As part of a college honors program, we were required to read The Affluent Society over the summer and render a report first thing upon our return to college. I was a freshly minted college sophomore with strong but primitive conservative instincts and little wariness for the hidden agendas which motivated the political science professors running the honors program. I was shortly to be disabused of my ignorance.
Essentially, The Affluent Society, itself has an agenda, to rationalize the taking of your liberty and vesting it in the state. Galbraith exploited his agility with a pen and succeeded in convincing a large portion of our people that the elites who run the think tanks and universities and the government regulators are smarter than we are. His proof that we are stupid? We waste money on big fins attached to the back ends of our automobiles but fail to spend that money for the programs which later came to be known under the rubric, The Great Society. In fact, so well did Galbraith succeed that the popular justification for the great society was laid down in this book and ultimately accepted by the public at large.
My conservative principles, although not yet tempered, were strong enough and clear enough to see that the question was individual liberty versus collective control. Once one accepts Galbraith's premise, that society exercising individual choice squanders its resources, the argument is virtually over. One must maintain the high ground, that individual liberty is worth the inevitable waste. That waste is the price we pay for innovation, for growth, and ultimately for economic and political freedom. Finally, that waste, compared to the institutionalized waste committed by governments, is cheap indeed. Ultimately, the question is, do you want to pay the price the Italians paid to make their trains run on time?
To college professors, the temptation to make the trains run on time is irresistible. Galbraith's career itself demonstrates that. These were the heady days along The New Frontier. We had thrown off the shackles of the boring 1950s and we had inherited from that decade wealth beyond our experience. The professors were focused on how to get their hands on that wealth while forgetting how it was created. No, they did not want it for themselves, they wanted a great society do good with it. Lyndon Johnson gave them a chance and our eletes gave us The Great Society.
These professors are all dead now, not enjoying Galbraith's longevity but their legacy and his survives mere mortal life span. The temptation to do good by ultimately invoking the physical power the state to control people's choices and spend their money for them is difficult for any generation or culture to resist.
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