ustxtxb_obs_1983_11_11_50_00012-00000_000.pdf

federal price controls. What I pointed out was that the price of movies has gone up a lot more than the price of gas has during that time. Does he think that in the national interest we need price ceilings on movies? By the way, I worked very hard on natural gas deregulation because I believed in it which is a position no different from that taken by William Fulbright or Lyndon Johnson or Ralph Yarborough. When we were talking about defense policy, I meant to ask you about nuclear freeze efforts. My feeling is that we have to stop the arms race; we ought to move toward nuclear disarmament. The only way that we can do it is given the suspicions on both sides if we have some sort of mutually satisfactory process of verification. Arid if we don’t have that, we don’t have anything. Because to me the shooting down of the Korean airliner reflects the extraordinary paranoia that exists in the Soviet Union. This is not a new thing; it didn’t begin with Marxism; it existed in the period of the czars, etc. They’re extremely territorial and very very fearful, and ultimately I think they shot down the plane because rather than take the chance, they’d rather kill. . . . So if we don’t have a mutually verifiable inspection procedure, we don’t have anything. We won’t be able to disarm, and if we don’t, we can’t move toward disarmament, not only will the direct economic costs be very great and very wasteful because what do you do with it except store it you hope. You hope you don’t use it. If you use it, you’ve got bigger problems. But today we have weaponry, we have bombs 1,600 times as strong as the one that hit Hiroshima. One bomb could take out 7 million people in New York City. And if we refuse to address the need to disarm, we are certainly selling short the future. And this is absolutely something that only the federal government can do. I came across a quote last night from Randolph Bourne in the early 1900s that war is essentially the health of the state. I don’t know who Bourne is, but I would rather draw my instruction from Gandhi than him. Bourne was a social critic in the early 1900s whose observation about war was ironic. I think he was a pacifist during World War I, and I was wondering, particularly during the Reagan administration, if we are reaching something like that a state that relies on war for its economic health. If we think that we are, by engaging in defense manufacture, creating a healthier society, we are being deceived. That’s what he [Bourne] was saying. Because the logical extension of that notion is that what we should do then, if this is really the way we create economic health, we should devote more and more of our resources to tanks and weaponry, and then if necessary, if we’re running out of a place to store it, we should dump it in the sea. If the idea is simply to put people in an activity, to work, and say this creates jobs and so forth, that is very, very shortsighted. One of the problems the American economy faces today is the fact that so many of our resources have gone into defense and weaponry, compared with the nations with whom we compete industrially, that we have not remained competitive in our other industries because we have devoted a disproportionate amount of resources to piling up weaponry. And if we look at the nations that have had the greatest economic health in the last thirty or forty years, what we find is that Germany and Japan, which have proportionately very small defense budgets, have been able partly to live behind the shield of the USA. But they have been able to devote their resources to items that are used by consumers. Whereas we have a certain portion of our people thinking about how to build a better tank, they have people devoted to thinking about how to build a better Toyota. Priorities It is possible for this society to move in that direction? Sure. It’s a case of national priorities. We are not going to have, and should not have in my judgment, a nation that does not value a strong defense. We should have a strong defense. We need to keep those things in proportion; we need to have our priorities straight. We ought to recognize that part of having a, quotes, strong America is having a strong economy. We haven’t had a strong economy in a long time. It may not worry some people, but I am greatly worried that last year total after-tax corporate profits in the United States of America were $117 billion. And our national deficit this year is going to be $220 billion. So if we took all the corporate profits of America and applied them to our national debt, we would still have a national debt bigger than any debt created by any administration before the Reagan administration. And that would have left nothing to invest in our own economic well-being. And we have a low savings rate, and we have a very low rate of new capital planned investment. I think that is causing us a lot of concern, and I think part of America’s slippage in international power and prestige has come from the fact that our economy is not as strong as it used to be. The Japanese have some following around the world, and they have hardly any military. The following comes because they have a very strong economy. When you go about setting those economic priorities, does that involve a decision between old-line industry or high-tech industry? Those questions are too often oversimplified by people in politics. It is important that the USA have and continue a lot of basic and mainline industries. And I think the USA is basically a large enough, strong enough, country that we ought to be able to continue with some strength both in basic industries and in high technology. We don’t have to produce a hundred percent of what we need in all those areas because we have to be an internationally trading country. International trade is to me no different than the very notion of specialization that goes back to Plato’s Republic. What we find is that any individual who is living as entirely selfsufficient is living at the most basic and primitive level. If you are spinning your own cloth and growing your own crops, you’re living at a very basic level. Specialization is inevitable. And international trade is simply the extension of the expectation of specialization. But what we have to have is enough strength in various areas at home to be able to continue under different circumstances, so that we can’t be blackmailed by somebody else. What has happened, of course, is that our savings rate has been so low, we’ve been mortgaging our future for a long time; we’ve been eating up our seed corn. One part of the problem comes from the fact that we have had no one, Democrat or Republican, who has insisted on trading on equal terms with other countries. It is absolutely outlandish that this country has the poor trading policy that it does. And the Democratic Party, I’m sorry to say, is as guilty as the Republican. There’s enough blame to go around; we don’t need to be goring Reagan’s ox on this. Reagan hasn’t done well, but we didn’t do well either. We will have to insist to other countries that they bring down barriers to our products. I got married recently, and I noticed that over 2/3 of the gifts we received were not made in the USA. You can say, well, those are just small items, and that’s true, but the Japanese hold up any car going into Japan for 12 NOVEMBER 11, 1983