Book Reviews

One calls the book enigmatic because Ha raszti skips from sections in which he mocks himself to ~ore serious passages in which he seems to be saying it is quite normal for an artist to work within the confines of any culture that is his national inheritance. The excuse has a sometimes unnecessarily forgiving tone. Haraszti's thesis is that socialist writing comes in two forms, depending on the state of affairs pertaining to any given moment in a to talitarian society. If one is under a Stalin, Com munist pictorial art will be poster work, and literature will follow a propagandist line. There will be strict censorship exercised from a cen tral point. Under a Khrushchev or a Gorbachev, however, things might differ. In periods of re laxation, artists under socialism may be permit ted a wide degree of self-censorship. The ones that seem to be good socialist citizens will be rewarded by ample funds and good working conditions-hence the term "velvet prison. "

What Haraszti says may very well be true for Hungary. He doesn't talk much about specific Hungarian authors, so it is difficult to see where ,'soft aesthetics" may take over. In medieval times the architects of Chartres Cathedral would have endorsed everything Haraszti might have had to say about working in a culture. But in Soviet Russia the Haraszti thesis doesn't check out. True enough, there was plenty of poster work under Stalin. But the writers who were permit ted latitudes under Khrushchev did not ask for velvet prison cells. Doctor Zhivago and various books by Solzhenitsyn were uncompromising. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn' s Gulag Archipelago still awaits a Soviet publication under the so-called relaxed Gorbachev. The Haraszti book does not check with Max Eastman's excellent Artists in Uniform, written many years ago and unfortunately now out of print. Max dealt with Soviet writers both in the pre-Stalin period, when Lenin and Trotsky were permissive about art, and in the gloomy night when the totalitarian "inquisition" took over.

In Leningrad, in the first days of Bolshevism, poets were permitted their lyricism. They could sing to the moon if they pleased. But the story of Yesenin, who married the American dancer, Isadora Duncan, is symptomatic. Yesenin had hoped to travel about Russia with Isadora, sing ing while she danced. But when Lenin and Trotsky ceased to have a direct influence on Yesenin, he took to reading texts he couldn't understand. Says Eastman, "It was the two fold misfortune of Yesenin' s lyric nature to be born into an age of gigantic concentration upon a practical undertaking, and into a company of engineers whose blueprints took the form of metaphysical demonstrations that the universe itself, or man and all society and all history, is that undertaking. ' , In short, Yesenin was convinced there was no room for poets under either militant or a more relaxed socialism. "My poems," he wrote, ' 'are no longer needed here." So his suicide followed.

In Eastman's story of what happened after Stalin grabbed the power and the printing presses, there were more suicides. Maiakovsky, after announcing his ~urrender to the politi cians, offered a "thunderous manifesto of defeat" and shot himself. There was an epi demic of suicides of poets of lesser importance. An exception, Eugene Zamyatin, author of the beautiful novel We, did not make any great ef fort to keep himself from being framed. Pan teleimon Romanov recanted his "mistake" of writing Three Pairs of Silk Stockings, which called attention to evils that had already been attacked by government. Isaac Babyel, author of Horse Army and Odessa Stories, refused to behave "like a recruiting sergeant" (he wouldn't write "ballyhoo" for the Red Army), and he shut up voluntarily. Boris Pilnyak, a great talent, rewrote a novel in order to get a visa to America. Says Eastman, "Probably no work of art in the world's history was ever com pleted in more direct violation of the artist's conscience, or with a more unadulterated mo tive of self-preservation than Pilnyak's The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea.

In Hungary, apparently, there were fewer suicides in Stalinist times. Says Haraszti, "al though the tradition of 'productive, revolution ary, and national themes' survived into the post-Stalin era, it was discovered that aesthetic regulation alone would do the trick. " No such discovery was made in Russia when Khrush chev denounced Stalin. Solzhenitsyn welcomed the denunciation for what it did to get a few of his books into print, but he now lives in Ver mont and refuses to change his style to conform to any "aesthetic regulation" that Gorbachev might want. Where are the fairly decent works of art or literature that have emerged from Hungary un der self-censorship? No doubt there are some. But Ben Shabn, the perceptive painter who wrote The Shape of Content (New York: Vin tage Books) is dubious of the value of any sys tem of conforming. ' 'Nonconformity, " he says, "is not only a desirable thing, it is a fac tual thing. One need only remark that all art is 125 based upon nonconformity, has been bought ei ther with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists. Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no science at all, no phi losophy, and considerable fewer religions. All that is pretty obvious. "

The good artist, says Shabn, has no really vested interest in the status quo. Hitler, a bad architect who wanted to kill expressionism, tried to establish a Nordic status quo, "a cloy ing art of kirche, kiiche, and kinder . .. [it was] stillborn and unremembered. " German expres sionism hasn't come back, but there will be other rebels. In Hungary, according to The Christian Sci ence Monitar, they are "taking a giant, if little noticed leap toward letting capitalism out of the closet. " If a nonconforming art. is to go with this leap, Haraszti is the man to discover it. But he has been too concerned with maintaining his sardonic pose. 0 WHEN GOVERNMENT GOES PRIVATE: SUCCESSFUL ALTERNATIVES TO PUBLIC SERVICES by Randall Fitzgerald Universe Books, 381 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016 1988 • 330 pages • $24.95 cloth Reviewed by Robert W. McGee B y the time I got halfway through the . introduction to this book, I wanted to send a copy to the mayor of the town where I live. Randall Fitzgerald documents lit erally hundreds of ways that local and national governments can cut costs without cutting ser vices by turning over government functions to the private sector. Nearly every line contains useful information for anyone interested in learning ways to shrink the size of government.

Fitzgerald shows that there is a third alternative to either cutting back on services or raising taxes-privatize. The "bottom line" of this book is that the private sector can do just about anything better and cheaper than government. The reason? In126 THE FREEMAN. MARCH 1989 centives, which are unleashed by breaking the government monopoly and opening up the ser vice in question to the competitive forces of the marketplace. A secondary theme of the book is that privatization is an idea whose time has come. Numerous municipalities are turning to privatization to reduce costs and provide better service. Some cities have been able to com pletely eliminate property taxes by privatizing everything. More than 50 countries have also been bitten by the privatization bug and have started turning over functions previously pro vided by government to the private sector. Privatization has many faces-at least 22 have been documented so far. Government can sell or give away state-owned enterprises, as Britain has been doing. Services can be con tracted out to one or more private companies.

Enterprises can be turned over to employees and allowed to sink or swim. State monopolies can be repealed, thus opening up the way to competition. User fees can replace taxes. Nu merous methods have been tried and they all result in reduced cost and/or better service. Here are some examples: When Central Park's Wollman Skating Rink was closed in 1980, New York City officials estimated it would take two years and cost $4.9 million to repair. Six years and nearly $13 mil lion later they estimated it would take another $3 million and two years to complete the reno vation. Businessman Donald Trump made a deal with City Hall and did the job in 3V2 months for slightly over $2 million. Trump was able to circumvent New York State's Wicks Law, which requires the use of separate con tractors for construction, plumbing, electrical, and ventilation work. Mayor Koch was so shocked at the result that he ordered a study to determine how Trump could beat City Hall so badly.

North of Boston, a privately owned and op erated incinerator turns garbage into energy for 20 towns having a combined population of over a half million. The towns now pay only $22 per ton to have their garbage taken away, compared to $100 a ton that is charged by the government operated landfill. A study prepared for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development examined eight municipal services, comparing the cost of having government provide the service to the cost of having the service contracted out. It found that asphalt paving cost 95 percent more when done by municipal workers, janitorial ser vices cost 73 percent more, and 5 of the other services cost at least 37 percent more when per formed by government workers. Payroll prepa ration costs were about the same regardless of who performed the service. The study also showed that the savings were not due to lower wage rates in the private sector-the private sector employees earned an average of $106 a month more than the government workers. Sav ings were made possible because of the inher ently more efficient structure of private, com petitive enterprise.

Prisons are also being privatized. A prison in Florida was turned over to a private company when the company offered to provide the ser vice for $24 a day per prisoner, compared to the $37 a day offered by the sheriff. Shortly after taking over, the private company raised guards' salaries from $8,100 to $13,500. California contracts out to the private sector for more than a dozen detention facilities. Prisoners who were temporarily housed in a private Pennsylvania jail did not want to return to the state-owned facility they came from because the conditions at the privately run prison were much more hu mane. Even streets are being privatized. At least 1,000 streets in St. Louis and adjoining areas have been privatized. The result has been sky rocketing property values, as deteriorating neighborhoods reversed the trend toward decay. Neighborhoods became stabilized and safer, and community pride increased. Houston sold some of its streets to homeowners to raise money and experienced similar results.

There seems to be almost no limit to what can be privatized. The U.S. military could save bil lions by contracting out numerous functions now performed by military personnel such as lawn-mowing, cooking, and selling groceries. Selling the post office and privatizing social se curity could save taxpayers and consumers bil lions more. Selling off surplus government as sets would enable the federal government to make the social security system solvent and could provide enough funds to wipe out the def icit, were it not for the fact that Congress sets up road blocks to prevent such sales from happen ing. If you have time to read only one book on privatization, this book would be a good choice. It summarizes what has been happening in the privatization revolution and cites numer ous books and articles that can be referred to for further investigation. The index is also quite thorough. 0 (Professor McGee holds a law degree and teaches accounting at Seton Hall University.) SEARCHING FOR SAFETY by Aaron Wildavsky Transaction Books, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903 • 1988 • 253 pages • $32.95 cloth; $16.95 paperback Reviewed by John Semmens W. hat is safe? While the purveyors of government safety regulations think they know, the odds are they are wrong. Since all action is designed to deal with the future, and the future is unknown, all action is inherently speculative. Though the ad vocates of statutory and regulatory approaches to coping with the hazards of an uncertain future believe they are ensuring safety, the reality is that the only thing likely to be ensured is stag nation.

This book is premised on the idea that safety is not a known, utopian condition, but rather a changing relative improvement over a previous more precarious condition. The question of how better to achieve safety is aptly posed by the so-called "jogger's dilemma." The dilemma consists of confronting two interrelated facts about the effects of jogging on a person's health. In general, over the long run, exercise tends to improve physical health and increase longevity. However, the process of strenuous exercise places the body under stress. One's chances of dying due to stress are, thus, greater during an hour of exercise than an hour of re pose. Should one incur the short-run risk of jogging with its attendant stress in order to obtain the long-run benefit of better health? The most inOTHER BOOKS 127 telligent response to such a question is that it depends. Not every individual faces the same risk-reward ratio. Not every circumstance is well suited to the contemplated exercise (as I write this, it is 110 degrees outside). The vari ety of contingencies that can affect the decision to take or avoid the short-run risk argue in favor of a flexible, decentralized process for decision making.

Safety regulation and legislation, though, are the opposite of flexible and decentralized. Gov ernment-imposed rules must be stable and stan dardized. "Flexibility" in the hands of govern ment can too easily degenerate into arbitrary abuse of authority. No matter how hard govern ment tries to decentralize, it will always fall short of matching its rules to the unique circum stances of each individual. Only freedom and the marketplace hold forth the prospect for ad equately coping with the changing needs of unique individuals. The current politicization of safety, by in flicting the force of government on more and more areas of our lives, threatens the safety it purports to be protecting. Banning or severely restricting "dangerous" research. and experi ments may prevent the improbable disasters the regulators fear. Unfortunately, progress may also be obstructed. Insisting that expensive safety equipment be mandated to guard against the tiniest hazards has a retarding effect on eco nomic growth. Safety demagogues are quick to assert their superior virtue for placing the sav ing of even one life ahead of economics.

Professor Wildavsky effectively refutes this fallacy by pointing out that economic growth also saves lives. The improved living condi tions made possible by economic growth actu ally contribute to longer, healthier lives. By way of illustration, he offers an interesting sta tistic: for a 45-year-old working man, a 15 per cent increase in take-home pay has the same statistical impact on his longevity as would the elimination of all workplace hazards. Thus, even if government programs to remove work hazards actually eliminated all risk, it is likely that the net result in most instances still would be negative. Sacrificing economic growth in pursuit of expensive safety rules, therefore, may well cost more lives than are saved. The progress that has yielded our current, 128 THE FREEMAN. MARCH 1989 relatively safe mode of living involved the in tentional taking of risks. Daring to venture into the unknown is an unavoidable step in develop ing new and better ways of living. Purposefully accepting risk isa necessary part of attaining greater safety in the long run.

The interconnectedness of risk and safety in validates the simplistic strategy of outlawing hazards. If we are to improve rather than atro phy we must move ahead by taking chances. The discovery of safer ways of doing things can be conducted most expeditiously by individuals free to act and to bear responsibility for the consequences. The social mechanism most adept at facilitating the process of rational risk taking is freedom. Professor Wildavsky's book is not always easy reading, but it is full of sound logic and useful illustrations. It will be especially helpful for those free market partisans who, for want of a firm scientific foundation, have conceded safety regulation to government. Not only can we rely upon the market to take care of safety, but if we value life and limb we will insist upon a market approach. 0 (John Semmens is an economist with the Laissez Faire Institute, a free-market research organi zation headquartered in Tempe, Arizona.) THE ART OF REASONING by David Kelley w. W. Norton & Company, 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 • 1988 • 412 pages • $19.95 cloth Reviewed by David M. Brown D avid Kelley's new logic text, The Art of Reasoning, is "must" reading for those dedicated to advancing liberty.

Of course, logic supports freedom over stat ism no matter what text one relies on. But Kelley seems to understand the relationship be tween first principles and final policy conclu sions somewhat better than many other philosophy professors. His exposition thus tends to be more informative than the usual textbook treat ment, even while avoiding technical issues not really relevant to the needs of the typical stu dent. (There's nothing in here about truth ta bles, for instance, or about exactly how statis ticians calculate probability variances.) This is not to imply that the book, with one of its more gratifying exercises pitting F. A. Hayek against J. K. Galbraith, was written with a primarily political purpose in mind. As the author comments, "The value of these logical skills is not limited to political arguments. . . . In a philosophy class, the issue might be free will versus determinism; in literature, it might be different interpretations of Hamlet.

Discussing these ideas means presenting rea sons for or against them.... In our own per sonal lives, finally, we all have choices to make, major ones or minor, and here too we need to weigh the reasons on each side and to consider all the relevant issues." The reader who studies this text and absorbs its lessons will be admirably equipped. Kelley begins by sketching the nature of concepts, the building blocks of premises. Then he takes on many of the usual topics, including the nature of propositions and syllogisms, inductive reason ing, etc. His chapter on dissecting and diagram ming arguments is particularly interesting and helpful. Here the reader leams to detect im plicit, unspoken premises, and to analyze the criss-crossing arguments and counter-argu ments of debates. Chapters are interspersed with practice quiz zes for which answers reside in the back of the book. For more detailed exercises there are no answers to tum to; the student gets practice in thinking entirely on his own. That's fine, espe cially since the meaty sample· arguments are drawn from a wide variety of intriguing con temporary and classical sources. Logic, it turns out, can be fun as well as relevant. 0 (Mr. Brown is a freelance writer in Trenton, New Jersey.) THEFREE IDEAS ON LIBERTY 132 The Real Meaning of Tax Loopholes James L. Payne Unraveling one of the great mysteries of modem politics.