Book Reviews

166 A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK Faith and Freedom by John Chamberlain B en Hart, the son of Dartmouth's Profes sor Jeffrey Hart, is one of those editors who got their training on the off-campus Dartmouth Review, a conservative publication that has turned out more good newspapermen in recent years than any of our graduate schools of journalism. He is also an indefatigable scholar in the off-hours when he is not working for the Heritage Foundation in Washington. In a writ ing regime that has begun for him daily at six every morning he has produced an excellent book called Faith a\nd Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty (Lewis and Stanley Publishers, 384 pp., $18.95). The book makes a case for the claim that our constitutional liberties are historically rooted in the Christian faith. But Thomas Jefferson, who wavered between Deism and Christian beliefs, preferred to speak of a nondenominational "Creator" who had endowed us with "certain unalienable rights. " The common people in the colonies who objected to taxation without rep resentation could have been secular in demand ing that the "rights of Englishmen" going back to Magna Carta must be respected. But in any case there was a consensus: individual citizens had the right to representative government.

"We are fortunate," says Ben Hart, "that the American Republic was created at a time when there was such unanimity of opinion on what constitutes good government. The dis agreements were over specifics, not fundamen tals; means, not ends." Whether it was Jeffer son's deistic "creator" or the God of the Bible who was the source of our liberties did not real ly matter. What was important, in Hart's view, was that America, at the end of the eighteenth century, "was overwhelmingly Protestant, and of the dissident variety. " In 1775 there were 668 Con gregational churches, 588 Presbyterian, 494 Baptist, 310 Quaker, 159 German Reformed, 150 Lutheran, 65 Methodist. The Anglican Church, with 495 congregations, was in de cided minority. Only 1.4 percent of the popu lation was Roman Catholic, and three twentieths of one percent Jewish. Fully 75 percent of all Americans at the time of the Revolution belonged to churches of Pu ritan extraction. These Americans believed they had the right to face their God directly, without institutional barriers intervening. The greater part of Hart's book is devoted to exploring the faiths of churchgoers who looked back to John Wycliffe's and William Tyndale's tradition of translating the Bible into contemporary English and reading it for themselves. In America the pivotal document in the development of consti tutional government was the Mayflower Com pact, which was signed by almost all of the adult men on the Pilgrims' voyage. This, says Hart, disproves the impression left by historians that the "social compact" was an idea invented by John Locke in 1688, when the Era of the Enlightenment was dawning. Locke's "social compact" theory, says Hart, "was not really a theory at all, but was derived mainly from Scripture and his experience with the Congre gational church."

What really mattered was that Locke and the Mayflower Compact people came from the same source. The Puritans, who sailed to the Boston area ten years after the Pilgrims had settled in Plymouth, had a leader in John Win throp who wanted to build a government on biblical principles. Winthrop, who envisioned a ,'shining city on a hill, " was a republican rather than a democrat. He believed there must be safeguards preventing a tyranny of the majority. Winthrop's way of avoiding a tyranny was to divide his law-making body into a House of Assistants and a House of Deputies, which rep resented the fIrst bicameral legislature in North America. Winthrop's hopes that his ' 'shining city" would hold Puritans close to the Boston area were doomed by what Edmund Burke at a much later date would refer to as the "dissidence of dissent. " The Reverend Thomas Hooker, though a good friend of Winthrop, petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to allow his congregation to move to Connecticut. Winthrop said Hooker was breaking a covenant in leav ing, but he couldn't stop him.

The Fundamental Orders The Puritans in Boston had their own charter, which they had had the foresight to take with them from England, well out of the reach of Stuart monarchs. In Connecticut, Hooker estab lished his Court without a charter. His General Court inspired the so-called Fundamental Or ders of Connecticut which was the first written constitution in America. The Fundamental Or ders created a pattern for the Federal Constitu tion. The Fundamental Orders set up a working government by the people themselves, without any concession from a previously existing re gime. The Orders provided for regular elections but set strict limits on the power of those elected. Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson, the Founding Fathers, had a lot of precedent to go on when the final break with England came in the late eighteenth century. What Hart is intent upon doing is to establish the idea that the American and French revolu tions were two entirely different things. The American revolution was really a counter revolution, aimed at preserving a dispensation that had been in effect since Winthrop's and Hooker's day. It was George III, with his ar chaic divine right of kings, who was the revo lutionist in 1776. The French revolution, com ing out of the Enlightenment, had no ancient roots in Protestant insistence on the right to face God directly. It collapsed into Bonapartism af ter Robespierre's guillotine had done its nefar ious work.

The majority opinion in America was Prot estant' but there were so many sects that it was necessary to create a government which would not favor one Christian sect over another. Hence the separation of church and state that is found in the First Amendment. Modem judges get it all wrong when they say that the First Amendment means that government forbids 167 State encouragement of religion in general. All that the Amendment says is that there shall be no specific religion. Some of the states, in 1787, had official churches, but this didn't last. In 1786 Jeffer son's and Madison's state bill in Virginia dis established the Anglican Church, which had be come a minority sect in Virginia anyway. Hart wonders how the posting of the Ten Commandments on school walls, or how pub licly expressing thanks to our Creator for all He has given us, threatens the liberties of anyone. He hopes that different judges appointed· by President Bush will bring an end to petty squab bling about such things as a moment of silence in schools. As he puts it in a concluding chapter on "the true Thomas Jefferson," ". . . one would have to have a very warped perspective on American history to believe the Founding Fathers intended or foresaw the federal govern ment being used to bludgeon Christianity."

The clear intent of the First Amendment, says Hart, "was to protect a religious people from government." D PRIVATIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT Edited by Steve H. Hanke InternationalCenterfor EconomicGrowth/ICSPress, 243 Kearny Street, San Francisco, CA 94108 • 1987 • 237 pages • $29.95 cloth, $12.95 paper Reviewed by Robert W. McGee T his book is a "how-to" manual on privatization, which Hanke defines as "contracting with or selling to private parties the functions or firms previously con trolled or owned by governments." However, whereas most privatization books emphasize how privatization has worked in developed na tions, this book spends a good deal of time showing how privatization aids economic de velopment in less developed countries. But the book is not exclusively about priva tization in the Third World. There are more general chapters on the role of divestiture in economic growth, political obstacles to privati zation, property rights, legal and tax consider ations, and financing and marketing techniques that apply to any privatization program. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field, and 168 THE FREEMAN. APRIL 1989 Professor Hanke has done a good job of editing their work to make the chapters flow smoothly.

The fust part of the book discusses the effects of privatization in the developing world. Han ke's introduction calls privatization a revolu tionary innovation in economic policy, and mentions that the privatization concept has spread from Britain to France and to the "peo pIe's republics" in Africa and just about every where in between. Privatization will have a last ing impact in many places because it leads to structural change rather than cosmetic changes that can be easily undone by the next political administration. There is something in privatization for every body. Privatization promotes efficiency be cause private parties can do just about anything more efficiently than government, as long as they must compete in the marketplace. (If gov ernment grants a monopoly, that's another story.) Others favor privatization because it shrinks the size of government. Individuals from all parts of the political spectrum find privatization appealing once they can be shown what it is and what it can do for them.

Several chapters address this marketing ques tion from different angles. Robert Poole points out the political obstacles to privatization-it is widely believed that there won't be enough sup pliers to permit competition, public services are "natural monopolies," government must pro vide the service in question to ensure that the poor have access to it, and so forth. Poole an swers these and other popular objections that have been raised against privatization. One chapter provides a decision-maker's checklist of things to consider when preparing for privatization to avoid the pitfalls and maxi mize the chance of success. Another discusses successful privatization strategies and cites ex amples of how privatization has cut costs in a wide variety of areas. For instance, it costs the Army $4.20 to pro cess a check, but a private company can do it for $1. Private airlines in Australia carry 99 percent more tons of freight and 14 percent more passengers per employee than does Aus tralia's state-owned airline. Government offices in Hamburg, Germany, saved 20 to 80 percent in custodial costs by privatizing. Fire protection can cost 50 percent less when provided privately. Preparing timber for sale on public lands costs $80 to $100 per 1,000 board feet, com pared to $10 on private lands. Construction costs for Veterans Administration nursing homes are 290 percent higher than for private nursing homes. Ohio's private property asses sors can do the job for 50 percent less than the national average, but quality, as measured by the relationship between appraised values and actual property sales prices, is the highest in the nation. Many more examples are given.

From the evidence, it is obvious that privati zation strategies can be used to reduce the cost of just about any government service. But part of the problem with trying to start a privatiza tion program is.to ov~rcome the inertia of the status quo. Politicians and affected parties have to be convinced that they stand to benefit from privatization. This book describes techniques that have proven successful in winning over key groups. The book also gives four case studies of countries that have privatized. The history of privatization in Britain is especially interesting because Britain has been at the forefront of the privatization movement. The British Colum bian experience is interesting to read because of the novel approach that was used-transferring government assets to a holding company and giving its stock to the residents of British Co lumbia. Privatization in Turkey has led to both successes and problems. While intervention in the economy was reduced, it has been difficult to get the citizens to invest in anything other than gold and real estate because those were the only two investments they felt safe with. The Grenadan example shows what can be done when the proper groundwork is laid.

Privatization has had many successes since the late 1970s. The evidence is clear that gov ernment goods and services can be provided better and cheaper by the private sector. The major problem to be overcome is to convince those affected that they will be better off if their product or service is provided privately rather than by government. When this is done, priva tization can succeed. D Professor McGee holds a law degree and teaches accounting at Seton Hall University.