Book Reviews

He is not a sleeve-plucker. But, working out of a small publisher's office in Chicago with little support from the book sellers and only sporadic encouragement from re viewers, he has been one of the more potent movers and shakers in the American conservative movement. He tells the story of his publishing ventures in an engagingly modest autobiography, Memoirs of a Dissi dent Publisher (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 757 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017,260 pp., $12.95), that is in thorough keeping with his character. Always honest with him self, he had an affinity for honest men who are finding it difficult to get a forum in a world dominated by the quasi-collectivists who had .ap propriated the word «liberal" to .de570 scribe their illiberal philosophy. He had some money from his father's business, he had the support of his Quaker-bred wife, Eleanor, who be lieved in his inner light as well as her own, and he retained enough business sense to keep clear of bank ruptcy even while doing good for its own sake. With these quiet advan tages he picked up authors who, though they scarcely realized it themselves,werejust on the verge of capturing new audiences for which the Establishment publishing au thorities had no feeling and no use.

The list of conservative and liber tarian writers who were either floated or rescued by the Regnery imprint now makes a «(Who's Who" of a movement that is coming of age. Regnery published Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale on a tip from Frank HanighenofHuman Events, he accepted Russell Kirk's epochal T he Conservative Mind in its imMEMOIRS OF A DISSIDENT PUBLISHER 571 pressive entirety after Knopf had demanded that it be cut to a quarter of its length, and he gave many a dissident in the field of foreign af fairs (Freda Utley, William Henry Chamberlin, Charles C. Tansill, George Crocker) his or her head. In between times he did not neglect poetry, belles lettres and religion, publishing books ofconsequence and taste even though they did not an ticipate the apocalypse. Studies in Germany In his diffident way Henry Reg nery would have you believe that he became a publisher because he was not fit to be anything else. His own record belies his modesty. He decided against an engineering career after two years at Ar~our Tech, but he continued to pursue a mathematics major at M.1.T. At M.I.T. he met students and teachers who deflected him from the ((dull winter of mathematics and physics" to more exciting pursuits in music, art, languages and philosophy. At the be hest of a young German friend he spent two years in the German Rhineland, studying at Bonn and listening to all the music that he could absorb. Regnery's forebears, on both his father's and mother's side, had come from the Mosel re gion near Trier, so RhinelandGer many seemed home to the young student. Hitler had not yet suc ceeded in Nazifying the region, and the genocidal purge of the Jews was still a few years away.

The German experience taught Henry Regnery that not all Ger mans are Prussians, and gave him a special feeling for the opposition to Hitler whose plottings might have ended the war at an early stage if Roosevelt had not insisted on un conditional surrender. Returning home to New Deal America, Reg nery studied economics at Harvard under Schumpeter, learning some thing of ((the realities of the world." He began to distrust the fashionable intellectuals who had illusions of their own importance, but he re tained enough faith in the New Deal to spend a summer working for Rex ford Tugwell's Resettlement Ad ministration. Quaker Influence After qualifying for an M.A. at Harvard he took a job with an American Friends Service Commit tee community project in western Pennsylvania which offered a volun taristic version of the Tugwell theories. Using funds raised by the Quakers from private foundations, the so-called Penn-Craft community hoped to establish an industry to sustain homesteaders who could no longer find work in the mines or at the abandoned coke ovens. The most advantageous event to come out of Henry Regnery's brief association with Penn-Craft was his meeting 572 THE FREEMAN September with Eleanor Scattergood, the daughter of a prominent Quaker family. After their marriage, they spent a short time working with the Penn-Craft pioneers, but the time had come, so the young couple felt, for something more permanent.

Henry Regnery tried to return to his father's textile business, but soon, as he says, he found himself sliding into publishing ctalmost impercepti bly." The young Henry began with pamphlets, an offshoot of his connec tion with Human Events, a publica tion started in Washington toward the end of the war by Frank Hanighen and Regnery's Quaker friend Felix Morley. One thing led to another, and a collection of Com munist documents assembled by Raymond Murphy of the State De partment, too voluminous for pam phlet issue, inevitably became a book, Blueprint for World Conquest, with an introduction by William Henry Chamberlin. The Human Events pamphleteering introduced Regnery to more and more people who did not conform to what he perceived to be the ~~dominant opin ion" of the times, which was all in favor of accommodation with Stalin abroad and an extension of welfarist collectivism at home.

The ~~dominant opinion" included Henry Morgenthau's plan for turn ing the German Rhineland and Ruhr into a permanent industrial waste. Henry Regnery, remember ing his own German experience, re volted against that. So the first im prints of a newly formed Henry Reg nery Company went on two books by the humanitarian English pub lisher Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany and Our Threatened Val ues, and one by the philosopher Max Picard, Hitler in Our Selves. A first Regnery catalogue included Hans Rothfel's The German Opposition to Hitler and Ernst Juenger's The Peace. The Flag of Unorthodoxy Having raised the flag of unor thodoxy, Henry Regnery began to discover that Gollancz's phrase, ~~our threatened values," applied all over the lot. Pursuing this anti-Mor genthau interests, Regnery pub,Jished Montgomery Belgion's Vic tor's Justice and Freda Utley's The High Cost of Vengeance. Later he issued Utley's The China Story, but not in time to save mainland China from the Communists. Mortimer Smith's And Madly Teach, a book on the dominant educational theories that had inflicted the faulty ~~look say" reading methods on a genera tion of unsuspecting children, be came a Regnery bestseller after Time magazine had devoted a three-column article to it.

It was only natural that Regnery should take the lead in publishing early World War II Hrevisionist 1979 MEMOIRS OF A DISSIDENT PUBLISHER 573 books." There was William Henry Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade, Charles Tansill's Back Door to War, Husband Kimmel's Admiral Kimmel's Story and George Crocker's Roosevelt's Road to Russia. Regnery says he doubts that pub lishing the true story of Pearl Har bor or Yalta uwill prevent such oc currences in the future." But the truth, he says, ((is worthwhile for its own sake." If we can't know what our leaders have done and agreed to in our name, the alternative is ((the society described in George Orwell's 1984." Regnery anticipated Solzshenit syn by many years with his publica tion of Elinor Lipper's Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps. He outraged the Zionists by publishing Alfred M. Lilienthal's What Price Israel, even though Lilienthal made plain his ((obvious devotion to his Jewish faith."

It was not with a movement in mind that Regnery accepted Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind and Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale, but a movement it became, as the many Regnery titles mentioned in George Nash's The Conservative In tellectual Movement in America Since 1945 attest. In a period of less than two years Regnery issued James J. Kilpatrick's The Sovereign States, Felix Morley's Freedom and Federalism and James Burnham's Congress and the American Tradition,all of which complemented each other. Regnery has a gift for characteri zation, and his descriptions and analysis of some of his authors Konrad Adenauer of West Germany and Roy Campbell, the South Afri can poet, are examples-prove that he could have been a huge success as a critic or journalist if he had not chosen publishing as a career. But publishing was just exactly right for him. It allowed him to indulge his master passion, which was to let honest dissidents have their say. @ ECONOMICS OF PUBLIC POLICY: THE MICRO VIEW by John C. Goodman and Edwin G.

Dolan (West Publishing Company, 50 W. Kellogg Blvd., P.O. Box 3526, St. Paul, Minnesota 55165) 1979 211 pages • $6.95 paperback Reviewed by Lawrence W. Reed, As sistant Professor of Economics, North wood Institute, Midland, Michigan How refreshing it is to come upon a textbook on public policies which holds those policies up to the light of liberty as a standard for judging their desirability. At a time when many economists cast this yardstick aside with a ((Mussolini at least kept the trains running" attitude, two 574 THE FREEMAN September authors have produced a magnifi cent volume which is at once sound economics and a defense of liberty. The primary purpose of John C. Goodman's and Edwin G. Dolan's Economi;;s of Public Policy: The Micro View is ((to help students understand how economic theory applies to the real world . . . by showing how some of our most im portant (and often controversial) public policies reflect economic prin ciples in action." If the response of students at my college, Northwood Institute, is any indication, Good man and Dolan deserve an ((A+" for success in this endeavor.

In Chapter 1, ((Thinking About Public Issues and Policies," Good man and Dolan map out for the reader the course they will take in the succeeding fifteen chapters. They explain that positive economics-the scientific study of economic institutions, policies, and actions-will be utilized through examination and application of such concepts as scarcity, opportunity cost, the production-possibility fron tier, supply and demand analysis, and consumer choice. From there, the authors propose to enter the risky field of normative economics «the application of ethics or philoso phy to economic issues." It is this latter emphasis that makes Goodman's and Dolan's book so intriguing to the freedom be liever. The authors readily acknowledge that ((not everyone agrees on which normative stan dards are valid or on which ethical principles are more important than others" but they are quick to pro claim that ((such disagreements are no excuse for the failure to think and express ourselves clearly" in this realm.

The first standard which they use in evaluating public policies is that of efficiency, defined by the authors as ((the property of producing or act ing with a minimum of expense, waste, and effort." A policy or a change in policy is judged ((efficient" by this standard if its benefits ex ceed its costs. A second standard, equality, fo cuses on the distribution of income and wealth. If there is anything in the book which might touch off a libertarian's warning siren, it would be this point. Goodman and Dolan state that ((Bythis standard, a policy that causes income and wealth to be more equally divided would be judged to be a good policy ..." Inclusion of this standard, how ever, does not lead the authors to endorse coercive, egalitarian mea sures. They consistently favor the unfettered price system for ration ing economic goods and oppose nonmarket forms of rationing put forth as programs to ((help the poor."

They champion the sanctity of con tract and rebuff schemes for the for cible redistribution of wealth. They 1979 OTHER BOOKS 575 clearly show that recognition of Hvalue trade-offs" is important that complete equality of income, for instance, could only be achieved with disastrous effects on both effi ciency and their third criterion, liberty. As applied to the evaluation of public policy, Goodman's and Do lan's standard of liberty holds that cC any policy is bad if it violates the individual's civil and economic liberties." Such liberties include freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to own property, the right to produce goods and services, and the right to engage in voluntary exchange with others. As a professor of economics, I am at a loss to name another text book which rigorously evaluates the public policies of today against such noble principles.

Look to the Individual Another great strength of this book is the policy-by-policy scrutiny of the cCpolitics"of the issues. Here, the authors tackle the job of Utrying to explain why we have the particu lar policies we do have." As Ludwig von Mises and the praxeological economists have stressed re peatedly, the basic· economic unit of society is the individual. All actions and their consequences must be traced back to their point of origin-particular' individuals with particular interests and ideas. Only in this manner can we see why an act or policy has come about, and then assign responsibility. Once their methods of analysis are unfolded, the authors take on such varied topics as the military draft, gasoline rationing, product safety, farm policy, the postal service, il legal aliens, the minimum wage, the environment, and social security. Chapter 10, HCompetition and Monopoly in the Market for Oil," is one of the best. It covers a brief history of government and the oil business, a look at the OPEC cartel, the politics of oil, and a summary of several alternative energy policies.

These range from adopting a, free market to breaking up oil companies to nationalizing the oil industry. In their evaluation, Goodman and Dolan endorse the free market as the only alternative consistent with the standards of efficiency and lib erty, even though it does not pro :mise greater equality of income: By this standard [liberty] there should be no restrictions· on the buying and selling of oil and no restrictions on the production of oil and oil· products. Nor should government be able to tax uwind fall" profits or subsidize uwindfall" losses. Nor should government impose ar bitrary restrictions on our behavior or use the tax system to reduce our consumption of oil. The production, dis tribution, and use of oil should be left totally to the free choices of individuals who are participating in the free market. In other chapters, the reader will 576 THE FREEMAN fmd such interesting tidbits as a contrast between private and gov ernment mail delivery in American history, a defense of free immigra tion, a suggestion of applying the property rights concept to eliminate pollution, and an endorsement of innovative, free market pricing in the distribution of electric power. In every chapter, the authors write in a lively and lucid style that makes this study of public policy an abso lute delight.

Economics of Public Policy: The Micro View is exciting and exceed ingly useful in the classroom. And, in this reviewer's opinion, it's just great reading for anybody. i HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $3.00 Order from: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION, INC. IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 29, NO. 10 • OCTOBER 1979 Two Ways of Life Robert G. Anderson 579 Capitalism or socialism? The nature of property ownership makes the difference. The Fight for Free Enterprise Kenneth McDonald 590 In the contest against intervention, industrial capitalism should win on material, spiritual and ethical grounds. This Is Mine Robert LeFevre 593 How the concept of ownership might have emerged to undergird production and trade and civilization. "The King is Dead" Leonard Franckowiak 603 Government licensing curbs capitalism and freedom. The Hidden Fallacies Behind Intervention Clarence B. Carson 606 Man and the market economy are of a nature that cannot be improved or repaired by coercive measures.