Book Reviews

In Poor Policy, D. Eric Schansberg argues that, like bleeding, government policy to help the poor actually is harmful. Welfare programs aren't just ineffective. They are harmful. Furthermore, the author, who is assistant professor of economics at Indiana University-Southeast, makes a strong case that many of the poor are poor (or at least poorer than they would otherwise be) due to the effects of laws and policies designed to benefit various groups of non-poor people. In short, Schansberg is arguing the classic laissez-faire position against interventionism by demonstrating that it creates and exacerbates poverty. Virtually everything government does outside of its Jeffersonian core of protecting individual rights to life, liberty, and property creates wealth trans fers that make the society poorer on the whole, and have their worst impact on those who can least afford it. Schansberg devotes several chapters to the familiar list of laws that especially hurt the poor-the minimum wage, occupational licensing, rent control, and so on. In doing so, he introduces the reader to public-choice economic theory. Once people understand the logic of public choice, they are less apt to be taken in by the claims that laws like those are "well-intentioned."

579 I particularly commend the author for attacking sacred cows. Social Security? Sorry. It harms the poor. Drug prohibition? It harms the poor also. Public education? A cataclysm for the poor. Given that so many Americans have been conditioned to ask of any proposed public-policy change, "How will it impact the poor?" we should use Schans berg's book (as well as the works of Charles Murray, Marvin Olasky, and others) to bludgeon Social Security and so on with the argument, "They hurt the poor!" The book also takes some well-aimed shots at the pernicious idea that Christianity demands that we have a governmental welfare system. Big-government advocates shamelessly resort to this form of moral blackmail, but the author replies, "The bottom line is that there is no relation between the biblical call to Christians and the use of government to help the poor. In fact, they are diametrically opposed. The use of government to reach certain ends is based on coercion. The change in behavior designed to accompany the Christian's Spirit-filled life is completely volun tary." The use of coercion to accomplish anything, whether it is feeding the hungry or exploring Mars, is simplywrong.Schansberg has here hit upon what I believe must be the foremost goal of defenders of liberty, namely, to get people to pay attention to the morality of the means and not just the desir ability of the ends.

Poor Policy is a useful, nontechnical book that neatly organizes a lot of data and arguments against the ideas that government can, does, and should assist the poor. Bravo. 0 George C. Leef is book review editor of The Free man. The Concise Conservative Encyclopedia by Brad Miner Free Press. 1996 • 318 pages. $15.00 Reviewed by Aaron Steelman T he free-market movement in the United States has prospered tremendously over the past 20 years. Dozens of market-oriented think tanks and journals have been created, and an increasing number of students are becoming interested in the ideas of liberty. The ConciseConservativeEncyclo pedia provides a valuable and easy-to-read intro duction to the ideas, individuals, and organizations that have shaped this burgeoning intellectual movement.

580 THE FREEMAN • SEPTEMBER 1997 Miner's book contains 200 brief entries, an afterword by the author, and five succinct essayson the origins of conservative thought, ranging from antiquity to the modern era. Those essays are written by Carnes Lord, Jacob Neusner, James Schall, S.J., Peter Stanlis, and Charles Kesler. In the preface, Miner argues that the "purpose of a 'reader's encyclopedia' such as this one is not to provide the last word on the topics and people it covers, but to offer the inquiring reader just enough information about the subject in question to enable him to go on reading in some other book with a modicum of improved perspective." Toward that end he has succeeded marvelously. The entries have been chosen wisely and the author has given more than adequate attention to all the major strains of modern free-market thought, including classicalliberalism. Every major classical liberal and libertarian figure-including Mises, Hazlitt, Bastiat, Friedman, and Hayek, to mention but a few-is incisively and intelligently profiled. In addition, Miner has included entries for a number of other individuals and institutions that readers of The Freeman will undoubtedly be familiar with, but that many nonlibertarians will not. Among those are Frank Chodorov, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and Felix Morley. The book also contains brief, yet insightful, descriptions of the Austrian, Chicago, and Virginia schools of eco nomics. And Miner doesn't shy away from dis cussing differences of opinion on the Right. He discusses the debates over an interventionist for eign policy and free trade, and he deals with the seeming divide between traditionalism and liber tarianism, which he argues has been overblown.

For newcomers to free-market thought, his suggested readings at the end of each entry will be valuable-although there are a few exceptions to that rule. For example, the lone book by Mises that he has recommended is Human Action. While there can be little question that Human Action is the most comprehensive statement of Mises's worldview, how many beginners are going to be able to actually get through it? Listing,for example, Liberalism or Planning for Freedom as well would have been more helpful. Moreover, there are some exclusions that seem a bit puzzling. The Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, and the Volker Fund do not receive individual listings, nor do Israel Kirzner and Richard Epstein, two giants of free-market scholarship. Despite those problems, The Concise Conserva tive Encyclopedia is a tremendous improvement over its two principal competitors: Right Minds: A Sourcebook of American Conservative Thought by Gregory Wolfe and A Dictionary of American Conservatism by Louis Filler. It belongs in the library of every student of liberty, beginner or veteran. 0 Mr. Steelman is a staff writer at the Cato Institute.

The Diversity Machine: The Drive to Change the "White Male Workplace" by Frederick R. Lynch The Free Press. xv + 416 pages. $27.50 Reviewed by Brad Stetson E ven though race-and-gender-based double standards are encountering increasing public opposition, the affirmative action steamroller and the diversity machine have continued their work. Affirmative action has sustained some severe crit ical and legal blows lately, but its commercial cousin, the diversity movement, has escaped close scrutiny-until now. With this wide-ranging book, sociologist Frederick R. Lynch of Claremont McKenna College, crushes the Potemkin Village of slogans, moralisms, and stereotypes that have shielded diversity management from careful anal ysis. Lynch diligently traces the diversity movement from its roots in the affirmative action campaigns of the 1960s to its entrenchments in the board rooms of today's largest corporations. He carefully documents the language and rationales of "diver sity trainers," the salespeople for the movement who practice a subtle form of extortion by urging CEOs and personnel managers to have a workforce that "looks like America" or "reaches out" to the "underrepresented." In other words, the best way to avoid being called names at an interest group's press conference or to preempt discrimination is to artificially pump up the number of women and minorities employed and promoted. Of course subsequent training in "cultural sensitivity" and multiculturalism also looks good-and is very profitable for the firms devoted to providing such "services" to corporations.

While Lynch is respectful of the good intentions of many in the diversity movement, he does not accept their rhetoric at face value. At conference after conference, he encounters "diversity experts" who, for all their multicultural awareness and self-proclaimed sensitivity, are unwilling to ac knowledge either intragroup differences or the legitimate grievances of white males.

The diversity machine's general blindness to internal group differences stemming from age, religion, education, and even gender undercuts the validity of its generalizations about group traits. As Lynch illustrates, "The Hispanic manager could be a fourth generation Mexican-American with an Anglo mother and a Stanford M.B.A.; subor dinates might be first-generation Guatemalans with a sixth grade education." Similarly,dismissive talk of white male "backlash" and "resistance" is the ready response of many diversity "facilitators" to the white male employee who voices disagree ment with the diversitymandate. Lynch shows that the diversity machine's dispute with "white male" culture is in fact a veiled argument with the values and methods of capitalism and meritocracy. The basic reality that supports the diversity juggernaut is the same phenomenon that sustains affirmativeaction programs and so much politically correct cant about race and gender in American life: "preference falsification." This phrase, coined by economist Timur Kuran, refers to the mobili zation of social pressure to make people publicly praise ideas as true which they privately believe to be false. So in public, out of fear of being labeled "racist" .or "insensitive," people may accept the reasonableness of affirmativeaction, but in private they deem it a cloak for racial discrimination. The same holds true for corporate diversity programs, except that the pressure to be approving is mag nified, as people's promotions and jobs may well be jeopardized if they are too forthright in their disagreement. Indeed, as Lynch clearly showswith interviews and vignettes from the diversity semi nars, dissenters from diversity orthodoxy experi ence an enormous amount of fear and intimida tion.

The exhaustiveness and relentless detail of Lynch's investigation have a cumulative effect that will be persuasive to any open mind. Emerging from this meticulous dissection of the diversity movement is the unsettling truth that both the means and goals of this now largely mainstream, institutionalized philosophy are antithetical to the basic liberal values of the American founding: free speech, individualism, equality of opportunity, and nondiscrimination on grounds of race, gender, or religious faith. The diversity machine, with its underlying ideology of ethnic-gender proportion alism, cultural relativism, and identity politics can only foment social acrimony and, ironically, given its banner and rhetoric, a homogeneity of thought. Were this a nascent or fringe movement, it would be troubling enough. But given that the mantras of diversity have already mesmerized American pol itics and business culture, it is even more distressBOOKS 581 ing. The diversity machine's momentum will not soon slow, and we should be deeply concerned about where the irrational ethnic and gender group consciousness it stimulates will lead us. 0 Brad Stetson is director of The David Institute, a social research group in Tustin, California. He is coauthor of Challenging the Civil Rights Estab lishment (PraegerPublishers, 1993), and author of Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism (forthcoming, Praeger). His E-mail address is blsdi@aol.com. A shorter version of this review appeared in First Things.

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, 2nd edition by George H. Nash Intercollegiate Studies Institute. 1996 • 467 pages. $24.95 Reviewed by Robert Batemarco "we see so far because we stand on the shoulders of giants." In a nutshell, this is the major lesson to be learned from The Conser vative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 by George Nash. First published 20 years ago, this tome breathes life into those "giants of conserva tism" and the battles they waged not only against the dark forces of leftism, but at times against one another. That the internecine struggles of conservatism occupy a large part of this book should come as no surprise, given that conservatism was less a coher ent movement than a coalition of three move ments: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti communism. The Second World War had just finished giving each of them a pounding. To fight the war, governmental powers were swollen to unprecedented levels utterly inconsistently with libertarian notions of limited government; the ghastly carnage of that conflict shook the faith of many in the superiority of the Western tradition; and diplomatic intrigues plus the power vacuum caused by Germany's defeat left Stalin's Sovietsthe most powerful force in Europe.

Yet some thinkers saw these events not as a death knell, but rather as a wake-up call. The insight that the rise of totalitarianism was the logical conclusion of seemingly benign accretions of state power was the core message of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Like the first crocus 582 THE FREEMAN • SEPTEMBER 1997 when the snow still covers the ground, this book was a harbinger of future events. These included the founding of institutions as well as the prolif eration of scholarship aimed at furthering the cause of freedom. Indeed, the Foundation for Economic Education and The Freeman loom large in this story and Nash devotes several pages to their early days. The contributions of Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Ropke, and Friedman, among others, also receive their due. If libertarians blamed the rise of big government for most illsof the twentieth century, traditionalists found greater fault in the realm of ideas. Richard Weaver, in his book Ideas Have Consequences, drew a straight line from William of Occam's fourteenth-century denial of the existence of uni versals to the twentieth century's moral relativism and denial of ultimate truth. Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Russell Kirk were other major con tributors to this strand of conservative thought.

While these thinkers berated libertarians for fail ing to venture beyond the realm of economics, the libertarians responded by accusing traditionalists of not standing for anything in a principled way. Frank Meyer sought to find common ground between traditionalist and libertarian camps by emphasizing "reason operating within tradition." Despite Meyer's efforts, however, the insistence of many traditionalists on using the state as a vehicle for the promotion of virtue kept them at odds with libertarians. The third element of the amalgam known as conservatism were the cold warriors. The threat that communism posed to both limited government and traditional values was particularly obvious to those who had witnessed its depravity from the inside. It was from the ranks of those who could not answer in the negative the second half of the question, "are you now or have you ever been a communist? ," such as Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, that sprung the fiercest anti communists. The conflict between the cold war riors and the libertarians arose over whether it was appropriate to jettison many American freedoms in order to preserve the rest from communism.

Many libertarians correctly pointed out that this was a false dilemma. Fortunately, history proved them correct. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in Amer ica: Since 1945 covers all this and much more. I found it a fascinating story and a great way for anyone taking an interest in conservative or liber tarian ideas to get to know the key players. Political junkies be forewarned, however. You will find very little politics here: mainly discussions of the con troversyover Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Warren Court's landmark decisions, and the states' rights aspects of the civil rights movement. This book's forte is ideas-their origins, connections, and consequences. Having read the first edition of this book 20 years ago, I got even more out of it the second time around. However, a major disappointment was finding that to deal with the important events of those two decades, the author could muster no more than a 13-page epilogue. While he manages to fit a lot into those 13 pages, including the blossoming of rightwing think tanks, the impact of neoconservatism on the movement and the paleoconservative response, and the rise of the Religious Right, his discussion of paleolibertari anism was skimpy. He also all but ignores the impact of talk radio, an end run around the liberal-dominated news media that, while not orig inating new conservative ideas, played a major role in disseminating them. These lacunae notwith standing, this book remains an authoritative source of information of those who have done so much to put liberalism on the defensive. 0 Dr. Batemarco is director ofanalytics at a marketing researchfirm in New York City and teaches econom ics at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York.

He is book review editor of the Review of Austrian Economics. The Young Entrepreneur's Guide To Starting and Running a Business by Steve Mariotti Times Business. 1996 • 322 pages. $15.00 Reviewed by Richard A. Cooper S teve Mariotti was mugged twice-once by the hoodlums who beat him while jogging on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and then by the realization that these street punks were forgoing the greater returns possible by honest effort in business. Did this bookish financial analyst and export/import trader pack his bags and flee Man hattan for the relative peace of suburbia? No, he left his previous line of work and became a teacher in the New York City public schools. He volun teered for assignment to the worst schools. There he had another revelation. Steve Mariotti's primer could just as easily have been called The Beginner's Guide to Starting and Running a Business. But it is called The Young Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting and Running a Business for good reason. His focus has been on teaching entrepreneurship as a way of imparting both business principles and basic skills to young people, especially disadvantaged youth, including the poor and handicapped. Personal transforma tion and self-fulfillment of students were the orig inally unexpected side effects.

Mariotti discovered that he could grab the attention of students, even those labeled "border line retarded" when he talked about business and making money. "What had begun as an intuition slowlydeveloped into a certainty: whenever I could manage to focus a lesson on some phase of en trepreneurial business, I had the students' atten tion. I'began to do this consciously, using all my ingenuity to get across the bedrock principles of business: buy low, sell high; keep good records. I wanted these young people to appreciate the principles of free enterprise: (1) ownership and (2) honest relations with other human beings through the rational self-interest of voluntary trade." With e:t;ltrepreneurshipin mind, Mariotti's stu dents became interested in math, reading, and writing skills because they saw it benefited them. Instead of preaching or hectoring the students, Mariotti awakened the spark of recognition in them. Entrepreneurial education transformed the students' behavior as well as their academic out look. Courtesy, deferred gratification, and con scious decision-making planted roots within them.

He discovered that their tough lives gave them a "natural aptitude" for entrepreneurship. "I found that the negative characteristics of my students, when channeled into entrepreneurial activities, became positives." Given what we know about educational bureau cracies it comes as no surprise·that Steve Mariotti BOOKS 583 is no longer a schoolteacher. He left the New York City school system and established the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship in 1988. Today, he is still president of NFTE (pro nounced "nifty"). NFTE conducts classes in entre preneurship in schools, both public and private, as well as through various youth programs. Mariotti is not just interested in helping people start business, but in also showing them the liberating implica tions of entrepreneurship and the free-market economy. He is quite frank about this being one of the purposes of NFTE. Step by step Mariotti explains the key principles of entrepreneurship in practical, basic (sometimes a little too basic for my taste, having spent my adult life in business), and inspirational style. Examples are given of well-known entrepreneurs as well as NFTE graduates and their businesses. Some of the topics include negotiations, keystoning, market research, costing, accounting, banks, busi ness plans, and so forth. Suggestions are made for businesses teenagers could start.

Whatever your role in society, you can benefit from reading The Young Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting and Running a Business. You will better understand what you or others can do to make yourself and society more educated and more prosperous. This entertaining and sometimes mov ing book tells the story of entrepreneurship as personal empowerment while also revealing the path that led Steve Mariotti to his life's work from number-cruncher to teacher in the worst public schools in New York to entrepreneurship missionary. D Richard A. Cooper makes his living as an export import manager while exploring ideas as a freelance writer.

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