It’s a plain, squat building on a billboarded Albuquerque boulevard, the office of an insurance agency called MLA—entirely unremarkable except perhaps to those who know it is owned by a U.S. congressman. Early in the 1970s federal funds started to disappear here. The money wasn’t being stolen. Nor was it being fumbled away through incompetence. […]
Posted inMagazine, November 1982
Reagan’s Regulatory Report Card
Government regulation is a bit like sex. (Bear with me for a moment—or would you prefer to read about “cost-benefit analysis” right away?) Most people can agree it’s a necessary thing, but start talking about how much is necessary—and of what variety—and opinions quickly diverge. Liberals generally tend to be permissive in both regards, and […]
Posted inMagazine
Putting the Mind Over What Matters
In Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift there is a scene where the crazy poet-hero, Von Humboldt Fleisher, now widely known as Delmore Schwartz a clef tells his protege Charlie Citrine about his hopes and dreams for the presidency of Adlai Stevenson. “If you could believe Humboldt (and I couldn’t),” says Charlie, “Stevenson was Aristotle’s great-souled man. In his […]
Posted inOctober 1982
Jonathan Alter On Political Books
Lou Cannon is the Lou Gehrig of Reagan reporters. He must hold some sort of record for consecutive campaigns covering a politician without being sent to another beat or brought into the front office as an aide. Since 1966, when Reagan first entered politics as governor of California, Cannon has been there to make sure […]
Posted inSeptember 1982
Sam Nunn: Can He Escape the Respectability Trap?
From time to time the political landscape shifts in such a way that an aperture flicks open, revealing with some certainty which issues will dominate the decades ahead, and which people will dominate those issues. One of the issues, of course, is national defense, a subject that relates not only to national security, but to […]
Posted inJuly 1982
10 Heresies That Could Save Our Economy
Our economy is on the ropes. It may not be in a depression—yet. It may have spared you and your family up to now. But it’s in trouble, and despite a few recent glimmers of recovery, it’s going to remain in trouble for many months to come. Take capital investment plans. They’re down sharply this […]
Posted inMagazine
The Difference One Man Can Make
A familiar literary conception holds that when an honest man challenges a dishonest system, it’s the man who gets destroyed. At one end of the literary scale, this is the message of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, in which the citizens of a resort town ostracize their local doctor rather than let him […]
Posted inMay 1982
Misfire: How Pentagon Critics Shot Down Their Own Ace
Last month this magazine set out to explain in some detail how the defense budget could be cut without hurting national security. There were two reasons we devoted so much space to the defense issue: first, the enormous importance of the subject for the future of the American economy and military; and second, our sense […]
Posted inMarch 1982
The Powers That Stay
There are basically two ways of surviving in the government: call them `ring-kissing’ and `empire-building.’