic administrative machinery that ac companies every national health insurance system is staggering. The Swedish citizen, for example, pays twenty per cent of his taxes for health. Nationalized medicine was ini tiated in Sweden even though sev enty per cent of the Swedish pop ulation was already covered by private insurance programs. In the name of equality, these sev enty per cent were forced into a compulsory government-adminis tered program in order to provide for the remaining thirty per cent 1972 OTHER BOOKS 575 of the population not privately in sured.

Today there is hardly a single hospital in Sweden where there are not long waiting lists for all kinds of hospital care. It is esti mated that in Stockholm alone there are more than four thousand persons waiting to enter hospi tals, one thousand for operations. In some cases, waiting periods for minor operations may be more than half a year. Dr. Dag Knuts son, head of Sweden's medical as sociation, estimated in the first years of the medical plan that half of the patients in Sweden's hospi tals "need not be there." Mr. Edwards challenges the myth that there is a doctor short age. In the United States today there are 318,000 medical doctors. With a national population of roughly two hundred million, that is an average of one doctor for every six hundred and forty per sons. No other maj or nation in the 'world enjoys anything close to that ratio. Of these doctors, 169,656 are engaged in full time private prac tice. The remainder are engaged as follows: 28,105 in government service, 17,725 in full time hospi tal staffs, 10,452 in full time med ical faculties, 33,247 in resident training, 9,102 in internship, 4,919 in preventive medicine, and 2,653 in 'administrative medicine.

The 'remainder are retired or in some type of work other than the practice of medicine. "The problem," Mr. Edwards declares, "is not that there are not enough graduating doctors, but that too few are in direct pa tient care. In fact, it is. govern ment involvement in the field of medicine which is, in large meas ure, responsible for this situa tion." Discussing the failures and huge cost overruns of Medicare and Medicaid, Mr. Edwards points out that the overwhelming majority of Americans are covered by pri vate health insurance. As of the end of 1969, the Health Insurance Institute estimated 164 million persons under sixty-five - eighty nine per cent of the total - had some form of private protection against medical costs. He noted that "If a national system were to become law, the government pro gram would replace all of these private plans - at a much higher cost. Since eighty-nine per cent of the group in whose behalf such so cialized medicine" plans are being supported are, already covered, the advocates of such plans have not met the burden of proving a 'need' for the' program at all."

"The choice before us," writes Mr. Edwards, "is simple. You and I are now covered by private health plans and we are familiar 576 THE FREEMAN with them; we know what they provide and what they cost, and we know the agent who services them. We know our doctors and most of-us have confidence in them. . . . National Health Insur ance will destroy private insur ance. In return, its advocates promise to solve a fictional health crisis. . . . Government has made similar promises in the past: It has promised to solve the prob lems of agriculture,. of housing, of welfare. Instead, government in tervention has compounded the problems. Do you and I want to spend from twelve to eighty bil lion a year to replace private med ical care with government medical programs that have failed wher ever they have been tried?" Marvin Edwards has made a powerful case. Hopefully, it will provide a new and important di mension to the, thus far, one-sided public discussion of this truly life and death question. ~ CORRECTION: Dr. Sanborn's book, What, How, For Whom, reviewed in the August 1972 issue of THE FREEMAN, does not state spe cifically that the author favors conscription. The author leaves the question open for the stu dent to decide.

GARY NORTH HANDSOME BLUE lEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each ORDER FROM: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 22, NO. 10 • OCTOBER 1972 The Population Question: Limited Governmentor Limited People? James A. Weber 579 Drawing a true perspective on the governmental aspect of 1I0verpopulation." A Vote for Myself A vote everyone should be able to cast in confidence. Edwa,rd Y. Breese 584 Ageless Faith for a VacillatingAmerica Robert G. Bearce An urgent call for restoration of faith in God, in freedom, in the individual, in our heritage, in ourselves. Flood Relief Paul L. Poirot If a flood destroys my property, am I thereby entitled to yours? Creeping Capitalism: Is Free Enterprise Coming Back? Edward Coleson Examining present prospects for a renewal of freedom as a parallel to Britain's rejection of mercantilism in the century after Adam Smith.