On the Right

New York, April 25—The argument over the proposed constitutional amendment to limit federal spending proceeds at many levels. One argument currently being stressed by the amendment’s opponents is that economic doctrine ought not to be written into the Constitution, both because economic doctrine is a modish thing, and because it is uncrystallized. That is certainly true. The disestablishment of John Maynard Keynes during the past two decades is as convulsive an experience in iconoclasm as Dorothy’s discovery that the dreaded Wizard of Oz was a cowardly middle-aged man with amplifiers and a lightning-machine. A couple of years ago Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, interviewed in London, confessed that 15 years before, his fellow economists were pretty sure they had all the answers. “Now,” said Professor Galbraith, “we know how much more there is to learn.” If there is much more for other economists to learn, we can reflect, a fortiori, how much there is left for Professor Galbraith to learn.

Here is the way Professor Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School frames his complaint. Let us agree, he says, that during the recent period Congress has tended to overspend. I.e., it has been politically fashionable to overspend. “But suppose,” he says, that tomorrow it became “equally fashionable” to underspend. There is, he insists, an argument against underspending, even as there is an argument against overspending. It is preposterous, he concludes, to lock the Constitution into an attitude in the matter, which changes, and rightly so, with the social seasons. Just as it is wrong to spend so wildly as to bring on inflation, it is wrong to underspend when today’s capital investment can yield a generation’s profit.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

New York, April 25—The argument over the proposed constitutional amendment to limit federal spending proceeds at many levels. One argument currently being stressed by the amendment’s opponents is that economic doctrine ought not to be written into the Constitution, both because economic doctrine is a modish thing, and because it is uncrystallized. That is certainly true. The disestablishment of John Maynard Keynes during the past two decades is as convulsive an experience in iconoclasm as Dorothy’s discovery that the dreaded Wizard of Oz was a cowardly middle-aged man with amplifiers and a lightning-machine. A couple of years ago Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, interviewed in London, confessed that 15 years before, his fellow economists were pretty sure they had all the answers. “Now,” said Professor Galbraith, “we know how much more there is to learn.” If there is much more for other economists to learn, we can reflect, a fortiori, how much there is left for Professor Galbraith to learn.

Here is the way Professor Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School frames his complaint. Let us agree, he says, that during the recent period Congress has tended to overspend. I.e., it has been politically fashionable to overspend. “But suppose,” he says, that tomorrow it became “equally fashionable” to underspend. There is, he insists, an argument against underspending, even as there is an argument against overspending. It is preposterous, he concludes, to lock the Constitution into an attitude in the matter, which changes, and rightly so, with the social seasons. Just as it is wrong to spend so wildly as to bring on inflation, it is wrong to underspend when today’s capital investment can yield a generation’s profit.