EXPLANATIONS EXPLANATORY OF THINGS EXPLAINED (A. Lincoln)

Whatever happens in the election Tuesday, it is now clear that the Republicans have a great deal of regrouping to do to get right with the electorate in the matter of choosing candidates who can (a) stay out of trouble; and (b) get themselves elected as a consequence. The Stevens case just concluded provides all the incentive needed for that.
Before Stevens we had the case of Governor Rowland of Connecticut. He also was the victim of impulsive contractors who insisted on making alterations to his home despite everything he could do to prevent them. To add insult to injury they then refused to present him with a bill for their services, which he was forced to accept without payment.

In court language “Rowland” came before “Stevens” and should have served as a warning to him, but it didn’t. He rushed right into the trap. All of a sudden from living in a hovel he was installed in a palace. He didn’t give it any thought, just gave all the credit to his fairy godmother and returned to his senatorial duties, coincidentally seeing to it that his benefactors weren’t overlooked when it came to the awarding of government contracts.

What a guy! To think that all this brought a sudden end to an illustrious career. (I didn’t think it was so illustrious. Cf. my piece “Back to Your Sled, Senator Ted”, indexed here.
Could this have hexed him?) The lesson I draw from it is that the Republicans will have to stop nominating homeowners for office and restrict nominations to apartment dwellers only. Apartments can be altered and enlarged too, but not the way houses can. They are not as likely to be invaded by tradesmen determined to redo them while the owner is totally unaware of their presence. No, I don’t think it would matter much if some of them were rent-controlled, but they would be hard to get. The Dems have 'em sewn up.

None of the current hoo-haw is unfamiliar to people like myself who remember the case of Happy Chandler in 1945. Happy was a Senator from Kentucky who was chosen by the major league baseball clubs to be the new Commissioner of Baseball succeeding the deceased Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. It turned out that he also had been ambushed by unscrupulous contractors who had installed a swimming pool in his backyard without him knowing a thing about it. “You could have knocked him over with the diving board", he was so surprised, as one newspaper put it. But he got the job anyway.

One who didn’t get a job under similar circumstances was Ed Flynn, the Democratic boss of the Bronx, who was nominated by President Roosevelt to be his ambassador to Australia in 1943, but was not confirmed by the Senate when it became known that he had improved his country property upstate by using Belgian building blocks belonging to New York City but not being used for anything.

Governor Rowland went to jail for ten months for his indiscretions and Senator Stevens faces jail too. Chandler and Flynn lived in more easygoing times and their only real punishment was the bad publicity they got. It’s not so simple today. Apartments, I say again, are the only protection available to the Grand Old Party to keep their officeholders out of stir. Please do it now, before it’s too late.
All this shows how concerned I am for the future of the party. Thing aren’t looking good for it at the moment, but people who actually expect the Democrats to overcome the current economic problems and create prosperity will find they have made the mistake of committing suicide out of fear of death. Higher taxes and ‘spreading the wealth’ just won’t do it. The one industry that will come back bigger than ever will be the tax shelter
business. As for the underground economy, that won’t just grow, it will metastasize.

So, assuming the Republicans get clobbered this year, I look for them making a comeback in two years, completing it in four years by taking back the presidency. That’s a quick turnaround alright, but opinion shifts happen that way nowadays. People want instant gratification and if they don’t get it from one president, they’ll go looking for it from another.

I just can’t picture the Demos solving the economic problem. They’re too much given to playing the giddy goat for that. They deal mostly in cliches like all the talk about wealth “trickling down.” What is the meaning of that? The rich get richer, we know, and that’s a terrible shame, but they do spend their money which eventually reaches right down to the sharecropper who grew the cotton that went into the making of their shirts. That’s redistribution by the way, which the Democrats have exalted to the status of a creed.

Do we change all this to make redistribution more perfect maybe? What happens to the sharecropper? It’s all right because someone more deserving is getting the money that used to go to him? Tell that to Maw and Paw Kettle.

The whole trickle-down concept comes from Karl Marx anyway, not the clearest thinker who ever existed. A better economist, Joseph Schumpeter, to whose work I was introduced at Columbia University, shot a few holes in this concept when he wrote “the capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably means also production for the masses.” He went on to say “It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalistic production, and not as rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth (the First) owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.”

Ford put millions of people around the world in motorcars. Rockefeller produced billions of gallons of oil to keep these cars running. How is that a trickle down? For those who don’t like the way these men did their work, I ask who do you have in mind that would have done it better?

In case you care, I ain't rich, just willing to be. I think stockholders should demand CEO’s take their pay in stock to show faith in their companies, not in cash to cushion their fall when the company crashes. I think Congress shouldn’t force banks to lend to mortgagors who can’t make their payments. I think income gaps happen in discovery eras when pioneers like Columbus and Bill Gates clean up until the discoveries are absorbed and things equalize.