About the Election  

Michael Dukakis has been a liberal, a champion of fiscal responsibility and in his latest phase an enthusiastic practitioner of industrial policy, translated into cooperation between state government and corporate enterprise on terms exceedingly generous to the latter. His running …





The West Side of My Youth  

I was born in 1920 in the old Women’s Hospital of St. Luke’s at 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Two-thirds of a wretched century later, I reside one block west and five blocks north on Broadway and 115th Street, overlooking …



The Craze for Privatization  

The drive for “privatization” first began to gain momentum, like such key elements of the Reagan agenda as deregulation and acceleration of weapons procurement (the infamous MX was a Carter favorite), in Jimmy’s  administration. Its advocates claim that privatization not …





English Socialists a Generation Ago  

For individuals of a certain age and experience, Elizabeth Durbin’s sympathetic but clear-headed exploration of the British Labour party’s attempt in the 1930s to define a program at once intellectually coherent and politically appealing recalls their own groping for a …



The Debt Balloon  

Analogies both tempt and mislead. Still, it is hard to avoid recalling the merry 1920s, the last occasion when international and domestic credit stimulated pundits to project endless prosperity premised upon ever-rising stock prices. Roger Babson saluted Hoover’s victory in …



Poverty in the Mind  

At the very beginning of this meticulous essay in intellectual history, Gertrude Himmelfarb employs Samuel Johnson and R. H. Tawney to make a point of importance, that attitudes toward the poor in England have changed less in the last two …







Right Wisdom  

I know George Gilder as a likable chap, prey to surges of emotion that last long enough to translate themselves into entire books. In the wake of the 1964 Goldwater debacle, Gilder, then in his Ripon Society phase, wrote with …



The Economy: A Bleak Outlook  

Supply-side economics, the official Reagan alternative to the scorned Keynesian prescription, amounts to a gamble on the proposition that lower taxes will stimulate enough new investment and effort to flood supermarkets and showrooms with cheap merchandise of steadily improving quality. …





Troubles of the Welfare State  

Such as it is in the United States, the welfare state, a term for which exegesis will soon be supplied, came under intense fire even before the OPEC coup slowed economic growth, upset a precarious political detente over the size …



Tax Nonsense, Conservative Style  

Howard Jarvis stumps the country preaching salvation through lower taxes. One of the country’s best congressmen, Don Fraser, loses to a millionaire convert to the same gospel, and Vice President Mondale travels to his home state to urge his fellow …