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                           Imprimis, On Line
                     Special Edition, November 1993
        
        IMPRIMIS (im-pri-mis), taking its name from the Latin
        term, "in the first place," is the publication of
        Hillsdale College. Executive Editor, Ronald L.
        Trowbridge; Managing Editor, Lissa Roche; Assistant,
        Patricia A. DuBois. Illustrations by Tom Curtis. The
        opinions expressed in IMPRIMIS may be, but are not
        necessarily, the views of Hillsdale College and its
        External Programs division. Copyright 1993. Permission
        to reprint in whole or part is hereby granted, provided
        a version of the following credit line is used:
        "Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the monthly
        journal of Hillsdale College." Subscription free upon
        request. ISSN 0277-8432. Circulation 480,000 worldwide,
        established 1972. IMPRIMIS trademark registered in U.S.
        Patent and Trade Office #1563325.
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
              Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
                            Special Edition
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
                        A Special Message From_
                            Stanley D. Crow
                            Attorney at Law
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
        In recent years you and I have participated together in
        campaigns to prevent the establishment of an Idaho
        state lottery (we lost) and casino gambling (we won).
        When we undertook those campaigns, we had many good
        reasons to do so, but among them was our mutual desire
        to uphold and preserve traditional values--the values
        that make the difference between a society that thrives
        and one that wanes, between a society that is blessed
        with honor and one that is cursed with disrespect, and
        between a society that encourages vigorous virtues and
        one that degrades into malaise and dysfunction.
        
             The founders of our nation had carefully
        considered the teaching of centuries concerning how man
        should relate to God, how man should relate to man, and
        how government should encourage those right
        relationships. In turn, they created a governmental
        system that both presupposed a moral, upright, and
        self-responsible citizenry and that strived, until
        comparatively recently, to preserve those conditions.
        
             As our government has let us down, you and I and
        many others have stepped forward to fill the gap. One
        of the most effective in doing so is Dr. George Roche,
        whom I regard to be a philosopher of and for our times
        and a hero in the truest sense of the word. As
        president since 1971 of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale,
        Michigan, Dr. Roche has led his school to become one of
        the leading, if not the leading, institutional
        proponents and exponents of the interrelated causes of
        freedom for the individual, Judeo-Christian values for
        individuals and society, and a deep understanding of
        and firm commitment to the heritage of Western
        civilization.
        
             Through its own determined fight to be completely
        independent of government regulation and funding,
        through its renowned academic and public policy
        seminars both on campus and around the nation, through
        its brilliant exposition of the values that underlie
        free enterprise, through its academic rigor, and
        through its many publications--including the books of
        Dr. Roche and others and this Imprimis you hold in your
        hands--Hillsdale College has provided all of us with an
        inspiring example and the means of victory.
        
             I believe this so strongly that I have arranged
        for you to have a free subscription to the monthly
        Imprimis, at no cost or obligation if you so desire.
        Simply return the postpaid business reply envelope
        inside and join me as a faithful and appreciative
        Imprimis reader.
        
                                                     Sincerely,
                                                Stanley D. Crow
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
                 "Capitalism and the Future of America"
             By George Roche, President, Hillsdale College
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
        The brilliant young economist George Gilder has written
        that the most important event in recent history is "the
        demise of socialist dream." However, he also notes
        "_the failure of capitalism to win a corresponding
        triumph."
        
             Why is this so, when capitalism has so obviously
        provided more material benefits for every individual,
        regardless of economic or social condition, than any
        other system in the history of the world? Why, when
        capitalism's intellectual defense has been so ably
        undertaken by some of the greatest minds of our time is
        socialism, thinly disguised, still taught in our
        schools and promoted by our politicians? And why, when
        capitalism's results are so demonstrably humanitarian,
        is it still seen as a symbol for greed and
        exploitation? The perplexing answers to these questions
        share a common root: They all lie in the realm of
        ideas. Ideas, I find myself often saying, rule the
        world--not armies, not economics, not politics, not any
        of the things to which we usually give our allegiance,
        but ideas.
        
             "Ideas have consequences"--in just three words
        Richard Weaver encapsulated an entire philosophy of
        life that is also a challenge, a call to action for all
        of us. Throughout history there have been formative
        moments in which particular ideas and particular
        leaders exert a profound impact on the character and
        events of a nation. These special epochs, marked by the
        emergence of a new consensus, can readily be found in
        American history. The first great sea-change in
        American society occurred fully 150 years before the
        American Revolution when our colonial ancestors enjoyed
        a large measure of self-government. From the start, the
        American colonial experience had drawn heavily upon the
        traditional liberties of British subjects and upon
        their rich heritage of individual freedom guaranteed by
        the Magna Carta.
        
             By the eighteenth century, however, the British
        were pursuing a different goal. A new economic idea,
        mercantilism, dominated British thinking. Government
        planning and control regulated society and manipulated
        individuals. Eventually, the American colonists ran out
        of patience with this growing governmental interference
        in their affairs. During the summer of 1776, Thomas
        Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a
        revolutionary document destined to represent liberty
        for the American republic as long as it should endure.
        
             Coincidentally, during that same summer in 1776, a
        book was published thousands of miles away from the
        American colonies, a book destined to have a profound
        effect on America. The author, Adam Smith, was a
        professor of moral philosophy at the University of
        Glasgow, and the book was The Wealth of Nations. As a
        moral philosopher, Smith contended that men must be
        free to make their own decisions because, if they are
        not, a moral paralysis soon sets in. From this basic
        truth, he examined mercantilism and discovered that
        this early form of the planned economy was denying men
        freedom of choice and thus distorting British society.
        Eleven years later, fifty-five men met in Philadelphia
        to draft our Constitution. Motivated primarily by the
        ideas articulated by Jefferson and Smith, our Founding
        Fathers charted our national path toward limited
        government, the dignity of free men, and the marvelous
        prosperity we have enjoyed in this country.
        
             The next great sea-change in our nation's history
        occurred around the turn of the twentieth century.
        Unfortunately, these new ideas favored the collective
        over the individual, redirecting America on an
        increasingly hazardous path as the century progressed.
        The setting was ripe. For years, as America's
        industries boomed, immigrants poured in and cities
        mushroomed, it began to seem to some that the scale of
        life itself had so magnified that the common man no
        longer had a fair chance to get ahead in the world. Far
        from what one might expect, the momentum for
        collectivism was imparted not by public figures but by
        little-known men of ideas whose names not one in a
        hundred Americans would recognize.
        
             In certain elite circles, some wondered whether
        the answers for America's growing pains might not lie
        elsewhere than in the common sense of the Founding
        Fathers and the time-tested traditions of our Judeo-
        Christian heritage--and whether those answers might not
        instead be found in the work of certain "daring"
        European thinkers like Marx, Darwin, and Freud whose
        ideas had rocked the Old World during the 1800s.
        
             So a relative handful of professors and
        intellectuals, writing in the first years of this
        century and drawing on iconoclastic theories already
        well advanced in Europe, brought those ideas to America
        and began a process that remade the face of American
        society within thirty years, roughly between 1900 and
        1930. These collectivist ideas spread from a few
        seminal thinkers, to the second- and third-hand
        purveyors of ideas--teachers, ministers, the working
        press--the word wielders. The collective mentality
        continued to spread, reaching the professions, the
        business community, the courts, the novelists, the
        artists, the general public and last--always last--the
        politicians.
        
             Of the first seminal thinkers of the new era, John
        Dewey has had a lasting impact on our philosophy, our
        education, our culture, and, ultimately, our
        government. From his "progressive school" experiment of
        the mid-1890s at the University of Chicago, Dewey
        advocated a system of education which would produce a
        new generation of Americans with a preference for group
        and social activity and who viewed themselves not as
        individuals but as members of a "total democratic
        society." He emphasized the unfinished nature of
        society and the universe and called for "a new kind of
        religion" to be derived from human experience and
        relationships.
        
             Dewey's intellectual colleagues were themselves
        busy on other fronts. At Col-umbia, anthropologist Ruth
        Benedict and her mentor Franz Boas were developing the
        ideas that man could be understood only as a social
        animal, since his character was allegedly the exclusive
        creation of his society and environment. Charles
        Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
        was another key turning point. He set aside the
        traditional ideas of American society in favor of an
        essentially Marxian philosophy of history in which the
        Founding Fathers were portrayed as having placed the
        economic welfare of a few ahead of the total social
        welfare of all.
        
             The flamboyant Thorstein Veblen poured out his
        bitter frustration on the business community in shrill
        anticapitalist diatribes like The Theory of the Leisure
        Class. Meanwhile, Veblen's fellow economists John R.
        Commons and Richard Ely pioneered in charting a vastly
        expanded role for organized labor in the new
        collectivity.
        
             Sociologist Lester Frank Ward, one of the true
        patron saints of the modern American collectivist
        ideal, saw politics as a manipulating device designed
        to control all society, stating: "Modern society is
        suffering from the very opposite of paternalism--from
        under-government." In Ward, all those years ago, we
        thus find the original germ of an idea that has been
        central to the social planner's rhetoric from the New
        Deal era to the Clinton era.
        
             By 1932, the year the arch-collectivist and
        political pragmatist Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected
        president, the intellectual revolutionaries had already
        done their work, and they rapidly became the new
        political establishment. Under FDR, the new generation
        of intellectuals managed to use the Depression as a
        pretext for a massive collectivization of American
        society throughout the decade of the 1930s. They failed
        to cure the Depression, but a "fortunate" circumstance-
        -World War II--did it for them. After the war, the
        social engineers stood ready with further collectivist
        gimmicks such as the Full Employment Act of 1946.
        
             There was steady pressure throughout the Truman
        years for major expansion of the federal role in
        health, in education, and in welfare--pressure that
        finally resulted in new government programs under the
        succeeding Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
        Thus Eisenhower proved once again that Republican
        administrations usually ratify rather than reverse the
        collectivist inroads of their Democratic predecessors.
        The same pattern of ratification and acceleration was
        repeated two decades later when the Nixon and Ford
        administrations helped consolidate most of Lyndon
        Johnson's Great Society programs, exacerbated the oil
        crisis and other economic woes through an unprecedented
        program of peacetime wage-and-price controls, and
        presided over the regulatory explosion of the early
        1970s.
        
             In the last months of the Reagan presidency, we
        wondered if the pattern had been repeated. Many saw
        Reagan's election in 1980 and his subsequent reelection
        in 1984 as genuine evidence of Americans'
        disenchantment with government, a disenchantment that
        cuts across ideological lines and is an inevitable
        reaction to the love affair with statism that has been
        carried on for so long. But whatever one thinks in
        retrospect of Reagan's actual accomplishments, it is
        uncertain whether much has changed. Critics on the left
        have declared that the end of the Reagan era signaled
        the end of conservatism's brief resurgence.
        
             Undeniably the idea of capitalism, a central tenet
        of conservatism, remains under constant assault, and
        its detractors comprise a majority in our schools, our
        media, and  even our political and cultural leadership
        communities. One faction we may dub the "anti-
        capitalists," those who regard the redistribution of
        wealth in the name of "economic justice" as the proper
        goal of all economic activity. They claim that modern
        capitalism began with the Industrial Revolution and
        heralded child labor, wage slavery, urban squalor and a
        Hobbesian existence for the working class. The late
        20th century, they insist, is still an era of
        exploitation.
        
             A second group, however, focuses less on
        capitalism's evils than its supposed inadequacies. It
        is all right to defend free enterprise, so the
        reasoning goes, but today there are simply too many
        demands on the system--too many poor, too many
        problems, too many inequities--for individuals or the
        free market to handle. Government must, therefore, step
        in and act as the problem-solver. Far more people
        belong to this group than the first. They have accepted
        the need for intervention even though they may harbor
        no hostility to capitalism.
        
             Both groups are obsessively results-oriented. They
        begin with the premise that the world is perfectible
        and that man possesses the means to perfect it through
        his own reason and through man-made institutions.
        Capitalism simply cannot fulfill their expectations.
        Yet no amount of intellect and no economic system--no
        man-made system at all, for that matter--can cure every
        ill the world produces; it probably can't even cure
        half of them. Sadly, the false notion persists that
        some other system, some other grand vision, can achieve
        the impossible.
        
             The central idea of capitalism does not lie in the
        miracle of the market or even the ingenuity of the
        entrepreneur. It rests, rather, on the fundamental
        principle of freedom. One of the great sources of
        strength for America has been our commitment to
        economic, political, and religious freedom. Within our
        open society, individuals are free to provide for
        themselves and their families, to compete with others
        and to join with them in voluntary associations. We
        have been free to support those professions,
        businesses, schools, hospitals, churches, and cultural
        institutions which best meet our individual needs and
        preferences. In other words, we have prospered with
        competition and voluntary association in the private
        sector. The American economy, despite its ups and downs
        and the serious threats it faces from over regulation,
        the deficit, and the other problems of our times, has
        worked beautifully--beyond the wildest dreams of the
        utopian social planners. But it has worked precisely
        because we have allowed individuals to act freely on
        their own.
        
             Self-transcendence is the ability to rise above
        the merely animal, merely physical self and freely
        choose the conditions and terms of our own existence,
        to decide what is of ultimate importance and act upon
        it whether or not other people understand, whether or
        not it is dangerous, whether or not it makes us rich.
        Only human beings have that capacity. Only you and I
        do. We have the capacity to rise above our merely
        physical selves.
        
             Self-transcendence, based on individual choice,
        touches every aspect of our lives. If economic
        transactions were based on the immediate cave man rip-
        off--the idea that I want to grab all I can get, and I
        want to get it right now, and I will not honor any
        obligation that interferes with this--no long-term
        economic planning would be possible. No investment,
        nothing of what we call a capital structure, could ever
        come into existence, unless legal contracts were
        honored. That necessitates self-transcending people,
        people willing to honor their commitments.
        
             That is the leadership commitment we are
        discussing. All civilization is based upon the
        integrity of the self-responsible individual, directed
        by a view of justice, of restraint, and of
        responsibility.
        
             There was a time when this country of ours valued
        such an idea. It placed its faith in the responsible
        individual and the institutional structure, giving form
        to our lives. And it is the erosion of that faith which
        today destroys us from within. I submit to you that
        unless we recover it, all the methods in the world to
        do something better economically, technologically, or
        socially are just so much spitting in the wind.
        
             We must insist upon a return to a hierarchy of
        values which gives primacy to the dignity of the
        individual and to the instructional forms which
        guarantee that dignity.
        
             It is here that the free market, private property,
        private institutions--that whole private sector idea--
        has special validity, because it does leave people free
        to build their own voluntary associations, to be
        uniquely self-transcending, to get on with the dignity
        of leading their own lives.
        
             Remember, then, when we as leaders are talking
        about the private sector, that we are committed to it
        not because it works, though it works very well. All
        kinds of economic arguments demonstrate that the free
        market provides prosperity. It solves social problems.
        It works. But that is not the argument that we should
        advance. People are not inspired by the argument that
        they will have more refrigerators if they are free men.
        Our message must not be that the free market is good
        because it works, but rather that it works because it
        is good--because it has the fundamentally proper view
        of human nature.
        
             This is what capitalism offers for our American
        future. Together we can invest our resources and
        energies in a system which provides a level of
        prosperity and personal dignity unheralded in the
        history of the world. Its legacy of freedom, passed
        from one generation to the next, is now ours to defend
        for our children, and for all who will follow.
        
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
        George Roche has served as president of Hillsdale
        College since 1971 and in the last two decades has
        attracted international attention for his battle to
        protect the school from federal intrusion. (Despite the
        fact that Hillsdale has never accepted federal funds,
        the Supreme Court has challenged Hillsdale's
        independence.) Firing Line, the MacNeil-Lehrer News
        Hour, News-week, the New York Times, Reader's Digest,
        Time, Today, the Wall Street Journal, and scores of
        other television, radio, magazine, and newspaper
        sources have chronicled his efforts.
        
             Formerly the presidentially-appointed chairman of
        the National Council on Educational Research, the
        director of seminars at the Foundation of Economical
        Education in New York, a professor of history at the
        Colorado School of Mines, and a U.S. Marine, George
        Roche is also the author of 10 books on education,
        history, philosophy, and government, including America
        by the Throat: The Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy
        (1985), Going Home (1986), A World Without Heroes: The
        Modern Tragedy (1987), A Reason for Living (1989), and
        One by One: Preserving Values and Freedom in Heartland
        America (1990).
                                  ###
        +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
           End of this special edition of Imprimis, On Line;
              Information about the electronic publisher,
          Applied Foresight, Inc., is in the file, IMPR_BY.TXT
        
        For the November 1993 issue, there is the normal issue
               of Imprimis issued by Hillsdale College.
                       See the file, IMPR9311.TXT
        +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
        
