William F. Buckley, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith agreed on virtually nothing in the public sphere. Whereas Buckley celebrated the free market and the anti-collectivist views of Hayek and Nock, Galbraith was an unrelenting critic of an economic system that left, in his view, millions of Americans vulnerable to capricious circumstances.

Part I: Introduction to Crossing Swords
Part II: James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement
Part III: Dwight Macdonald and Journalism as Style over Substance
Part IV: Gore Vidal: Politics as Personality
Part V: Michael Harrington and the War on Poverty
Part VI: Norman Mailer and the Culture Wars
Part VII: Noam Chomsky and the New Left
Part VIII: John Kenneth Galbraith and Free Enterprise
Part IX: The Environmental Movement
Part X: Buckley in Perspective 

No intellectual opponent of Bill Buckley’s was more publicly acknowledged as a friend and correspondent than John Kenneth Galbraith.

Certainly, Al Lowenstein, the Congressman who was murdered by a troubled youth, ranked high in Buckley’s esteem. Likewise, he befriended Michael Harrington and Murray Kempton. He counted in his universe of social friendships such media stars as Walter Cronkite, Charlie Rose and Mike Wallace, none of whom shared his political perspective.

But Galbraith had a special place in Buckley’s world, despite their strident disagreements. They skied together year after year in Switzerland, debated on and off Firing Line many times, and exchanged letters, insults, quips and advice on an ongoing basis for nearly a half century.

When 60 Minutes did a profile of Buckley shortly after the election of Ronald Reagan, Galbraith was asked to explain his friendship with Buckley, despite their conflicting worldviews. Galbraith called Buckley one of the few amusing conservatives around, but quickly added that he took comfort in knowing that to disagree with Buckley was to certify being correct on any given issue. Commenting once on his debates with Buckley, Galbraith said: “Bill Buckley is the ideal opponent – pleasant, quick in response, invulnerable to insult and invariably wrong.”

Peggy Lamson, in her short biographical sketch Speaking of Galbraith, suggested that this public friendship was more performance than a deeply felt communion. If true, this apparently suited both men for neither was prone to bouts of deep introspection or public revelation about things personal.

Nevertheless, Speaking of Galbraith was published in 1991 and it is apparent that the affection Buckley had for Galbraith deepened over the years. In Buckley’s home, a photo of Galbraith and Buckley together in Switzerland was displayed in a backroom where Buckley entertained guests. The same photo accompanied a tribute to Galbraith included in Buckley’s collection of personal writings, Miles Gone By. Buckley’s involvement with Galbraith’s family continued even after the great liberal icon passed away. I met Peter Galbraith briefly at Buckley’s home in the fall of 2007. He had taken a trip south from Vermont to pay tribute to Buckley, the long-time friend of his father.

The differences politically and economically were nevertheless profound. John Kenneth Galbraith was a liberal who admitted to an abiding infatuation with Marx, and even entertained becoming a Marxist, only to give up the idea because it was politically untenable. He worked in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration as an economic adviser and policymaker and campaigned for Adlai Stevenson. He would abandon Stevenson for John F. Kennedy, with whom he cultivated a friendship, and he joined the Kennedy administration, serving as Ambassador to India. He also taught at Berkeley and Harvard and numbered among his closest friends liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and George Ball.

For all his political entanglements, Galbraith, like Buckley, loved the written word and dedicated himself to his books and essays with relentless discipline. By the time he passed away, Galbraith had written nearly three dozen books that included studies of the 1929 crash, several collections of essays, cultural critiques and a memoir on his stint as U.S. Ambassador in India. Unquestionably, his most important works were The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, in which Galbraith laid out in broad strokes his insights on the American economy and the emerging forces that shaped it.

The Affluent Society sought to document the social travails that face even a wealthy culture such as the United States. In the introduction to the 1969 edition of the book, Galbraith outlined his economic perspective: “In a world where everyone is poor, there is nothing very remarkable about poverty. It becomes remarkable and also less forgivable, in a community where the great majority of people are well-to-do.” (TAS, p. XXV)

Galbraith’s critique of wealth was not simply aimed at poverty, which he, Michael Harrington and others made a focal point in the 1960s. He also critiqued what he considered the endemic challenges facing a society in which the basics are taken for granted: “Beyond a doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and its remedy: he hasn’t enough and he needs more. The rich man can assume or imagine a much greater variety of ills and he will be consequently less certain of their remedy.” (TAS, p. 1)

Galbraith suggested America ’s love affair with the free enterprise system was rooted in a devotion to mythologies with respect to capitalism.

The business executive listening to a luncheon address on the immutable virtues of free enterprise is already persuaded, and so are his fellow listeners, and all are secure in their convictions. Indeed, although a display of rapt attention is required, the executive may not feel it necessary to listen. But he does please the gods by participating in the ritual. Having been present, maintained attention, and having applauded, he can depart feeling the economic system is a little more secure.
– TAS, p. 10.

Surely, Galbraith suggested, the wonders of capitalism were lost on the vast majority of workers who did not own the businesses for which they labored. “Those who owned the new factories, or the raw materials or railroads or banks that served them, lived in mansions by which the nineteenth century is still marked. Their workers lived in dark and noisome hovels, crowded on dirty and unpaved streets along which missionaries and social reformers ventured with some sense of their own courage. (TAS, p. 22)

As a socialist, Galbraith believed the state must play a strong role in addressing social ills, tempering the voracious appetites of capitalism and creating a kinder, gentler culture in which the negative effects of competition were tempered.

In The New Industrial State Galbraith argued that the notion of a free enterprise system was itself a myth. In fact, the economy was controlled in large measure by huge corporations that manipulated supply and demand, set their own prices, and shaped government policy. Wrote Frederick J. Pratson: “Galbraith insists that planning is essential to our industrial society because the market economy, based on the vagaries of prices and demand, has ceased to be reliable. He believes that much of corporate planning has to do with minimizing or eliminating the influences of the market.” (Perspectives on Galbraith, p. 114)

This planning, he goes on, is undertaken by the “technostructure” – managers, researchers, executive leaders, etc. who serve the interests of the corporation, without regard to the market as it was traditionally understood. America was fully in the hands of centralized power, only that power served the interests of corporations and the military industrial complex, not the average citizen. This “revised sequence,” as he called his theory on the emerging economic structure, meant that corporate power brokers set price, developed products and then stimulated demand for those products through massive advertising.

Two of the most thoughtful reviews of his work were written by Scott Gordon, in the Journal of Political Economy, and J.K. Meade, in the Economic Journal who was, as Buckley put it, “a leading British defender of the free market.”

Gordon’s indictment of Galbraith’s work was severe, and focused not only on his economic conclusions, but on his style. “One must begin with candid recognition that the academic reader of Galbraith’s books is under a strong temptation to react negatively to the author’s style and method of discourse. He waives the scholarly conventions in favor of a rhetoric which is designed to apply to the lay reader. But the stylistic techniques he employs to this end increase the difficulty of grasping the substance and structure of his thought and work against a fair and objective appraisal of it by an orthodox, scholarly mind. Galbraith is satiric, scornful, and flippant. There is often a sneer at his pen point.” (Gordon, pages 635-636)

Substantively Gordon also found the book near fatally flawed. “The New Industrial State fails to present a coherent picture of what it sets out to describe, the organization of the American economy. It seems to me that Galbraith slips from the proposition that the firm plans to the proposition that the economy is planned, without realizing that such statements possess only a verbal similarity.” (Gordon, p. 640)

Galbraith did not take the review well. Gordon accused Galbraith of not adhering to scholarly standards that he, Gordon, embraced, but then, “Professor Gordon finds himself promptly seduced to criticism which even the most easygoing scholar would, I believe, find remarkably unscholarly and unmotivated.” Galbraith accused Gordon of making ad hominem attacks that were superficial, inaccurate and farfetched.

Meade, meanwhile, first outlined Galbraith’s position on the new industrial state, and then sought to debunk his rather pessimistic conclusions. “Now if Professor Galbraith has correctly analysed and described the development of the modern industrial society, and if this development is in the main inevitable, then we must say 'Good-bye' to any idea of promoting the liberal socialist or social liberal type of which I myself would like to see encouraged.”

Meade believed market mechanisms could be integrated with central planning in key areas that required government action. He argued that Galbraith shortchanged the market by exaggerating the ability of collective corporate power to control money prices, wage-rates or consumer demand. “Professor Galbraith continually uses expressions which imply that planning and the use of the market-price mechanism are incompatible. But nothing could be further from the truth.” (Meade, p. 382)

All of this is presented as a precursor to Galbraith’s exchanges with Buckley. The two men agreed on virtually nothing in the public sphere. Whereas Buckley celebrated the free market and the anti-collectivist views of Hayek and Nock, Galbraith was an unrelenting critic of an economic system that left, in his view, millions of Americans vulnerable to capricious circumstances. Buckley was a man of faith, Galbraith more skeptical in his religious convictions; Buckley took a hawkish view on the projection of American power, while Galbraith counseled restraint that could sound pacifistic and irresponsible.

The two men, who had met in 1966 according to Buckley, relished slipping their exchanges into reviews, columns and essays, as when Galbraith reviewed Buckley’s memoir on running for mayor of New York City, the Unmaking of a Mayor. “Mr. Buckley was running on the Conservative Party ticket. And he was running, specifically, because the Republican Party in general and John Lindsay in particular were deeply unfaithful to principle – because, in the author’s stern view, they were willing to approve any government subsidy, handout, tax raid, public extravagance or interference with sound market theorems that paid off in the votes of some minority or special-interest group. Alas, Mr. Buckley the vote seeker ended up doing just that himself. One could weep.” (A View from the Stands, p. 88)

Almost a decade later, Galbraith reviewed United Nations Journal, Buckley’s memoir about his short stint as a Nixon delegate to the United Nations Advisory committee. Galbraith relished Buckley’s failed attempts to make any clear moral statement before the cynical international body, whether inviting Alexander Solzhenitsyn to address the assembly or his effort to make a statement about the Soviet prohibition of travel by Russian scholars.  Galbraith’s delight in these matters underscored that Buckley was more the idealist than his skiing and intellectual sparring partner.

Buckley’s “idealism” from the right and Galbraith’s “realism” from the left was emphasized during Galbraith’s first appearance on Firing Line in 1969. Galbraith had recently published Ambassador’s Journal, his memoir of serving as ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration. Quite naturally, given the content of the book, the discussion focused heavily on foreign policy. The only economic content involved Galbraith’s reminder to Buckley that as a candidate for mayor of New York, he had supported subsidizing commuters from Staten Island. The issue came up after Buckley suggested that Galbraith, in dealing with a China/India border dispute, had been tempted mightily toward a hawkish position toward China, not unlike that of many conservatives. Galbraith reminded Buckley that he, too, could be tempted into inconsistency.

B: I may be guilty of heresies, but I don’t remember deserting any of my heresies.

G: Oh, yes, yes, Bill. I remember that very good book of yours The Unmaking of a Mayor, where you deserted your whole Conservative doctrine – and I pointed it out in a review with some pleasure.

B: Rather maladroitly, because in fact it wasn’t a desertion . . .

G: You proposed an extensive subsidy between Manhattan and Staten Island, remember?

B: I was told that I would lose Staten Island unless I defended the five-cent fare . . . Now that was the beginning of political reality.

G: So, you sacrificed your whole Conservative position . . .

B: No, No.

G: . . . on the basis of expedience, and I thought that was pretty shocking.

B: On the contrary, I asked whether or not I had enough ingenuity . . . 

G: (To the audience) Don’t you think that was pretty shocking? To have William Buckley advocating the five-cent fare and subsidizing it at the expense of the taxpayers?

B: Now professor. Now professor. What I said was did I have the ingenuity to effect a grand theoretical reconciliation to which my reply was yes, I did.

G: I see.

B: And the question really was if Staten Island is part of New York, then it presumably ought to have the same privileges that other parts of New York have. That it ought not to be penalized for its geographic remoteness, right? Now, maybe Staten Island should be allowed to spin off from New York, which it would undoubtedly do gleefully, in which case it ought to cost at least 50 cents to get to Staten Island.

G: I see your point. What you’re saying is that anybody that lives on an island should be subsidized.

B: I’m saying that anyone who lives on an island . . . 

G: Because otherwise he has disadvantages.

B: . . . who lives on island, which is governed by a remote government, managed by Reform Democrats, ought to have at least the same prerequisites that people who live in the boroughs do. Do you follow it now?

G: Yeah, I see. We have free transportation to Hawaii under a Democratic regi-administration.

B: Well, we have subsidies, as you know. All postage that goes to Hawaii . . . you don’t have to put more postage simply because the stamp goes to Hawaii. This would be parallel. Do you follow?

G: Well, no, there’s a difference.

B: But let’s get back to India .

G: I can see how you would want to. It seems to me there is a difference between letters and people, but still, let’s get back to India. It’s obvious it will be less embarrassing for you.

B: I think it’s obvious that you know more about it.

* * * 

This exchange is helpful both in appreciating the repartee that was typical between the two men, but also in grasping how they formulated their analysis on a given issue. Neither was so dogmatic as to pretend there were never inconsistencies in their respective positions.

Buckley drove the remaining conversation toward the Cold War, trying to dissect Galbraith’s position that intervention on behalf of anti-communism was a bad idea. Buckley argued that this was morally objectionable and he tried to isolate why Galbraith supported the war against Hitler, but objected to those who sought to contain communism. Buckley summarized the issue toward the end of the debate.

B: I think the residual confusion has really to do with what I understand to be a movement by American liberals which is not merely aimed at disengagement on the ground, that after all it is not our business to purify the domestic politics of other countries, and that Wilsonian hangover has lasted quite long enough. That I can understand, on purely practical terms. But it seems to be headed in the direction of saying, and what’s more, who really is to make a distinction between Chang Kai Chek and Mao Tse Tung, and this kind of thing that creeps into your rhetoric, however casually, I find arresting, because I consider it to be morally cretonous, and that anybody who can’t distinguish between Mao Tse Tung and Chang Kai Chek isn’t really enough on top of the essential tools of ethical analysis to be very reliable.

G: I can see how you feel that way, Bill, and I can even sense the undercurrent of moral indignation that supports this view. It doesn’t make it right. I can quite vividly distinguish between Batista and Castro and I can see the distinction between Chang Kai Chek and Mao Tse Tung, but I cannot see a distinction there which requires the intervention of American forces, American troops, and I notice that even you draw back on practical grounds.

B: Sure. What we can’t do, we can’t do.

G: And I congratulate you on the way in which your practical judgment takes over just at the point where your philosophical judgment becomes so inadequate and unreliable.

B: No, as a matter of fact . . . 

G: It’s very convenient that you have this meshing here.

B: On the contrary, there is more often symbiosis than not.

G: Oh, there is?

B: Between my practical and philosophical judgment.

* * *

Buckley distinguished communist China, a world power developing nuclear weapons and committed to an anti-Western foreign policy, from, say, the situation in Haiti and acknowledged that he had once endorsed the idea of taking out Chinese nuclear facilities with conventional bombs. Galbraith found this “appalling.” Buckley responded that while Galbraith and his philosophical companions talked, millions of Chinese perished under Mao. Ultimately, Buckley’s distinction between passive moral coexistence and practical coexistence did not convince Galbraith, who argued that communist tyranny, as bad as it was, did not justify an aggressive military policy that long term would do more harm than good.

Their next encounter occurred in October 1970 in Britain where Buckley returned to Cambridge, the site of his earlier debate with James Baldwin. This time they focused on economics rather than foreign policy. The debate was cast as featuring “liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith and conservative theoretician William F. Buckley, Jr. on the virtues and faults of the free enterprise system. The debate . . . is on Mr. Galbraith’s motion, “This House Holds the Market is a snare and a delusion . . . Both Mr. Buckley and Mr. Galbraith have debated other opponents at the Union in the past, and both of them lost their debates.”

The two men were grouped as part of three-person debate teams. Galbraith and Buckley were the final speakers. Galbraith began by suggesting that the idea of a true free market was a fantasy around which Buckley and other free market advocates mobilized at the expense of citizens and consumers.

We certainly would not, on our side of the house, ask that this be a perfect mechanism in order to debate it. We would, however, ask that the mechanism not be under the control of the producers. We would ask that the prices not be set by the producer or set on behalf of the producer by the state. And, I think, would ask that the producer not be subject to the kind of persuasion which Mr. Davidson was so enthusiastic to concede to our side. If this is true: if prices are set by the producer, and if the citizen is subject to extensive and systematic, and successful persuasion – of which only the Edsel is the unfortunate exception – then one will surely have to agree that the market does not function, that consumer sovereignty which has been associated with the market does not exist, and that power has, indeed, passed to the producer.

And one will also suspect – one will also begin to suspect that it is the case, as power has passed to the producer; and that those who continue talk about the market are engaged in a – I use the word in a rather calculated fashion but in no pejorative sense – in a rather fraudulent attempt to persuade other people, and, perhaps worst of all, themselves that the power does, in fact, lie with them, that they are engaged in persuading themselves and other people that the market and the elaborate apparatus on marketing, including the elaborate pedagogy which are subject to in this university in some degree — is not – is designed to persuade you that you have power you do not possess.

Galbraith presented specific cases in which he argued the producer controls the market – such as the automobile industry, which set the price, created consumer demand, and even affected government policy in order to obtain subsidized highways. He argued that farmers also benefited from subsidies and government intervention and therefore were not truly engaged in free market operations. Galbraith observed that Mr. Nixon, the president at the time, was not all that fond of markets either given his sustained interest in tinkering with the economy and price controls.  Galbraith took a jab or two at Buckley, too, suggesting that Mr. Buckley’s magazine, National Review, was one of the few magazines in the United States that displayed some humor, if only people would read it. But, alas, he hoped to redeem Mr. Buckley by the end of the evening before Buckley returned to the Ritz.

Buckley, once introduced, observed that the last time he had appeared before the Cambridge assembly to debate, his opponent got a standing ovation before Buckley had spoken — indeed, before his opponent (Baldwin) had spoken: “It seemed to me then that the Cambridge Union was trying to tell me something . . . So here I am back to defend the unfashionable notion that there is some virtue left in the marketplace.”

The power that Galbraith sought to ascribe to the producers, Buckley sought to discount by listing a number of major corporations whose stock prices had dropped precipitously in recent years. He observed of Galbraith that he struggled to distinguish his own views from those that must, axiomatically, be correct.

It would not occur to Galbraith that there would be necessary for survival the mechanism of an organization that might come to conclusions contrary to his own . . . As I say, Mr. Galbraith does this rather innocently. And I don’t think it would be right at all for anybody to encourage the suspicion that he harbors within him any totalitarian instinct. I am sure that he believes dissent has its place properly situated and properly modulated.

But there is one thing about the free marketplace that he has never been able to understand. That is that it is a mechanism by which people can come to conclusions different from his own. Not necessarily the conclusions that you favor or the conclusions that I favor.

As I understand it, Mr. Galbraith’s thesis is very simply this: namely, that the majority of the decisions that are made in America today in the economic world are made by what he calls the `technostructure,’ a people who in fact are so totally in control of the economic situation that they can in fact predict that you will buy their product; and, under the circumstances, it is nothing more than mystification to suggest that anything of the free marketplace remains. In his earlier book, he seemed rather to be saying something different. He seemed to be saying there was this strong oligopolistic industrial management group which, however, had to face up to the certain countervailing pressures that came in from government, that come even from labor unions.

Buckley argued that the market outperformed centralized, government-run enterprises, that it could resist the technostructure, and that, in any case, the proponents of the market were not suggesting the market would bring heaven to earth, which fantasy perhaps explained the suspicions of the market by those who expected more than it could deliver. Buckley saw in the market the best available economic system – a system that gave the individual some say in the shape of the system in which they lived.

We are moving precisely towards an epoch in history where it becomes all the more important to preserve such leverage as the individual can conceivably exercise . . . Those who believe that the marketplace is the best friend of individual people making individual decisions, very trivial decisions by the cosmic standards that we approach here today, but decisions that mean a great deal to them.

Those who believe that the marketplace ought to be overturned because it has not given us paradise are in fact criticizing people who have said about the marketplace that it would give us paradise. Davidson [debate partner] doesn’t believe it will. Neither does Mr. Evans. Neither do I. All I say is that in a world increasingly complicated, increasingly overridden by bureaucrats, increasingly dominated by the military, we must watch always to preserve those little mechanisms that are left over to us that are not subject to political manipulation.

This debate marked the beginning of a series of exchanges between the two men over the next decade. In fact, they would engage five times on Firing Line between 1972 and 1982, on topics ranging from Democratic politics, oil and gas regulation and general economic policy. The quality of these discussions was high both in terms of style and substance, and it is worth quoting from some of those exchanges at some length in order to appreciate the level of discourse. Here the two men argue over the tax system.

B: Let me be completely concrete –

G: Would you —

B: – for just one second, if it doesn’t offend you. There are six hundred and twenty five —

G: No. Let me ask you specific question. Would you get rid of the progressive income tax completely?

B: Absolutely.

G: I thought so. Well — would you then distribute the reduced income equally over the civilian and military budget?

B: It depends on the extent of the foreign threat. If we’d had a Democratic administration I would say we’d have to go heavy on military spending.

G: As things now stand, would you take it all out of the civilian budget?

B: It depends completely on the nature of the threat.

G: Well, let me rephrase it. Would you reduce the military budget?

B: I wouldn’t want to have one less airplane than we needed, if that’s the answer to your question. But let’s get back to —

G: No. I understand why you want to get back because I detect a terrible tendency to evade here. You would get rid of the corporation income tax and the personal income tax?

B: Oh, absolutely. The corporation income tax is one of those superstitions —

G: No evasion, Bill. Just —

B: Now wait a minute. [Laughter] If you reduce the corporate business tax you would have a great incentive to greater employment and therefore greater tax revenues.

G: Not immediately. Not immediately.

B: And among other things the need for fewer bureaucrats.

G: I’m talking about next year. Next year we get rid of the corporate income tax, we get rid of the personal income tax. Now —

B: No, no, no. I didn’t say get rid of the personal income tax. I said get rid of the progressive feature of the income tax.

G: Get rid of the progress — oh, I see.

B: The progressive feature of the income tax. As professor Milton Friedman – whom perhaps you will not condescend to with quite such flair – has said, you can eliminate the progressive feature of the income tax, have a uniform rate of nineteen percent, eliminate all of the deductions which I’m in favor of eliminating, and raise exactly as much money as we now raise for federal purposes. So what’s outrageous about that? However, on this business about the economic imbalance that would result —

G: I still detect some evasion. I still detect some instinct to protect military expenditures here from —

B: If you have an extremely successful foreign policy, you don’t have to have high military expenses. But you can’t have a series of diplomatic defeats as we did after the war and not face up to the military consequences. That is, if you are resolved to maintain your liberty — which some of us feel more strongly about than others.

Now on the matter of economic dislocation. There are six hundred and twenty five people in America who made a million dollars last year. If you were to take the whole of the million dollars — if you were to have one hundred percent taxation [of the wealthy] — that would pay the federal cost of government for eighteen hours.

G: Oh, yes, I’m quite clear what the purpose of taxation is.

B: . . . is to hurt them, not to help others.

G: Yes, to provide a general sense of equity, general sense of fairness in the economy.

B: But the progressive feature is not equitable; it calls for treating people differently.

G: – and this is extremely important; the sense of fairness is a very important factor. I would agree with you, Bill, that it isn’t raising revenue that is important . . . 
(As published in On the Firing Line, pages 39-42)

* * *

In 1978, the two tangled on the question of whether the federal government should regulate oil prices, a discussion that today would be watched with great interest. It was no less relevant then, the debate occurring only a few years after the OPEC embargo, higher oil prices and gas lines that shocked the American public into 55 mile an hour national speed limits.

Galbraith, of course, took the position that oil regulation was critical to stabilizing the economy and to protecting the massive investments in exploration and drilling of the oil industry. He argued that this centralized planning already was taking place and that, in any case, OPEC hardly submitted to the market mechanisms advocated by Buckley.

Mr. Buckley and I are neighbors part of the year in Switzerland . We both have a very personal interest in what has happened to the dollar in relation to the Swiss franc – Bill more seriously than I because he lives at a higher level of living standards. [Laughter] But beyond the immediate concern of the fortunate people who can still afford to go abroad, there is a very great danger in this process. This is the simple result of the fact that the market in relation to oil no longer works, as it no longer works in its consumption.

If there are any strange, neglected Republicans in my audience, I would note that the system of bridging the gap between imports of oil that are too large and consumption that is too large was initiated by Mr. Nixon [even though it] could be associated with any liberal Democrats. And this regulation is what happens when both consumption and production pass into the hands of large planning units, the large planning units which are essential if these large tasks are to be performed. We haven’t yet come around to calling the very large planning organization that we have in Washington for dealing with this regulatory apparatus a planning department. The man who did that planning, initiated it, was called a czar, the impression being, of course, that that phrase is more democratic than “planning” and I sometimes suspect, Bill, that no one ever told you Republicans what happens after the czars.

Buckley could not resist take a few good-natured shots at Galbraith in the opening of his response.

I have to confess that the temptation to regulate is not exclusively the impulse of the socialists of this world. I sometimes wonder whether the case couldn’t after all be made for regulating the literary production of John Kenneth Galbraith. [Laughter] He says that I live at a higher level than he in Switzerland, which may be a free market’s relative assessment of the value of our work. [Laughter, applause]

After a few more quips, Buckley focused on the topic at hand, observing that government positions about the scarcity and production of oil throughout the past century had been, repeatedly, wrong.

Now, says Professor Galbraith, it is historically our disposition to turn to the government when and if we get into any kind of economic trouble. It is certainly the disposition of human beings to turn to anybody when they get into trouble. We are here today not to predict the behavior of American capitalists, but to advise them.

Buckley agreed that OPEC represented a violation of the free market system, as political forces were at work that aimed to disrupt the free market. The answer to such disruption, he argued, should be economically punitive – we should tax imports at a rate that corresponded to the cost of producing the oil in a given country, in order to limit the profits of those cartels seeking to exploit our dependence by grossly overcharging. Otherwise, Buckley argued, let the free market work.

Locally, we should have instant deregulation of oil and gas in order simultaneously to decrease our imports and increase supply and reassert the majestic impartiality of the marketplace with which Mr. Galbraith, as a result of his failure to reason and failure to reckon with reality, is so manifestly unfamiliar.

Buckley observed that shortly after the debate, a representative of the oil industry approached the two debaters and suggested they give him a call if they wanted to actually know what was happening in the oil business.

In yet another discussion, a debate in 1982 over the Reagan administration’s economic policies, Buckley and Galbraith sparred to the delight of the audience, in this case sparking more light than fire.

B: Professor Galbriath, I’d be most grateful if you would answer my questions directly and laconically.

G: That’s an example I hope you would set.

B: Is it your impression that the amount of taxation that Americans should pay should be set by Congress?

G: Should be set by Congress?

B: Yes.

G: Yes. [Laughter] With the support of state legislatures.

B: I’m talking about the federal tax.

G: Yes — and local governments.

B: Okay. Now, if it should be set by Congress, then it oughtn’t to be set by noncongressional forces, should it? That is to say, the two are mutually exclusive. It’s either set by Congress or it’s set by an inflationary impact on a tax scale, is that correct?

G: You’re not setting a superlative example of brevity for me. [Laughter]

B: I will be as diffuse as I choose, Mr. Chairman. I am asking you to answer briefly, and I will ask my questions as copiously as I like. [Laughter, applause]

G: It should be set by Congress.

B: All right, if it’s set by Congress Mr. Galbraith —

G: And there’s no question that there should be consideration of the effect of inflation.

B: All right.

G: – particularly on lower income brackets. I would not worry so much about people of great affluence as you do.

B: All right, in other words are we to be guided by what you worry about or are we to be guided by the rule of law. Make that distinction now permanently if you please.

G: I would consider myself identified with the rule of law.

B: Oh, you do?

G: Oh yes. Wise laws are, as you know, part of the expression of the democratic spirit. [Applause]

B: Yes. Well, having heard that violin cadenza, let me ask you this . . . [Laughter]
(On the Firing Line, pages. 72-74)

* * *

And on it went, with the two men so intent on baiting one another, that the moderator finally reminded them of how little time they had left to make substantive points, not that the audience, fully entertained, minded.

A show airing in 1981 was geared toward reflection, John Kenneth Galbraith Looks Back. The exchanges again illustrated the playful nature of their disagreements but also underscored their different worldviews.

B: I don’t think we will have an increase in deficit.

G: Where did you get that idea?

B: From my reading.

G: I think you’re going to have to read more carefully.

B: Perhaps. To be sure, I have had to rely on the statistics issued by the Democratic administration.

G: Would you . . .

B: They predicted first zero, then 16, then 61, then that it’s going to be 81. I say I think it’s going be less than 81 in fiscal 82.

G: Okay, let me concede your point. Let me concede that we’re going to have a large and continuing but marginally increasing deficit. My figures are not of that sort. Would you have tolerated that from a Democratic administration?

B: It would depend completely on surrounding circumstances. I think, for instance, the deficit is not extremely important if the percentage of the public sector spending is going down. For instance, if we spent a total of $100 million a year and we had a deficit of $100 million a year, I wouldn’t be upset.

G: Don’t you find yourself struggling a little bit to maintain your love for Ronald Reagan?

B: No, I think he’s very lovable.

G: And you find yourself forgiving him his economics in order to maintain your affection?

B: No, no. The only quarrel I have with Reagan is that he hasn’t gone far enough. He’s going in the right direction, but he hasn’t gone far enough. He should come out for the elimination of the capital gains tax right away; he should come for letting people who invest their money in savings get the dividends from those savings without paying tax on them; he should come out against double taxation; as a matter of fact, he should come out for a lot of the things that Lester Thurow has come out for in a book that you consider the most exciting economic book published last year.

G: You’re diverting the discussion again from my question. Have you encountered the so-called horse and sparrow theory of economics?

B: No.

G: Well, you’ve just given an eloquent statement of it, and I invite your agreement. It is, if you feed enough oats to the horses, there will be some left over on the road for the sparrows. It seems to be that this is the kind of metaphor which has a rich meaning as compared with those of yours of the BB bullets.

B: Since this is metaphor explanation time, I invite your to elongate that one.

G: My basic point would be that one way or another, one has to find in this waste some moral excuse for reducing taxes on the affluent and that, on the whole, yours is about as persuasive as any; but the fact is that the people who pay high taxes would like to have the money to spend, not to save necessarily . . .

B: You’re absolutely right, and I think that people who want civil liberties ought to admit that they want civil liberties because they want to use them. I don’t suspect anybody who says, “I’m in favor of civil liberties,” like Aryeh Neier, by saying, “You want to make a living off pornography.” I don’t suspect anybody who says, “I want clean air,” to say “He’s really asthmatic. He just wants clean air because that’s his only interest.” I assume that people who are in favor of lightening the tax load are in favor of lightening the tax load because they would prefer to spend that amount of money the way they want to rather than the way the government wants to.

G: What you’re saying Bill, is that you’re in favor of the same kind of massive obfuscation with which you respond to some of my rather simple questions. Now let me be precise. You’re saying that while well-to-do-people — people in the 50 percent bracket and in unearned income going up to the 70 percent bracket – do not like to pay taxes, would like to have the money to spend; they must produce some deeply moral obfuscation such as the fact that they need the incentives they’re not . . . 

B: Why is it an obfuscation?

G: That they’re not working and they need to be encouraged to work harder.

B: Why is it an obfuscation for somebody who hits the 50 percent bracket at $30,000 to say, “I would like to save enough money to be able to send my children to school.” Or he might say, “I want to take a world cruise.” I don’t care.

G: Okay, I’m prepared . . .

B: I think that one of the things we ought to respect in one another is your right to use civil liberties to write the kind of books you want to write and you ought to respect my right to earn money in order to spend it the way I want to spend it, including buying your book.

G: We get over to civil liberties as we got back to Hitler as we got to those minority and Jewish students. Now, couldn’t we . . . 

B: I despair of anything less than ideological imagery shaking you out of your trance.

G: Couldn’t we stay with the subject?

B: The subject is, is somebody suspect who says, “I want lesser taxes” and says also, “lesser taxes are going to benefit the economy”? I say, no more so than somebody who says, “I want civil liberties because civil liberties are going to enrich culture.”

G: All right, I don’t really have any objection to that.

* * *

In what must have been a lengthy interview with author Frederick Pratson, excerpts of which were published in Perspectives on Galbraith, Buckley confronted directly his differences with Galbraith on economic and social policy.

Galbraith continues to have in common with liberals a belief in the numinous powers of the federal government. But he is rather more dogmatic on this point than most liberals. That doesn’t mean that he goes around picketing the White House for the president to nationalize our basic industries, because he is prepared to roll with the historical situation and to see government intervention when he finds that it will either be most useful to him or most deadly to the capitalist system.
– Pratson. p. 184.

Galbraith, Buckley argued, was to the left of Walter Heller and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., but that generally in America at the time (the interview occurred in the 1970s), there was growing disillusionment with “that part of liberalism that fancied itself as having redemptive answers for America ’s problems.”

Buckley quoted from Peter Drucker’s work, The Age of Discontinuity, to the effect that government does only two things better than the private sector – wage war and inflate currency:  “It is significant that Galbraith now calls himself a socialist, which he didn’t before. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t essentially a socialist before, but it is a terminological change, and it distinguishes him from the nonsocialist liberals.”

Galbraith’s infatuation with Marx, Veblen and Keynes, of course, is about all one needs to know to appreciate how dogmatically he and Buckley differed. In his book, The Age of Uncertainty, Galbraith traced the history of economics in the modern era and lauds Marx as a unique visionary who changed the way the world viewed economic and political issues.

He also summarized his debt to Veblen, who in his Theory of the Leisure Class sought to document the failures of wealth and the wealthy just as Lewis Lapham today aims his journalistic lance at the many failures of the American system, only rarely able to conjure up a good word about the so-called elites who, in his view, dominate American culture. Veblen suggested that America’s economy since the 1900s was founded on a contrived consumerism that was both wasteful and harmful to a free society. Goods were no longer produced because they were needed, but were produced and promoted to create demand.

There is no question that the Great Depression shocked the complacency of those prone to credit free enterprise and capitalism as the best solution for what ailed the country. Galbraith, in his influential book, The Affluent Society, argued that the New Deal, which aimed to calm fears, struck fear into the hearts of capitalists. “For perhaps the first time in history they worried not about the turbulent ambitions of the masses but about their yearning for peace and contentment.”

Liberals began to see something else, something far more sinister taking place: “Modern industrial life, they concluded, was a thing of exceptional hazard; the worker lived in constant danger of begin torn to pieces by the increasingly complex social machine which he served. (TAS, p. 103)

The Age of Uncertainty echoed these themes and was made into a television series. It remained one of Galbraith’s most popular books, despite its dark view of economics and its class warfare paradigm.

A careful reading of Buckley underscores his ideological accommodation of some aspects of the safety net. His point was less dogmatic than Galbraith’s – merely that a system that created more wealth for more people than any in history deserved more than the endless carping directed at it from the Galbraith wing of the Left. Galbraith’s inability to acknowledge that capitalism and free enterprise created the world in which a poor person was news, or at least worthy of public concern, strikes many on the conservative side as extreme ingratitude. Surveying the economic state of those nations that adopted leftist doctrine, one has been forced to acknowledge that free enterprise worked better, whatever its excesses and failures. Afterall, the great innovation of the communist Chinese leadership of today isn’t that they annunciated central planning, but that they allowed free enterprise to thrive in spite of the state’s desire to control.

In his book, Up from Liberalism, Buckley articulated eloquently his concerns about Galbraith’s desire to have the centralized state address every social issue – from roads, to schools, to slum clearance, to unemployment.

The program prescribed by Mr. Galbraith is unacceptable, conservatives would agree. Deal highhandedly as he would have us do with the mechanisms of the marketplace, and the mechanisms will bind. Preempt the surplus of the people, and the surpluses will dwindle. Direct politically the economic activity of a nation, and the economy will lose its capacity for that infinite responsiveness to individual tastes that gives concrete expression to the individual will in material matters. Centralize the political function, and you will lose touch with reality, for the reality is an intimate and individual relationship between individuals and those among whom they live; and the abstractions of widescreen social draftsmen will not substitute for it. Stifle the economic sovereignty of the individual by spending his dollars for him, and you stifle his freedom. Socialize the individual’s surplus and you socialize his spirit and creativeness . . .

I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.
– Up from Liberalism, pages 227-229.

One of the harshest verdicts on Galbraith and his economic ideas came, not surprisingly, from the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, named for the great free market philosopher with whom Buckley also collaborated. William Anderson wrote upon Galbraith’s death that his infatuation with socialism and collectivist solutions never abided:

After visiting China in 1972, he wrote China Passage, in which he praised all of the alleged accomplishments of communism. Of course, anyone even remotely familiar with the history of communism in China knows that Mao tse Tung imposed socialism not only with tears, but with prison, torture, and murder. Perhaps this whole affair gives us a good window into the real Galbraith: as long as the communists wined, dined, and lavished praises upon him, it did not matter how many people Mao killed as long as the Chinese believed that Galbraith was a Great Thinker.

It is highly doubtful that Buckley would have endorsed such a strident interpretation of Galbraith’s views, no matter how serious their disagreements. It was a measure of his respect for Galbraith that he devoted nearly a dozen pages in On the Firing Line to Galbraith and that he asked him to appear on the show a half-dozen times, a number exceeded only by a few luminaries like Malcolm Muggeridge and Mortimer Adler.

While Galbraith was fond of Buckley, he was not as publicly kind to the younger man as Buckley was to him. In comments published in Pratson’s book, Buckley offered high praise. “I don’t think of Ken as being primarily an economist. I think of him primarily as a social philosopher. I don’t say that to disparage Ken. I just happen to think that social philosophy is far more interesting. I feel that Galbraith’s place in history will be not that of an economist but that of a hugely influential and brilliant literary technician and critic. He is a great writer. Ken has a great wit and is a man with some startling and highly rewarding social concepts. But, it seems inconceivable that he will be thought of in the future as having used economics other than as a sort of extended metaphor by which he has been able to ply his wares.”

Though Firing Line aired for another 17 years, Galbraith only appeared (as best I can determine) one other time — in 1999, the final year of the show. But throughout those years public correspondence continued, sometimes friendly, often sharp. When Galbraith playfully wrote to Buckley about his correspondence with Evelyn Waugh, the great British novelist, Buckley responded, with equal joy, by publishing the full correspondence between the two of them, including Waugh's flattering comments about Buckley and National Review. (See Right Reason, pgs. 340-347)

In his collection, Happy Days Are Here Again, Buckley included a critical essay on Galbraith in his section called “Assailing.” Here he took Galbraith to task for his dismissive attitudes toward conservative writers and economic analysts such as George Gilder, Arthur Laffer (famously of the Laffer curve) and Charles Murray. He observed that all Galbraith could find to write negatively about China under Mao was that the Chinese smoked too much. He quipped that when Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada named Galbraith as his favorite economist, the Canadian economy immediately slipped into decline.

All the fun and seriousness aside, Buckley prized Galbraith as a friend. In Miles Gone By, published in 2004, he wrote of his old friend with an affection that sustained the humorous tone.

He consistently writes pleasant tributes to my own books, inevitably advising the reader that my political opinions should be ignored, my fiction and accounts of life at sea appreciated. His friends and admirers are numerous and profuse, and he doesn’t mind that at all. He is amused and amusing about it. I was a speaker at his huge eighty-fifth birthday party, my four minute talk interrupted halfway through by the master of ceremonies. Is there a doctor in the house? The acoustics at Boston Public Library were bad, and the next day I sent Galbraith the text of my talk. A week later I had his acknowledgement. It read, “Dear Bill: That was a very pleasant talk you gave about me. If I had known it would be so, I would not have instructed my friend to pretend, in the middle of your speech, to need the attention of a doctor.”

I’m preparing a speech for his ninety-fifth.

Galbraith would continue to crank out books, on economics, culture, and history. At the time of his death, he had published nearly three dozen books, adding to his more famous works such titles as The Culture of Contentment, The Anatomy of Power and The Good Society. The latter, published in 1996, demonstrated that he had lost none of his zeal for reengineering the economic system. He continued to view economics through a Marxist prism in which the rich were eternally pitted against labor or the poor.

On one side, there are now the rich, the comfortably endowed and those so aspiring, and on the other the economically less fortunate and the poor, along with the considerable number who, out of social concern and sympathy, seek to speak for them or for a more compassionate world. This is the economic and political alignment today.
– The Good Society, p. 7.

It was, like so many of his books, another call for government intervention into the affairs of the economy on behalf of those Galbraith felt the capitalist system exploited. When Galbraith died in April of 2006, there was no evidence that he had been moved one iota by Buckley’s arguments on behalf of free enterprise or even by the collapse of the Soviet empire or the fact that post-modern intellectuals such as Richard Rorty were embracing free enterprise and capitalism as the only alternative to the failed policies of the Left.

In Galbraith’s final months, Buckley would dutifully visit him. After one such encounter, Buckley talked of not returning because it was so difficult to bear Galbraith’s deteriorating condition and its effects on Galbraith’s mood. But after a few weeks, he reconsidered and resumed the visits.

In his remarks at Galbraith's memorial, Buckley recounted some of their exchanges over politics and the Iraq war. Galbraith, for example, advised Buckley to oppose the war in order to enhance his conservative credentials, but Buckley, though he did for his own reasons eventually distance himself from Bush's Iraq policies, was never quite sure when Galbraith was being serious or glib.

He acknowledged as well Galbraith's love of language and his own efforts to continue to visit Galbraith even unto the end, no matter how difficult the effort. "I resumed the trips because they meant so much to me, to sit by the bedside of this eminent man, who loved so the language in which he wrote and spoke, and reveled in the wit he brought to life itself."

Ironically and sadly, the Buckleys’ affection for Galbraith led to one of the other great losses of Buckley’s life. His wife Pat, during the trip to attend Galbraith’s funeral, stubbed her toe. That incident resulted in an infection that grew increasingly worse and led finally to her unexpected death.

Buckley of course was devastated by both losses. After decades of friendship and repartee, finally there was nothing witty to be said.