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- | Welcome once again as MIT Professor Paul Samuelson | 0:02 |
discusses the current economic scene. | 0:05 | |
This series is produced | 0:07 | |
by Instructional Dynamics Incorporated. | 0:08 | |
This program was recorded August 13th. | 0:11 | |
- | This is the day after President Ford | 0:14 |
addressed the joint sessions of Congress. | 0:17 | |
So of course there's only one thing to talk about today. | 0:20 | |
The new president's speech was well-received. | 0:24 | |
He was returning to the chambers | 0:28 | |
where his career was made. | 0:32 | |
I was unable to recall | 0:35 | |
whether Senator Johnson | 0:37 | |
as was, President Johnson, | 0:41 | |
who became the successor | 0:45 | |
to John F. Kennedy on the assassination date in Dallas. | 0:47 | |
Whether when in his first speech to the joint sessions | 0:53 | |
the reception was any less cordial. | 0:58 | |
But I think it was all that you could ask for in terms | 1:02 | |
of the social amenities, a subject | 1:04 | |
upon which I don't consider myself | 1:08 | |
to be a particular expert. | 1:10 | |
The economic topics were foremost | 1:13 | |
in the new president's text, | 1:17 | |
but there was really very little | 1:20 | |
in the way of exciting news. | 1:22 | |
What did we learn? | 1:24 | |
Well we learned I think what one might have expected | 1:26 | |
from a man whose 25 years in Congress is an open record. | 1:30 | |
A man from a middle class | 1:35 | |
Grand Rapids, Michigan district. | 1:40 | |
As you would guess, he had no startling new ideas | 1:44 | |
on what to do about the economy. | 1:47 | |
If he has any such new startling ideas, | 1:49 | |
they are being kept carefully under wraps. | 1:52 | |
He has taken over | 1:55 | |
from the conventional wisdom. | 1:58 | |
He didn't require taking over any of the, his predecessors' | 2:03 | |
economic advisors in order to do this. | 2:09 | |
But for the conventional wisdom, he took over the notion | 2:11 | |
widely shared that the main cause of inflation | 2:15 | |
is the government. | 2:20 | |
In fact, he quoted what some of you probably noticed | 2:22 | |
in the newspaper that over half the American population, | 2:25 | |
just over half, think that you can't blame the boll weevil, | 2:29 | |
and you can't blame the king's enemies. | 2:34 | |
But you can blame the government | 2:38 | |
for the recent inflation. | 2:41 | |
And so he quoted that with approval. | 2:45 | |
He shared that particular view, and he said | 2:48 | |
he was going to do something about it | 2:51 | |
with respect to government. | 2:53 | |
Now what was it that he was gonna do? | 2:54 | |
His fundamental diagnosis seemed to be | 2:56 | |
that there was somehow too much government spending | 2:58 | |
and that next year | 3:02 | |
(speaking foreign language) | 3:05 | |
we would be balancing the budget. | 3:06 | |
That's the fiscal 76 budget beginning next July 1st | 3:09 | |
and ending on June 30th in 1976. | 3:14 | |
To show however that he is really an even-handed, | 3:18 | |
middle of the road man, he said that the bill, | 3:21 | |
the law on his desk | 3:26 | |
which the outgoing President Nixon | 3:30 | |
did not act on, did not veto, | 3:33 | |
which involves spending | 3:38 | |
for aid to education that he, Ford, was signing that. | 3:41 | |
He was signing it with some evident reluctance. | 3:47 | |
Many of the commentators afterwards said well, | 3:52 | |
he talks in global terms about balancing the budget. | 3:54 | |
But he in fact goes ahead and spends. | 3:57 | |
I would not take quite that interpretation | 3:59 | |
at this stage. | 4:05 | |
It may be right, but you could say | 4:06 | |
that he's giving Congress one bite. | 4:08 | |
After all, he does want to enter | 4:10 | |
into a good marriage with Congress. | 4:13 | |
But that doesn't preclude entering into a good honeymoon. | 4:14 | |
In fact a good honeymoon is often a prelude | 4:19 | |
to a good marriage. | 4:21 | |
And so he's going along with this spending of Congress. | 4:23 | |
But he did say something which really raised the ears | 4:26 | |
of Constitutional lawyers. | 4:30 | |
And namely he wasn't gonna spend the money very fast. | 4:33 | |
And that conjured up in the minds of some people | 4:35 | |
the problem which had been thrown up by the conflict | 4:38 | |
between President Nixon and Congress, | 4:43 | |
in which President Nixon was taking it upon himself | 4:46 | |
to impound funds. | 4:49 | |
That, by the way, is not a new innovation | 4:51 | |
by President Nixon. | 4:52 | |
Earlier presidents have done it. | 4:54 | |
But like so many things in American Constitutional law, | 4:55 | |
the unwritten law is very clear. | 5:00 | |
And there is no written law in many points. | 5:02 | |
Well, what we'll assume | 5:06 | |
is that the middle of the road man | 5:09 | |
from Grand Rapids, Michigan will take | 5:11 | |
a middle of the road approach | 5:13 | |
to the impounding of funds. | 5:15 | |
Then to show himself, | 5:20 | |
and I don't really mean to be ironical, | 5:22 | |
but to show himself a man of action, he said yes. | 5:26 | |
He will take up Senator Mansfield's suggestion | 5:29 | |
that there be a summit meeting, a meeting well aware | 5:33 | |
perhaps in the highest skyscraper in Washington | 5:39 | |
of the best economists in the country. | 5:45 | |
But more important, the representatives of labor, | 5:50 | |
agriculture and industry. | 5:54 | |
I suppose he doesn't really mean | 5:57 | |
to exclude transportation and commerce. | 5:59 | |
And he was going to have it meet | 6:02 | |
not in the distant future | 6:05 | |
like six months but within six weeks time. | 6:08 | |
More than that to emphasize the importance | 6:11 | |
which he attached to this meeting. | 6:14 | |
He, the new president, was going to take time | 6:17 | |
out of his busy schedule himself to preside | 6:20 | |
over this meeting. | 6:23 | |
So that any pearls of wisdom thrown up by that crew | 6:25 | |
would immediately be pressed into the service of the nation | 6:31 | |
in the important cause | 6:36 | |
of lowering the rate of inflation. | 6:39 | |
I think that pretty much sums up what he said. | 6:43 | |
I guess I should have mentioned that the new president | 6:47 | |
emphasized the continuity of his foreign policy. | 6:52 | |
And in that connection, | 6:54 | |
emphasized the importance in his mind, | 6:56 | |
of not cutting defense expenditure. | 6:59 | |
What I presume that means is that defense expenditure | 7:02 | |
is going to be cut. | 7:06 | |
There is a very considerable movement in that direction. | 7:07 | |
But that the new president is going to resist that. | 7:11 | |
So we're gonna have a moderate cut at best | 7:14 | |
in defense expenditures. | 7:18 | |
What do we do with think of this? | 7:23 | |
What does it augur | 7:26 | |
for the economic future | 7:30 | |
or for the probabilities with respect | 7:32 | |
to the economic future? | 7:34 | |
I guess I'd have to say that another bit of news | 7:37 | |
that came up yesterday in the afternoon | 7:41 | |
was the release by the agriculture department | 7:46 | |
of the state of the crop and the outlook for the harvest | 7:50 | |
as of August 1st. | 7:54 | |
Now I'm talking in the last part of August, | 7:57 | |
middle of August, and we're now talking about how the crop | 8:04 | |
was up to the end of July and August 1st. | 8:08 | |
And as you know, there have been some rains | 8:12 | |
finally at long last to relieve the situation a little bit | 8:15 | |
in Iowa, Nebraska and the prime grain territory. | 8:20 | |
The August 1st numbers, which were announced, | 8:26 | |
which by the way were of course very discouraging, | 8:29 | |
did not take into account that slight improvement. | 8:32 | |
What did they show, well, what they showed | 8:36 | |
was that the corn crop was not only going to be less | 8:38 | |
than the earlier more optimistic estimates. | 8:43 | |
But it actually was going to be down in all likelihood | 8:46 | |
in comparison with last year. | 8:49 | |
The same thing was true for the soy bean crop, | 8:52 | |
and I believe that wheat, | 8:57 | |
much of which is already in the barn, | 9:00 | |
is not going to be down in comparison to last year. | 9:03 | |
This does mean, however, that around the corner | 9:09 | |
in 1975, the meat, the poultry, the eggs | 9:13 | |
that are made out of these grains, | 9:18 | |
they are going to be scarce, and their price is gonna rise. | 9:21 | |
So the agriculture department had to change its earlier | 9:25 | |
more sanguine forecast in the direction | 9:30 | |
of higher food prices ahead. | 9:34 | |
And I guess that as a observer | 9:36 | |
of the passing economic scene | 9:42 | |
and as a would-be appraiser of probabilities | 9:45 | |
with respect to future scenarios of this economic scene, | 9:48 | |
I would have to consider the disappointing crop news | 9:51 | |
as a bigger bit of information for me as an investor | 9:57 | |
to digest than anything that I was able to hear | 10:02 | |
in the halls of Congress last night. | 10:06 | |
What about the summit conference meeting? | 10:13 | |
Certainly we can all benefit from the injunction | 10:16 | |
in the Book of Isaiah of the scriptures | 10:22 | |
which says let us sit down and reason together. | 10:27 | |
But I think we have enough knowledge | 10:30 | |
on what previous such conferences and sitting downs together | 10:35 | |
have produced to be a little bit skeptical | 10:40 | |
that somehow the synergism of that movement | 10:43 | |
is going to create new, fresh, useful ideas | 10:47 | |
for handling the present inflation. | 10:53 | |
Out west, when the rains don't come, | 10:57 | |
and you see your crops shriveling, | 11:01 | |
and the ground dry, you are desperate. | 11:06 | |
You become so desperate | 11:11 | |
that you will actually go through the ceremony | 11:13 | |
of getting a rain expert, who will beat his drums | 11:16 | |
and call down on the heavens to send down the rain. | 11:20 | |
And sometimes the heavens respond to that call. | 11:25 | |
You even, if there's a local Indian tribe, | 11:29 | |
will use the oldest residents | 11:33 | |
of that territory | 11:38 | |
in this very understandable human ritual. | 11:39 | |
I suppose that we're to think of this summit conference | 11:45 | |
realistically as a ceremonial rain dance. | 11:49 | |
It shows our good faith. | 11:55 | |
It shows that we have a genuine concern about inflation. | 11:57 | |
It shows that it is a number one topic in our minds | 12:01 | |
and that the government is not callous to it. | 12:05 | |
However, whether the heavens | 12:08 | |
will send down the rains | 12:11 | |
in the form of inflation abatement, | 12:16 | |
or failing that will send down some good ideas | 12:20 | |
to the assembled people there, | 12:24 | |
I'm inclined to doubt. | 12:28 | |
In fact, not knowing | 12:29 | |
about the president's projected summit meeting | 12:32 | |
of an economics Congress, | 12:37 | |
a soviet of concerned citizens about economics. | 12:39 | |
I had to write at the request of Newsweek a column | 12:46 | |
on what we might expect in economics | 12:53 | |
from the transition to President Ford | 12:56 | |
from President Nixon. | 13:00 | |
And I predicted there, | 13:03 | |
I was just going by a priori reasoning | 13:08 | |
and Mr. Ford's previous record. | 13:11 | |
I predicted that he would be pretty much following | 13:15 | |
the counsel of people like Arthur Burns. | 13:18 | |
And as a matter of fact, I hit the target on the nose. | 13:23 | |
I say I hit the target on the nose | 13:30 | |
because there was one element in the speech | 13:32 | |
which I forgot to mention. | 13:34 | |
It's fairly significant that I did forget to mention it. | 13:37 | |
Namely that the new president's asked Congress | 13:41 | |
within the next two weeks | 13:45 | |
to reactivate the cost of living council. | 13:47 | |
He assured them it was not for the purpose | 13:50 | |
of controlling wages and prices | 13:53 | |
but for the purposes of monitoring price and wage decisions. | 13:55 | |
In other words, we're going to go swimming, | 14:00 | |
but we're not to go near the water. | 14:05 | |
Or rather, we're not quite get in the water. | 14:07 | |
Well, and this is in line, | 14:09 | |
and I don't mean to cast any scorn upon the suggestion. | 14:11 | |
This is in line with the suggestions that have been made | 14:15 | |
by almost all economists | 14:19 | |
of both political parties | 14:23 | |
who are not 100 percent | 14:27 | |
free market men, persons, | 14:31 | |
namely that although price and wage controls | 14:34 | |
are not a good thing or won't wash politically | 14:38 | |
or won't be effective. | 14:40 | |
That nevertheless a hands-off policy | 14:42 | |
is not the optimal alternative | 14:45 | |
to direct price and wage controls. | 14:48 | |
And what you do need is presidential leadership. | 14:51 | |
What you do need is job boning. | 14:53 | |
What you do need is informed job boning. | 14:54 | |
What you need is informed job boning with the sanctions | 14:58 | |
of government behind it. | 15:02 | |
And I ought to mention that it's action like this | 15:05 | |
which is likely to cause some consternation | 15:10 | |
in the hearts of those who are against | 15:14 | |
price and wage controls in any form. | 15:19 | |
They will begin to realize what it is that they are missing | 15:22 | |
with the going out of office of President Nixon. | 15:27 | |
Because this is one of the things | 15:31 | |
which he did on very rare occasions. | 15:32 | |
Whereas the new president on really the first occasion, | 15:34 | |
there was so much economic news yesterday | 15:39 | |
that I didn't have a chance | 15:41 | |
to mention this third bit of news. | 15:42 | |
But the new president, in the morning, | 15:45 | |
as one of his first acts, | 15:47 | |
did take the occasion to deplore | 15:48 | |
what seemed to be a rather massive increase in prices | 15:50 | |
by General Motors. | 15:54 | |
I believe that averaged out to be nine and a half percent. | 15:56 | |
Let's call it 10 percent. | 15:59 | |
And when you realize | 16:01 | |
that the average car and truck these days | 16:02 | |
has to be thought of as costing in the neighborhood | 16:04 | |
of $5,000, not $2,000, not $3,000, not even $4,000. | 16:06 | |
That means an average increase in price of about $500. | 16:11 | |
Now General Motors has by repute | 16:16 | |
long been the low cost producer. | 16:20 | |
And if ever there is to be moderation | 16:23 | |
in administered pricing, | 16:27 | |
it's always to be expected from General Motors. | 16:29 | |
Chrysler is one of the more leveraged, higher cost producers | 16:31 | |
and they always want General Motors | 16:36 | |
to be as high as possible so that they, Chrysler, | 16:37 | |
can be as high as possible. | 16:40 | |
And General Motors often does not accommodate them. | 16:43 | |
Well this time they are accommodating | 16:46 | |
to the two and a tenth percent. | 16:49 | |
But that may just indicate that for Ford and Chrysler | 16:50 | |
a 10 percent, $500 per car, per truck increase | 16:53 | |
may not seem adequate to compensate | 16:59 | |
for the cost of their raw materials. | 17:02 | |
Since I talked on these tapes last, | 17:05 | |
we did get the bad news we expect to wholesale prices | 17:08 | |
for July and that was a monthly increase | 17:12 | |
of more than three percent. | 17:15 | |
I think it worked out to 44 percent on an annual basis, | 17:16 | |
which was reported to be the highest | 17:20 | |
single monthly increase since 1946. | 17:23 | |
In consequence, we find that many raw materials | 17:30 | |
are going up. | 17:34 | |
So far, oil, a very important raw material, | 17:36 | |
has not joined in the latest upswing. | 17:41 | |
And there had been some hope that an oversupply | 17:45 | |
of oil provided by the cartel was going to make the cartels' | 17:48 | |
administered, posted price structure non-operative | 17:53 | |
and bring down somewhat the price of oil. | 17:58 | |
But that aside, there has been a increase | 18:02 | |
in the price of raw materials. | 18:05 | |
Moreover, as you know, the catch up after April 30th | 18:09 | |
by the industry once out of price controls, | 18:14 | |
which some economists | 18:19 | |
thought would be a rather short, live thing, | 18:21 | |
turns out to be going full blast. | 18:26 | |
And then of course finally, the cost-push inflation | 18:30 | |
which had been pretty much an advance, | 18:34 | |
at least submerged by other even larger factors | 18:37 | |
in 1973 and back in 1972. | 18:41 | |
That cost-push inflation is now very much on us | 18:46 | |
and any prudent observer | 18:51 | |
of the industrial collective bargaining scene | 18:53 | |
must be expecting a continuation of this. | 18:58 | |
Electricians have been getting | 19:03 | |
and asking for large wage increases. | 19:07 | |
Carpenters and the end is not yet in sight. | 19:10 | |
Well, how are we to appraise | 19:17 | |
the relative merits | 19:21 | |
of what it is that different presidents inherited? | 19:24 | |
I don't think that President Ford | 19:27 | |
is one of the luckier presidents | 19:29 | |
in what the state of the economy is, what he inherits. | 19:32 | |
President Eisenhower in 1953 | 19:40 | |
inherited the nearest thing | 19:44 | |
to a full employment with stable prices economy | 19:46 | |
that we've seen in, I was gonna say | 19:50 | |
in the post-World War II period. | 19:53 | |
But I think I could almost make it | 19:55 | |
in the period | 19:57 | |
since 1929. | 20:00 | |
If it however paradoxically | 20:08 | |
was right in the last year | 20:10 | |
of the Korean War that that was the case. | 20:14 | |
And of course it contrasted with what went before it, | 20:17 | |
the 1950 period at the outbreak of the Korean War. | 20:21 | |
President Eisenhower, when he was re-elected in 1956, | 20:27 | |
really had an economy that was poised to go into recession. | 20:33 | |
And when I made a little calculation on election economics | 20:38 | |
or election arithmetic, | 20:44 | |
I found that in some ways the toughest thing | 20:45 | |
is to be re-elected, either a Republican or a Democrat. | 20:48 | |
Roosevelt in 1932 was lucky because the economy | 20:52 | |
was so far down | 20:56 | |
that it could hardly do anything but go up. | 20:57 | |
In 1936, he was poised for the 1937 recession. | 21:01 | |
Well, President Kennedy | 21:06 | |
was fairly lucky in this sense | 21:11 | |
in that he inherited an economy | 21:14 | |
which was in recession at the time of the election | 21:18 | |
and prior to inauguration in January. | 21:22 | |
But in a sense, he inherited at the trough of business | 21:27 | |
and so conditions looked to improve. | 21:32 | |
President Johnson, who was catapulted | 21:35 | |
into office accidentally, tragically in 1963, | 21:37 | |
inherited an economy that was nicely approaching | 21:43 | |
the high employment level. | 21:49 | |
Of course, in a modern mixed economy | 21:50 | |
that tends to be a dangerous level. | 21:52 | |
Finally President Nixon inherited an inflation | 21:56 | |
in being with a fairly strong demand poll elements, | 22:01 | |
which was an inflation bequeathed to him | 22:06 | |
by President Johnson | 22:08 | |
and President Johnson's fiscal policies, | 22:09 | |
particularly President Johnson's crucial error | 22:13 | |
in not increasing taxes in 1965 | 22:18 | |
when he accelerated the Indochina War. | 22:22 | |
Well what is it that President Ford has inherited? | 22:25 | |
What has he inherited, stagflation. | 22:30 | |
I think that's the toughest ailment | 22:31 | |
for the medicine men | 22:34 | |
to prescribe for in the modern mixed economy. | 22:37 | |
The downward impetus of real growth is just behind us, | 22:41 | |
and actually the economy will be doing very badly indeed | 22:48 | |
if for the first four quarters | 22:53 | |
of President Ford's term | 22:56 | |
we do not show growth. | 23:00 | |
But I think all the signs are | 23:05 | |
that it will be at best anemic growth. | 23:07 | |
By that I mean growth that averages for those four quarters | 23:11 | |
in the neighborhood of zero to two percent, | 23:16 | |
two and a half percent, | 23:20 | |
definitely below the three to four percent | 23:21 | |
that's needed in order to keep up | 23:25 | |
with the growing labor force | 23:28 | |
and with the increases in productivity. | 23:30 | |
But as far as the inflation is concerned, | 23:34 | |
the inflation is as bad | 23:38 | |
in this third quarter right now apparently | 23:41 | |
as it was at the worst of the first quarter of the year. | 23:45 | |
We are in two digit inflation, | 23:49 | |
low two digit inflation to be sure. | 23:52 | |
But there are no great signs | 23:55 | |
that the natural force of the system | 23:57 | |
will act powerfully | 24:01 | |
to bring low two digit inflation | 24:04 | |
down to the five or six percent rate of price inflation, | 24:07 | |
which just a little while ago, | 24:12 | |
the majority of the economists, | 24:15 | |
whether they were non-monetarists or monetarists, | 24:17 | |
were thinking was in the ballpark for the turn of the year | 24:19 | |
into 1975 or at least in 1975. | 24:23 | |
I notice as I read the various forecasters | 24:27 | |
that they've been trading down their rates of year growth | 24:30 | |
and trading up their rates of inflation. | 24:34 | |
Although they have not abandoned the hope | 24:39 | |
that as we move into 1975, we will be in one digit inflation | 24:44 | |
but alas, it would be high one digit inflation. | 24:49 | |
It may seem that in my description | 24:57 | |
of the non-sensational middle of the road | 25:00 | |
instincts and utterances of the new president | 25:07 | |
that I'm being critical. | 25:11 | |
I don't intend to be an (audio muffled) here | 25:14 | |
looking at a Calvin Coolidge | 25:17 | |
and laughing derisively at him as | 25:18 | |
(speaking in foreign language) | 25:24 | |
Quite the contrary, it seems to me that this is a good time | 25:26 | |
for moderation, for non-sensational | 25:31 | |
ideas and procedures. | 25:38 | |
This is a time to proceed very cautiously. | 25:40 | |
And I think it's a time to proceed | 25:46 | |
on a unifying theme. | 25:50 | |
I was struck with the fact, | 25:53 | |
and I'm sure that many of you have too, | 25:56 | |
that we're seeing something in the way around the world | 25:59 | |
of some counter-movements to fascist governments. | 26:05 | |
We have seen, for example, | 26:11 | |
or totalitarian governments of the left. | 26:14 | |
We've seen the restoration of a measure | 26:17 | |
of Constitutional democracy to Greece. | 26:22 | |
You recall that one set of colonels took over, | 26:26 | |
but they were replaced, not for long though, | 26:30 | |
by another set of officers, generals. | 26:33 | |
And this last set seems to have been so inept | 26:37 | |
that they got themselves into a wrangle over oil with Turkey | 26:41 | |
and then of all things, they got themselves | 26:45 | |
into a real shooting situation | 26:48 | |
with respect to Cyprus. | 26:52 | |
This is a time when they had to realize that Turkey | 26:55 | |
was a military force equal or superior to theirs. | 26:59 | |
They also had to realize, or they soon learned, | 27:03 | |
that the Greek civilian population | 27:06 | |
is not very good cannon fodder | 27:10 | |
in its present state of mind | 27:12 | |
and to mobilize them and to fight an enemy. | 27:13 | |
And think they'd be an efficient army | 27:17 | |
is of course very dubious. | 27:19 | |
The Greek pattern gives you the problem | 27:26 | |
that I'm talking about. | 27:31 | |
If having had a restoration of Constitutional democracy | 27:33 | |
in a measure, and by the way, the generals are still there | 27:37 | |
behind the scenes. | 27:40 | |
You immediately have a society which becomes polarized. | 27:41 | |
With let's say, | 27:45 | |
I would mention their names. | 27:50 | |
Let's suppose that the left won't cooperate | 27:51 | |
with the right of center government now. | 27:54 | |
Then what you can do is bring upon that situation in return | 27:58 | |
as a fascist rule. | 28:03 | |
The same problem with respect to Portugal. | 28:04 | |
Portugal after many, many years finally has had | 28:07 | |
a measure of freedom, a measure of freedom of the press. | 28:10 | |
And a long overdue decision | 28:15 | |
to let her colonies go. | 28:19 | |
But if the different classes | 28:22 | |
engage in the class struggle, | 28:26 | |
each seeking to get a bigger share | 28:27 | |
of a rather limited social pie. | 28:30 | |
Then you invite the disorder, the lack of law and order, | 28:34 | |
which the citizenry really want. | 28:38 | |
I'm not talking about larceny, | 28:40 | |
but I'm talking about the ability to go about | 28:42 | |
doing the business of the gross national product | 28:45 | |
and earning a rising standard of living. | 28:48 | |
Then you throw all that away. | 28:52 | |
But now the question I'm asking | 28:54 | |
is can we have all over the world, in Canada under Trudeau, | 28:55 | |
in the United States under President Ford, | 29:01 | |
hopefully in Spain and Portugal and perhaps in Greece | 29:05 | |
and with implications for Brazil and Chile and Peru | 29:09 | |
and other countries where ordinary forms of democracy | 29:15 | |
have at least temporarily been suspended. | 29:20 | |
Can we begin to have some popular fronts | 29:23 | |
around a middle position? | 29:26 | |
Now that means give and take. | 29:29 | |
It means a lot of give. | 29:32 | |
It means that people on the right | 29:34 | |
have to sacrifice some of their most cherished notions | 29:36 | |
with respect to business freedoms, market autonomy. | 29:41 | |
On the left it means that the unions, | 29:47 | |
the organized groups | 29:52 | |
cannot roundly disrupt the economy | 29:54 | |
for the purpose of increasing their share. | 30:00 | |
I must confess that I am not overly optimistic | 30:04 | |
that there exists the rationality and the consensus | 30:09 | |
and the cohesion in modern nations | 30:14 | |
to make this pattern of democracy work. | 30:18 | |
But if I could say a prayer for the world, | 30:22 | |
it seems to me that my prayers would be directed | 30:26 | |
towards increasing the probability | 30:30 | |
of some such movements being successful. | 30:32 | |
And that I think is the real importance | 30:35 | |
of having President Ford in the White House. | 30:38 | |
- | If you have any comments or questions | 30:41 |
for Professor Samuelson, address them | 30:43 | |
to Instructional Dynamics Incorporated. | 30:45 | |
450 East Ohio Street Chicago, Illinois 60611. | 30:48 |
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