Book Reviews

He accepts it as a given fact that most people need a "Mecca," and if they can't find it in a reli gion they will find it on this earth. He quotes British novelist Doris Lessingwith approval. Says Lessing, "it's fairly common among socialists [that] they are in fact God-seekers, looking for the kingdom of God on earth, trying to abolish the present in favor of some better future. If you don't believe in heaven you believe in socialism." Hollander's curiosity led him to make an ex tended study of "political pilgrimage" among in tellectuals. Currently they are turning to Nicaragua in default of anything better. They went al~ng with Soviet Russia until Stalin made it impossible for them to deny their eyes and ears. Then they turned to China. But Mao, killing his millions in the name of culture, was no better than Stalin. That left Cuba, with Fidel Castro, and Nicaragua, with Ortega. So an issue of Sojourner's magazine says "we believe that something unprecedented in Central America is happening in Nicaragua." Hollander "wonders if it would have made any difference had they known that many similarly hopeful travellers also believed that something unprecedented was happening in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Albania, Bulgar ia, Mozambique or many other countries of a similar political inspiration."

The behavior of intellectuals on political pil grimage to Managua or Havana taxes one's credulity. The Reverend Jesse Jackson visited what he was told was a "model prison." The in mates played baseball. But "as soon as Jackson had left the balls and bats were taken away and the prisoners returned to their cells." In Nicaragua the Sandinistas' Tomas Borg has two different offices.One is for meetings with re ligious delegations and delegations from demo cratic political parties. Before Borg meets with a religious delegation he memorizes Bible passages for quotation. But in his "real office" there are no crucifixes or Bibles-only Marxist literature and "posters of Marx, Engels, and Lenin." Borg, of course, is the Marxist who said the Central American revolution recognizes no boundaries. The palpable effort in Managua is to repro duce in Central America the atmosphere of the American college campuses of the 1960s. A San dinista network in the U.S. funnels tour groups to Nicaragua. Hollywood types are welcomed.

George Kennan's changing views are thor oughly analyzed by Hollander. Kennan's famous 1947 article that set forth the policy of contain ment is no longer considered relevant. In 1981 Kennan had come to believe that the negative image of the Soviet Union is "a monster of our own creation." The Soviet leaders, says the "new" Kennan, are "ordinary men who share the horror of major war." Hollander says that "perhaps we can share" Mr. Kennan's concern for the earth's limited re sources, "but it is hard to see why tackling that problem and keeping the Soviet Union from ex panding its influence should be mutually exclu sive." 0 PROSPERITY AND POVERTY: THE COM PASSIONATE USE OF RESOURCES IN A WORLD OF SCARCITY by E. Calvin Beisner CrosswayBooks,9825 W. RooseveltRoad, Westchester,Illinois 60153 -1988 - 304 pages- $9.95paperback. Reviewedby PeterJ. Hill D espite protestations to the contrary by some economists, issues involving eco nomic policy are extremely value laden.

Questions of economic justice, appropriate levels of redistribution, and the moral foundations of rights continually arise. Hence it is not surprising that people who have a well-developed moral and religious framework attempt to integrate that value structure with their views on economic pol icy. Calvin Beisner fits very well in this genre as he has written a book that uses a biblical perspec tive to look at the world of economics. Beisner's analysis is thoroughly Christian in the sense that he sees the Bible as the ultimate stan dard of truth by which all things must be mea sured, but he is also conversant with much of the recent scholarship in economics. Thus his work represents a careful attempt to integrate the two perspectives. He recognizes the need for compas sionate people to address the problems of pover ty, but he is also aware that one must couple bib lical concern with a careful understanding of how the world works. Beisner avoids the trap that many Christians fall into of thinking that good in tentions are all that matters, and that appropriate Christian concern will automatically lead to ef fective policy measures.

Beisner begins with the concept of steward ship, arguing that the believer must see God as 493 the owner of all things, and from that flows the responsibility to act appropriately in economic matters. He argues that we must not act wasteful ly and that the creation of wealth is very much a part of good stewardship. However, he also rec ognizes the dangers of wealth, clearly laying out where the allegiance of the Christian must lie. Beisner also does a thorough job of developing the concepts of work and rest as they relate to economic activity. It is the second part of the book that many readers will find the most interesting. In it the au thor puts forth his standard of economic justice, and he departs considerably from most Christian ethicists on this issue. He argues that biblical jus tice does not demand equality, and, in fact, re quires very unequal results in many cases. A major part of Beisner's analysis deals with the controversial Jubilee Year provision of Leviti cus 25, and he concludes that the passage does not require a radical equalizing of property or in comes. He does recognize that the text implies a significant constraint on the ability of people to alienate their productive capital, and it is in this sense that the passage has the most interesting implications for modern society. Although Beis ner acknowledges the importance of translating biblical concepts to the modern setting, a fuller exposition of just what the injunction against the permanent sale of land would prohibit in today's society would have been appreciated.

Parts III and IV of the book give a fairly ade quate explanation of how an economy functions with appropriate attention to issues of property rights, prices, and markets. Considerable atten tion is given to the questions of money and infla tion, with the careful development of the argu ment that a decrease in the purchasing power of money represents both bad stewardship and theft. On the basis of the biblical injunctions pro tecting property rights, Beisner concludes that the government should have no positive role in the provision of money; in other words free mar ket money represents the only truly moral form of currency. The author reaches an equally radical conclu sion with regard to coercive redistribution of wealth, namely that, by biblical standards, none should occur. A strong emphasis on the sanctity of property rights is at the basis of this conclu sion. Fairly standard arguments against subsidies, 494 THE FREEMAN-DECEMBER 1989 price controls, and import restrictions are also made.

The last section of the book presents Beisner's views on what should be done to alleviate pover ty. He recognizes a clear biblical imperative to care for the deserving poor, but argues that the government should have no role in doing that other than preventing fraud and the violation of property rights. Therefore he proposes alterna tive anti-poverty measures involving church and personal voluntary action. Beisner calculates the number of poor people in the United States ac cording to the biblical concept of poverty, which he argues is much more restrictive than the offi cial government definition. Using rough esti mates for per capita income of church members, he concludes that about one percent of their in come, or one-tenth of the expected tithe, would be sufficient to eliminate poverty. Of course any such calculations are subject to numerous caveats, but the point is well taken; appropriate Christian concern could voluntarily solve most of America's poverty problem.

Of course Christians do not devote anywhere near this amount to poverty reduction, a short coming of which Beisner is appropriately critical. He also recognizes that his call for reduction of government involvement in income redistribu tion must be accompanied by a dramatic alter ation in the attitude of many Christians toward voluntary measures. Beisner's book is well worth reading. He takes his standard of justice and truth, the Bible, seri ously and doesn't shirk from attempting to apply it to some of society's most vexing economic problems. He also is careful not to argue that the prevailing ethos of our capitalist society is bibli cal, while at the same time avoiding a utopian fascinatioJ;lwith alter~ative institutional arrange ments. One may wonder if the strength of his conclusions is fully warranted on some issues.For instance, is only free market money truly biblical, and·can no coercive redistribution of income be considered legitimate from a Christian perspec tive? Nevertheless, Beisner develops well-rea soned positions grounded in a careful reading of Scripture to support these positions, and the reader who wishes to disagree must be ready to confront his arguments head-on. D Dr. Hill is George F. Bennett Professorof Economics, Wheaton College,Wheaton,Illinois.

ECONOMICS: BETWEEN PREDICTIVE SCIENCE AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY by James M. Buchanan Compiled with a preface by Robert D. Tollison and Viktor J. Van~ berg. Texas A&M University Press, College Station, Texas 77843~ 4354 -1987 - 413 pages - $48.50 cloth. Reviewedby MatthewB. Kibbe A good economist will make one impor tant theoretical contribution to his field in a lifetime of work. There are few in dividuals of this intellectual caliber. Far rarer is the economist who has written extensively and productively on a broad range of theoretical and practical issues, often crossing official boundaries into other academic disciplines. James Buchanan is such an economist. In his distinguished career, Professor Buchanan has written extensively on the eco nomics of public finance, welfare economics, the economics of cost and individual choice, econom ic methodology, and political philosophy. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work in the field of "public choice," which revolutionized the way main stream economists look at and evaluate the polit ical decision-making process.

For the serious student interested in learning more about Buchanan's work, this book is a great place to start. It is a collection of previously pub lished essays and journal articles that brings to gether a broad, well-rounded sampling of Buchanan's most important contributions to eco nomics and political philosophy. A student and protegeof Frank Knight at the University of Chicago, Buchanan reflects an eclectic mix of ideas borrowed from Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, G. L. S. Shackle, and others. Austrian economists in particular will find them selves sympathetic with Buchanan's primary goal of reviving and extending the study of political economy in the tradition of the 18th-century Scottish moral philosophers. But Buchanan is still a neoclassical economist who often defends the orthodox tendencies to test, measur.e,and·predict empirically.For exam ple, he maintains that there is a strict dichotomy between the realm of "reactive" choice, where he views man's actions as analogous to the reactions of rats, and the realm of true creative choice in the Austrian sense. He argues: ". . .Misesian praxeology,as I understand it, would seem to in clude both exampleswithin the realm of human action that theory seeks to analyze and to ex plain. I submit, however,that they are categori cally distinct. [Reactive] action need not reflect conscious,active,or creativechoice;it can be in terpreted as an animal-likeresponse to a change in the external environment. It is. . . behavior that mighthave been scientificallypredicted."

Always challenging,often frustrating,it is this essentialtension,the rift "between predictivesci ence and moral philosophy," that drives Buchanan'ssystem of thought. All the same, the reader will enjoy being introduced to one of the few trulyoriginalthinkersin economicstoday. D Matthew Kibbe is a doctoral student in economics at George Mason University and a fellow at the Center for the Studyof MarketProcesses. LIBERTY,PROPERTY,AND THE FOUNDATIONSOF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION Edited by Ellen Frankel Paul and Howard Dick man State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, NY 12246-1989 -181 pages - $39.50cloth, $12.95paper Reviewed by Robert W McGee T.. his book consistsof eight essays, written . by eight different scholars,and edited by Ellen Frankel Paul and Howard Dickman of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in BowlingGreen, Ohio. The unifyingtheme is the interrelationship between liberty and property, with specialemphasison how libertyand proper ty wereviewedby America'sFoundingFathers.

In the preface, Gordon S. Wood discussesthe intellectual atmosphere that existed in the Coloniesat the time of the Revolution.Property was seen not so much as a way to aggrandize profits,but as a sourceof personalindependence. Property consistednot only of tangiblegoodsbut also of skills and anythingelse that made a per son independent. At least some of the Constitu tion's framers were very much aware of the dan ger posed by a legislative majority benton usurping a minority's property rights. In one of OTHER BOOKS 495 the first Supreme Court cases, Justice Samuel Chase stated that a law exceedsits legislativeau thority if it takes property from A and gives it to B. Today, such laws are commonplace,and very few people question their validity or even their propriety.How thingshavechangedin 200 years. Michael Kammen writes about the rights of property and the property in rights. One of the primary functions of government is to protect property.The new Constitutionaimed at protect ing these rights,as did the variousstate constitu tions. Liberty and property were thought to exist side by side. People couldn't have one without the other. The best way to safeguardliberty was to safeguard property.While some patriots wor ried that a free societywould produce inequality, wealth,luxury,extravagance,vice, and folly, curb ing property rightsto prevent these possibleevils wasn't seriouslyconsidered by most theorists of the day. Madisonpointed out that property rights developed from the diversity in the faculties of men and that attempting to distribute property evenlyis a wickedidea. Jeffersonwanted to give 50 acres of land to every adult male who lacked property,so that a broad segmentof the popula~ tion would have a stake in the society.With the spread of propertygoesthe spread of liberty.

Andrew J. Reck'schapter discussesmoral phi losophyand the framingof the Constitution.Two influentialworksof political philosophyappeared between 1776 and 1789, John Adams' Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the Unit ed States of America and the Federalist Papers by Hamilton,Madison,and Jay. By far the more influentialof the two was the Federalist Papers, which argued for ratificationof the Constitution in a seriesof essaysthat firstappeared in newspa pers. Reck outlinesthe originsof these two docu ments, portions of which can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Other sections of this chapter focus on the conventiondebates, Forrest McDonald'scomprehensivestudy of the intellectual origins of the Constitution, the rela tionship between liberty and property, the com promiseby which states retained equal represen tation in the Senate and representation .by population in the House, and Hamilton'sspeech at the convention.At the time of the convention, moral philosophyfocused on the relationshipof special interests to the general good, a relation shipthat the PublicChoiceSchooland others still 496 THE FREEMAN • DECEMBER 1989 are studying today. The framers' moral philoso phy synthesizes the extremes of virtue and inter est.

Edward J. Erler's chapter compares the pre sent view of property rights, as expounded by Justice William Brennan, with the view of the Founding Fathers. According to Brennan, the Fourteenth Amendment is perhaps as important as the original Constitution itself because it up grades the importance of protecting life and lib erty, and places property rights in a secondary po sition. The Founding Fathers, on the other hand, saw no inherent conflict between the right to property and the rights to life and liberty. Secur ing the right to property was the means by which the rights to life and liberty could be achieved. John Locke and the natural rights theorists played a very influential· role in shaping the framers' view of property rights. Many docu ments of the Colonial era, such as the various state bills of rights, are Lockean in structure and content. Jean Yarbrough focuses on Thomas Jefferson's view of property rights. One long-running dis pute has been Jefferson's failure specificallyto in clude property among the inalienable rights enu merated in the Declaration of Independence.

Rather than life, liberty, and property (as per Locke), Jefferson used life, liberty, and the pur suit of happiness. Yarbrough points out that property is not inalienable, since it can be alienat ed-traded or given away. Inalienable rights are a special category of natural rights that cannot be transferred to another. Property can be trans ferred, so it is not inalienable, although it is a nat ural right. Other sections discuss the origin, meaning, and status of property and the place of property in a republican government. The final section presents an overview of Jefferson's agrari an republicanism. Charles R Hobson's chapter discusses republi canism, commerce, and private rights from a Madisonian perspective. Madison was committed to republicanism, the belief that government is derived from the consent of the governed. He was a believer in majority rule but worried that the majority would violate minority rights if not held in check by the chains of the Constitution.

Throughout history, republics inevitably had de clined into despotisms. Madison was determined that this fate would not befall the newly created United States of America, so he built in checks and balances to protect minorities and to prevent any branch of government from being able to seize too much power. Virtue was needed to sus tain republican government, and Madison be lieved that virtue was best protected in an agrari an society, where individuals could remain independent and need not rely on others for sus tenance. Bernard H. Siegan writes about the limitations placed on Federal and state economic powers by the Co~stitution. The Constitution protects prop erty rights and a capitalist economic system. Hav ing experienced the abuse of economic rights by state legislatures, the framers provided more spe cific protection against the Federal abuse of eco nomic rights. States were not to interfere with contracts, although that clause has since withered away almost to the point of nonexistence. A com mon market between the states prevents jealous special interests within the states from using the power of government to protect their interests at the expense of everyone else.

William Letwin expands on this theme when he addresses the Constitution's economic poli cies. While the term "capitalism" wasn't used in 1789, the concept of capitalism-that the means of production should be privately owned and controlled-was very much a part of the founders' philosophy. The due process, takings, commerce, and contract clauses all provide evi dence that the founders intended individuals to own and control the means of production. Con temporary writings, such as the FederalistPapers, other writings of Madison and Hamilton, and the writings of others during the period, all provide substantial evidence that the founders intended to protect a free enterprise system. However, it cannot be said that the framers intended to found a laissez faire system. Indeed, as a group, they had no concept of such an idea. Their experience had been of mercantilism, and while the framers abhorred certain aspects of mercantilism, they did not come out in favor of a laissez faire sys tem. But the Constitution did not say anything to prevent such a system either.

In the concluding chapter, Michael W. Mc Connell provides a case study in the relationship between individual liberties and Constitutional structure, focusing on contract and property rights. He goes into some of the history behind contract, including a discussion of the Northwest Ordinance, the Treaty of Paris, the contract clause and the just compensation clause. He also discusses some possible explanations for the dif ferent treatments of contract rights and property rights, focusing primarily on the Hamiltonian and Madisonian views. OTHER BOOKS 497 All in all, this book provides an adequate, though brief, introduction to the prevailing view of liberty and property at the time of the found ing of the American republic. D ProfessorMcGee teachesaccountingat Seton Hall Univer sity. A SPECIAL FREEMAN REPRINT with a foreword by Walter Williams Crime and sequences bert James Bidinotto Mr. Bidinotto's nationally acclaimed 3-part Freeman series is now available in conve nient reprint form. Order extra copies to share with friends and associates.

40 pages, paperback Single copy $3.00 each 10-49 copies $2.00 each 50 or more $1.00 each Prices include postage. Please enclose payment with order. Order from: The Foundation for Economic Education Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533 498 INDEX THE FREEMAN Volume 39 January-December1989 Prepared by Bettina Bien Greaves NOTE: In page references, the number preceding the colon designates the month, the numbers following refer to pages. All articles have at least three entries-au thor, title, and subject-except in a few cases when the title and the appropriate subject coincide. The short "Perspective" items are listed alphabetically by title un der that category and also cross-indexed to author. Books reviewed are listed al phabetically by their author( s) on page 503; the names of their reviewers are in cluded in the master index. A ADVERTISING Movie-goers can think for themselves (Machan) 10:409 The quality of people and products (Athens) 1:31-32 Rise and fall of the Edsel (Young) 9:336-339 AFFIRMATIVE action (Pasour) 1:29-31 AFRICA, hunger and farming in black South Africa (Vorhies) 6:232-237 AGAINST the creation of wealth (Shen field) 1:16-20 AGRICULTURE Hunger and farming in black South Africa (Vorhies) 6:232-237 AHLSTROM, Bjorn Protecting whom from what? 4:153-154 AMADOR, Jorge Fairness doctrine, R.I.P. 6:226-231 AMBITION/incentive "What do you want to be?" (M.