Four Reforms: A Guide to the Seventies, by William F. Buckley, Jr., New York: C. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973. 128 pp. $4.95.
Some true stories are so improbable that they challenge disbelief. A reader was reading Four Reforms in one of the last quiet places in the core city of Baltimore-a randomly chosen alcove in the venerable Peabody Library at Mlt. Vernon Place. Having worked through the introduction and first chapter-on Welfare-with the attention that Mr. Buckley’s, Latinate prose exacts, the reader leaned back, stretched his arms, rubbed his eyes, and looked around him. On the shelf at desk level behind where he sat, he noticed a set of seven straw-colored volumes with an interesting title: Commons Debates, 1621 ; Notestein, Relf, & Simpson, eds. He picked up the seventh volume and idly flipped to an open page: “An act for the avoydinge of the great charge daylie encreasing uppon the Inhabitants in Cities and Townes corporate for the reliefe of poore people. . . .”!
Of course 1621 was only twenty years after the great Poor Law of Elizabeth I had purported a final solution of the poverty problem; thus supplying one of the first large-scale demonstrations that when government supersedes private enterprise (in this case the care of the poor by the charities of the Church) with whatever confidence of superior performance, the normal result is not much more, and frequently rather less than under prior arrangements. The proposed 1621 act of “avoydinge” rose out of hard times and the drift of the poor [who] “daylie resort into the Cities and corporate Townes . . .”; its final solution was simply to send nonresidents back to where they came from. The bill failed to pass, but forty years afterward Parliament enacted the residence requirement which Governor Rockefeller borrowed three centuries later to abate the “great Charge and burthen” of in-migrating poor people on the taxpayers of New York State. The Supreme Court’s rejection of (a Connecticut version of) this Rockefeller solution was doubtless one of the things that started, or accelerated, Mr. Buckley on his welfare ruminations. And he seems to have proceeded on the premise that poverty is an old disorder, and an instant cure improbable.
After all, it is widely reported that Buckley is a conservative, and since the term is almost indefinable, the report may hold. If men divide, as they do, on the question whether it is wiser to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of, then to prefer the known to unknown and quite likely greater horror is to be conservative. So Buckley in these four proposals eschews dreams of substantive but potentially perilous change to settle for mere procedural mitigation of some of the graver defects in welfare, tax, education and crime policy.
Choosing New York City and State quite naturally, indeed inevitably, as the optimum theater for an examination of welfare pathology, Buckley very soon notes a suggestive statistic: the richest state in the Union by any count pays only 98 cents to the federal government for every dollar it gets back in welfare and other subventions. Yet the subvention dollar for Texas, relatively poor, costs her $1.03. As Buckley sees it, poor Texas is subsidizing the richest of all the states to the tune of five cents in the hundred. But he does not advocate instant and tumultuous change. He just asks that “Congress shall appropriate funds for social welfare only for the benefit of those states whose per capita income is below the national average.” A faithful Federalist, he would let the wealthy states make their own welfare way at standards of their own choice. Suffer the ills we know, but look well for patient, prudent, procedural easements. No doubt uniform national standards would still prevail: the federal subventions would be geared to lift poor-state benefits toward some approximate uniformity; no doubt the rich states would gravitate to the same levels in default of the 312 Summer 1974 block to welfare pilgrims which the Supreme Court has ordered the states not to borrow from the reign of James I.
Buckley opens his chapter on taxation with a paragraph from current tax law which answers closely to Judge Learned Hand‘s comment on some earlier I.R.S. prose: “the words merely . . . dance before my eyes in a meaningless procession: cross-reference to cross-reference, exception upon exception-couched in abstract terms that offer no handle to take hold of . . . .” But it is not primarily the verbiage that troubles Buckley. He has found, with the help of Professor Hayek et. al., that after sixty-one years of the income tax (the tax-according-to-the-ability-to-pay) and after forty years of the welfare state, Americans who earn two thousand dollars a year (and there are some twenty-seven million in such households) were paying back in tax annual dollars half that amount! The federal income tax from these people was, to be sure, only 1.2 percent. The scarcely visible but regressive social security tax, sales tax and other excises on tobacco, liquor, gasoline, cosmetics, the quite visible property tax, the wholly invisible tax component in prices and rentals susceptible to managerial diffusion of business- tax burdenethese round out the fifty percent of income poor people pay. They mock the principle of progressivity to the point where Buckley urges an alternative tax criterion-proportionality.
To accomplish proportionality Buckley would end the federal tax on corporations, abolish all individual tax exemptions, deductions, etc., and impose a uniform rate of 15 percent on all brackets. (The original act in 1913 imposed a “normal” uniform rate of 1 [one!] percent.) Proportionality would presumably mount from the yield of other taxes on individual differentials in purchasing power. It would be projected below the poverty line by rebate of regressive federal (except Social Security) tax payments. Again Buckley holds for dual Federalism and leaves the states to tax as they will-example and osmosis might nudge them toward over-all proportionality. The analysis, somewhat Friedmanite, is clear and the intent commendable. Buckley’s claim that the shift to proportionality would yield sufficient revenue for the subtrillion- dollar budgets apparently ahead would be better judged by a tax staffer of the Ways and Means Committee ,than by this deponent. But the point is that on taxation, as on welfare, his theme is not to subvert or convulse; merely to accept present burdens but ease them through more nearly proportionate procedures.
Coming to education, the proposal is even simpler and narrower. Buckley would amend the Constitution to provide that “any relief authorized by any legislature for children attending non-public schools [shall not] be denied by virtue of any provision in the Constitution of the United States or of any State. . . .” In shorter and less diffident words, if a state wants to aid a parochial school, of which most (not all) are Roman Catholic, let it do so. The lowvoltage arguments for such an amendment are well known, and have sounded in state legislatures which concede the manifest justice (and utility) of aid to any competent school which lightens the taxpayers’ charge for public schooling.
But standing square and with ever more sedulous particularity in the way of such assistance is the recent and current Supreme Court’s position taken on the ultimate ground that the First Amendment prohibits (as indeed it does) an establishment of religion-which is interpreted, however, to mean that federal aid turns a prayersaying school into an Established Church! Now the people who cheer this ruling are not only those who hold that milkweed ought to be under the Dairy Code. Too many of them seem to have been raised (as was the undersigned) in households where the rearmost protuberance (what Buckley would call the uropygium) of the festa1 bird at Thanksgiving was known as the Pope’s nose. Such traces of counter-Tridentine enthusiasm-despite conciIiatory intimations after Vatican 11-are stin strong Modem Age 3r3 enough to keep proponents of “parochaid” muting loftier pleas, to talk in minimum terms of economy in public school finance. Nor is that argument to be demeaned. But a deeper, graver and altogether more urgent concern looks back at least to Aristotle.
A young man in one of those walkaround seminars in the grove of the Lyceum asked Ithe philosopher how he maintained his ideal constitution, once he had managed to set it up. The answer was:
Of all the things which I have mentioned, that which most contributes to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government. . . .
The best laws, though sanctioned by every citizen of the state, will be of no avail unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of the constitution. . . .
Assuming, as seems not unreasonable, that the U. S. Constitution is an American institution, we may look for its spirit to an exegete not invariably so Aristotelian : “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being,” wrote Mr. Justice Douglas for the Court a few years back. Yet all of us have heard of the schoolboy reading the Declaration for the first time who got to the part about Rights endowed by the Creator and asked Teacher, “Who he?”
The long withdrawing of the instruction which made such a question unlikely even among the young is not merely melancholy, as has been said, but ominous. It is only those who think that ideas-and their death -are without consequences who will contest the Aristotelian admonition that constitutions wane with the assumptions that nourish them. To outlaw, as the Court has done, the minute of daily prayer that was the single presupposition of transcendence that millions of public school children ever experienced personally is worrisome enough. To push on from that to prohibit public support for the dwindling number of schools which continue religious studies in some amplitude is more than worrisome.
After all, the authority of the very courts charged with keeping the Constitution traces to the old idea of a law in rerum natura. If the judge is to rule by persuasion rather than force, said Hand, he must “cloak . . . himself in the majesty of the overshadowing past. . . .” Here enters Buckley with his least and most modest change in procedure: a mere reassertion that in 1776, 1787, right up to the day before last and probably even now, you do not establish a church by acquainting schoolchildren with a primal presupposition of our Constitution.
The final chapter is on crime, and might have been captioned “Buckley vs. Miranda.” In the great case of Miranda us Arizona (1966), the single Justice who made a majority of five pushed about as far as it would go the rule that Justice (then New York State Judge) Cardozo had condemned forty years ago: “The criminal is to go free because the constable blundered. . . .” Miranda had raped a young woman and had admitted it on the witness stand (with the jury out). But the police had failed to hold his pre-trial answers to the straits imposed for the first time on his appeal, and so he went free. “When the verdict was ,finally in,” the trial judge reflected later, “I suddenly realized, with complete amazement and disgust, that we had not dealt at all during the nine-day trial with the basic question of guilt or innocence. . . .”
Mr. Justice White, dissenting along with three of his brethren, noticed this, too, and with matching dismay. “In some unknown number of cases,” he wrote, “the Court’s rule will return a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets and to the environment which produced him to repeat his crime whenever it pleases him’,-and of course upon a victim of his own choosing. One school of criminology will at once inflate White’s passing touch on environment into a plea that it really wasn’t Miranda’s fault at all, but society’s, for the frustration it had put upon him: so that society was morally bound to spring the rapist and acknowledge, not of course without regret, 314 Summer 1974 that the rapee was ordained a sacrifice for society’s own communal sinning. Yet even a devotee of this still chic aberration might concede that the range of choice available to the criminal for his next sacral stroke ought somehow to be restricted. One way, Buckley feels, again narrowly, almost wistfully, would be trial procedures shaped more explicitly to the criterion, “Did He Do It?”
All in all, it is a patient and persuasively argued book, notably concerned for poor people, poor states, impoverished schools, and that updated version of Sumner’s Forgotten Man-the victim of violent crime ; and proposing only the quiet easements of procedure for substantive problems which, if perhaps still in theory soluble, have survived twenty-three centuries of trying by the brightest and best-and worst.
