The Week

@ In Manhattan, on signboards, fences and vacant walls all over the city, someone has put up plain white, black-bordered posters which read: “In Memoriam: Lt. Col. Virgil I. Grissom, Lt. Col. Edward White 2nd, Lt. Comdr. Roger B. Chaffee.” No one knows who.

@ President Johnson’s economic message to the Congress was of major theoretical interest because it bypassed the notion of “guideposts” for wage and price hikes. The “guideposts” idea had proven impractical. Johnson replaced it with an appeal to business and labor jointly to regard the national interest rather than their own – a prolongation of the myth that it is business and labor that are responsible for inflation. Thus the blame for future inflation may be attributed to private parties; when inflation continues, they can be accused; and the groundwork will have been laid to justify the imposition of economic controls.

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@ In Manhattan, on signboards, fences and vacant walls all over the city, someone has put up plain white, black-bordered posters which read: “In Memoriam: Lt. Col. Virgil I. Grissom, Lt. Col. Edward White 2nd, Lt. Comdr. Roger B. Chaffee.” No one knows who.

@ President Johnson’s economic message to the Congress was of major theoretical interest because it bypassed the notion of “guideposts” for wage and price hikes. The “guideposts” idea had proven impractical. Johnson replaced it with an appeal to business and labor jointly to regard the national interest rather than their own – a prolongation of the myth that it is business and labor that are responsible for inflation. Thus the blame for future inflation may be attributed to private parties; when inflation continues, they can be accused; and the groundwork will have been laid to justify the imposition of economic controls.