11
It’s a Wonderful Life
JULY 20, 1992
It is fortunate for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn’t used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking boats. Granted, one can take satisfaction from his anti-historical exertions—the reader gets subversive pleasure out of his Sisyphean labors, and some wholesome pleasure from his yeomanry as a sump-pumper. Indeed his rhythm and grace recall the skills we remember as having been developed by Ben Hur, the model galley slave whose only request of the quartermaster was that he be allowed every month to move to the other side of the boat, to ensure a parallel development in the musculature of his arms and legs. I for one hope that the next time a nation experimenting with socialism or communism fails, which will happen the next time a nation experiments with socialism or communism, Ken Galbraith will feel the need to explain what happened. It’s great fun to read. It helps, of course, to suppress wistful thought about those who endured, or died trying, the passage toward collective living to which Professor Galbraith has beckoned us for over forty years, beguiling the subliterate world, here defined as those whose knowledge of what makes the world work is undeveloped.
His current conceit is that the United States has become a “culture of contentment.” His objective is to account for our failure to expand the public sector at a faster rate than we are doing.
His tone of voice, in describing the culture of contentment, is indispensable to the psychiatrist’s posture at the bedside of the patient. The reason the United States is ... stuck with its fixed ways is that we are ruled by a class of contented Americans who like it this way because this way leads to a continuation of their contentment at the expense of the less fortunate. They manage their continuation in power by a series of political and philosophical stratagems apparent only to careful students of the knavish practices of the contented.
Now in defining the culture of contentment, Professor Galbraith has some easy and some not so easy explaining to do. His first problem is that the United States is, after all, a democracy, with a universal franchise; so that if the majority of us were agonizing in a cauldron of discontent, all we’d need to wait for is the next election. Ah! JKG thought of that, and here is the explanation: 1) Enough Americans are living off the larder of contentment to overwhelm the exploited minority. And then, 2) that minority who are discontented have no reason to believe that political action works, and accordingly they don’t bother to vote.
Then there are concrete clusters of people, and philosophical lacunae. He deals with these. The farmers, for instance. “Agriculture works well only under a widely accepted and much celebrated form of exploitation, that by the farmer of himself, his family, and his immediate hired hands.” The farmers are kept docile by subsidies and by refreshing the working class as required, inasmuch as we all see “the need for the resupply or, less agreeably, for keeping some part of the underclass in continued and deferential subjection.” The thing to remember is that they are not in revolt against their revolting work.
And then we have Social Security, which brings a measure of contentment to the aging: thus are they pacified into accepting the status quo.
The manufacturing class is pacified by our longtime program of heavy weaponry, done to satisfy our paranoiac concern over world communism and its alleged appetite to control the world. Billions of dollars were spent and are being spent on useless military armament, the only purpose of which expenditure is to enrich the contented class. How did this come about, given the anti-military tradition of post-World War I America? Simple: “Weapons expenditure, unlike, for example, spending for the urban poor, rewards a very comfortable constituency ... Until World War II, the fortunately situated in the United States, the Republican Party in particular, resisted military expenditures, as they then resisted all government spending. In the years since, the presumed worldwide communist menace, as frequently it was designated [Correction. It wasn’t designated as a “presumed worldwide menace,” but as a “worldwide menace”], brought a major reversal: those with a comfortable concern for their own economic position became the most powerful advocates of the most prodigal of military outlays.” In other words, the rich decided it would pay off to have huge military war expenditures. Communism was convenient. It remains unclear why fascism wasn’t convenient for the same reasons twenty years earlier.
Mr. Galbraith moves on to absorb phenomenon after phenomenon, his responsibility being rather like that of the Marxist scholar to integrate any event into the grand ideological picture. About the savings and loan fiasco he is at his most indignant. He grooves the scandal into his syllabus by nice little evasions. “The once modest insurance of deposits by the Federal Government was raised to $100,000 on each S&L account. The selective view of the role of the state was never more evident. The foregoing changes were variously enacted or instituted mainly in the early 1980s. They set the stage for what was by far the most feckless and felonious disposition of what, essentially, were public funds in the nation’s history.” As to the indictment, Mr. Galbraith is correct: the S&L bailout—a government deed—is indefensible. As to the responsibility for it, he is mischievously vague. “The foregoing changes were variously enacted or instituted mainly in the early 1980s. ” The relevant changes were the suspension of Regulation Q, which limited the powers of S&Ls to pay interest; and the rise from $50,000 to $100,000 in deposits protected. Both these measures were taken by the Carter Administration in 1980. Unless “the early 1980s” translates to “1980,” Mr. Galbraith is guilty of misrepresentation. Few scholars would word such a sentence as, “Pearl Harbor took place in the early 1940s.”
And so on. The reason we have a volunteer military is? That the contented find that on the whole it is safer not to join the military than to join it—so why not pay others to do so? (This does not explain the number of otherwise contented young men who apply to go to West Point and Annapolis, but never mind.)
Everything, in a word, is organized around the idea of satisfying the contented class, including such conformity of, thought as issues from the modern corporation. Mr. Galbraith has been trying to kill off the big corporation ever since The New Industrial State, in which he exaggerated the powers of the “technostructure” in order to establish that big business runs America. This insight America has never discovered, behaving most disobediently by bankrupting hypothetically invincible businesses.
Where Mr. Galbraith gets ugly, and I need to say this with some gravity inasmuch as I write about someone for whom I have respect and affection, is in his handling of social theorists who are inconveniently situated in his Boschean tableau. George Gilder he mentions, though almost in passing, as a bard of the social usefulness of adversity. He cites Gilder’s observation that “in order to succeed, the poor need most of all the spur of their poverty.” In the author’s hands this ceases to be a point of sociological interest, true or false: it becomes only a part of the psaltery of contentment: one more hymn praising the persistence of poverty. Professor Arthur Laffer, who was the idiomatic godfather of supply-side economics, Mr. Galbraith dismisses as though his insights were of zero interest: “It is not clear that anyone of sober mentality took Professor Laffer’s curve and conclusions seriously. He must have credit, nonetheless, for showing that justifying contrivance, however transparent, could be of high practical service.” In other words, Laffer was propelled only by his ideological anxiety to stroke a ruling class.
Where Mr. Galbraith is inexcusable in his search for disingenuousness is in his handling of Charles Murray, a meticulous scholar of liberal background whose book Losing Ground is among the social landmarks of the postwar era. His handling of Murray: “And in the mid-1980s the requisite doctrine [needed by the culture of contentment to justify their policies] became available. Dr. Charles A. Murray provided the nearly perfect prescription.... its essence was that the poor are impoverished and are kept in poverty by the public measures, particularly the welfare payments, that are meant to rescue them from their plight.” Whatever Murray’s modifications, “the basic purpose of his argument would be served. The poor would be off the conscience of the comfortable, and, a point of greater importance, off the federal budget and tax system.”
So much for the masterwork of a scholar who has wondered diligently why the expenditure of $2.6 trillion has not done much to help the poor, and has certainly done much to hurt the poor.
John Kenneth Galbraith can’t free himself from his fixations, and it doesn’t much matter how overwhelming the evidence: he merely finds a new set of metaphors on which to hang his wardrobe, the current being the “contented” class. Nothing penetrates his comprehensive illusion. He managed, in the seventies, an entire book about China, which he visited while it was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, in which he could find to criticize only that the Chinese smoked too many cigarettes. Ferdinand Mount, reviewing Economics and the Public Purpose in National Review in 1973, made the point that Professor Galbraith “is not an economist at all. He is a preacher, and a preacher of the most uncompromising sort. Hence his popularity. Most people have little relish for economic argument but everybody likes a good Hellfire sermon. Better still, Galbraith is irreverent, even raffish. His manner is unbuttoned, almost unfrocked.” I suspect this is the reason for his extraordinary popularity in Japan. That is good news for those who worry about Japan’s economic preeminence. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau cited Galbraith as his favorite economist, from which moment on the economic decline of Canada began.