What Instructs My Viewpoints

Let me state in this introduction that I am an unapologetic liberal and a member of the ACLU, People for the American Way, etc.

I was the beneficiary of a tuition free college. For this reason I am deeply disappointed that generations following did not and do not have this opportunity. There is no longer a free college in New York or anywhere else, and while public colleges have far lower tuitions than private ones, a low tuition can be as great an obstacle to one with scarce resources as a high one, and even these low tuitions keep going up.

I believe that government is the solution and not the problem, provided, of course that it is truly committed to the common good. If it serves as its master, those who have through good fortune, skill, skullduggery, inheritance or whatever, amassed riches and know only greed for more and more riches and who lust for power, than government does become the problem.

I consider myself an American and not a Jerseyite. I do not believe that a state should be able to deny its inhabitants due process or the liberties enshrined in our Constitution, and when I say Constitution, I do not mean only that which was conceived by our founding fathers, but the Constitution as amended and interpreted in the light of new realities. The courts, like the government can be a force for good or evil and they have from time to time been one or the other and often both. But our institutions have served us well since our founding and I would stay with them through the good times and the bad.

Federal law also often serves the country well by providing uniformity which is important for businesses engaged in interstate and international commerce, who would find it very difficult to operate while having to observe different laws in each of fifty jurisdictions.

By the same token, it is vital that many areas be left to the states. Most criminal law is best left to the states provided such laws pass constitutional muster, and states are a wonderful laboratory for new ideas which if successful can be adopted by other states, and if their worth is proven, such ideas can then, in appropriate cases, become the federal norm. California, for all its warts, has the best pollution standards for cars in the country and I certainly would not want the federal government, which today serves the polluters, to interfere with that state right.

The argument about states rights as such is, however, a phony one, for it is obvious that those of liberal persuasion are for states rights if that serves their philosophic bend and the same is true of those on the right who are ever willing to override state decision if it serves their own political predilections.

In future essays I will often severely criticize those who I believe advocate policies detrimental to the values I hold dear, particularly where they prevaricate, deny their intentions and work toward their nefarious goals behind a web of obfuscations, half truths and outright lies. (More on this in later writings.)

Let me begin at this juncture, however, by confessing to the many errors liberals have made in the past. I do this to make it clear to my readers that I do not pretend that liberals have all the answers or have always been a force for good. What makes liberals special is that whatever mistakes they make it is almost always intended for the common good and not to serve the interests of a narrow selfish faction.

Thus liberals, who correctly, have always fought for graduated taxes, inflexibly held fast to their formula, even as inflation brought more and more middle class Americans into ever higher tax brackets. It was left to Reagan to propose and convince Congress to enact tax brackets which automatically adjust for inflation, thus stopping what ended up being an unintended attack on the very concept of a graduated tax. I believe in this failure, which strangely has not gotten much publicity, liberals lost much of the middle class.

Public housing, a prime liberal program, was a disaster. Experience has shown that poor people do not do well when isolated into enclaves of poverty. Nor do high-rises, with their tendency to isolate, serve the poor well. What we have learned is that we need mixed housing, with a certain portion set aside for the poor and much of the housing for the middle and even upper middle class. In so far as it is feasible, individual home ownership works best. But help for the poor should not, (oh what heresy) be achieved by permanent rent control which should be reserved for temporary shortages, not as a permanent solution. It is neither fair, nor in the long run effective to put the burden of caring for the disadvantaged on one group, i.e., landlords. Such burdens must be born by society as a whole, i.e., taxpayer supported subsidies. Furthermore, it is self-defeating because by making it unprofitable to be a landlord the shortage is prolonged and good housing is not maintained, creating slums. The problem is best illustrated by noting how much of the housing market in New York has been abandoned, making the City of New York the largest slumlord in the country.

Liberals are sometimes naive. Thus too many took too long to recognize the Soviet Union for the "Evil Empire" which it was. I should be noted that this was a minority, which was used by the right to tar the whole liberal establishment. Thus, when the American Labor Party of New York became dominated by communist elements, true liberals broke away and formed the Liberal party. In my experience communists feared liberals much more than right wingers because they always felt that right wingers created the conditions which would eventually make their programs appealing, while liberals undermined their appeal. Thus I will always remember that while at CCNY one of the leading Communist said to me, " Comes the revolution, you will be one of the first to go."

Many liberals are pacifists but the majority fully understands that there is a time for war if it is not driven, by what Dwight Eisenhower described as the Military/Industrial complex. But liberals are not a monolithic movement and they cannot and should not be tarred by the mistakes of a minority in their midst.

Welfare was conceived as a worthy attempt to bring people out of poverty. But, self defeating aspects crept into it so that a destitute mother would lose her assistance if it was found that a man was living with her even if he was unemployed, thus discouraging the formation of family units and even encouraging their destruction. Clinton was right when he proclaimed that Welfare must end "as we know it," which was a dramatic way of saying it needed reform. But with his obsession with Health Insurance, which certainly was and is important, he missed the opportunity to reform Welfare and ended up having to sign a law which is not reform, but abolition. This was an enormous political blunder, which the late Daniel Patrick Moynahan warned against. What we have ended up with is a situation where we say to a mother with a young child, you will not get help to feed yourself or your child, unless you leave your child and go to work at what are often starvation wages, and then charge her with child neglect for leaving the child to go to work. Talk about "Catch 22." To the extent that the system offers childcare it is inadequate and under funded, and appropriations for this are declining

There are two other areas where I differ with the conventional liberal wisdom. One is globalization. I believe that in the history of the world the trading nations always enjoyed the greatest prosperity. Therefore, I favor an ever increasing lowering of tariffs world wide through agreements like Nafta. I strongly disagree with the Bush policy of paying lip service to free trade while imposing tariffs on steel, subsidizing agriculture and committing other selective violations. The jobs we lose to outsourcing will be more than made by other jobs which vigorous trade will ultimately create. It should be remembered that during the Clinton prosperity, outsourcing was taking place but other jobs were being created at a faster clip than the ones being lost. This is the formula to which we must return. The Bush policies have hampered job creation with its wrongheaded tax cuts and other economic policies, and have done nothing to alleviate the pain which temporary dislocation creates.

While it represented a small portion of liberal trends, primarily on college campuses, the trend toward "PC" or politically correct speech was wrong headed. Censorship by whatever group and for whatever "noble purpose" is never to be condoned.

I could go on with the mistakes liberals, or at least sub-groups of liberals, have made. But this will suffice to illustrate that I recognize that liberals are not always right, and I for one will never hesitate to be a maverick within a movement for which I feel a great affinity

Unfortunately, the Right, (and I call them the Right, rather than conservatives, because, as constituted today, they want to conserve nothing, are a radical group bent on destroying everything that has been built for the common weal since the New Deal and even before. They even would undo what the last great Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, built. They have a knack for finding defects in generally good programs; they are good at defining problems but unfortunately their solutions are calculated to exacerbate them, rather than solving them or even alleviating them.