Squandering a Splendid Asset

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

In Washington, where Jane Fonda once condemned the System, where angry farmers three months ago unleashed frightened goats, where Moonies have sung and right-to-lifers raged, there last Thursday afternoon were several hundred small businessmen standing in polished shoes and a light mist to tell their Government that they were opposed to yet another layer of regulation.

They stood around the Capitol somewhat apprehensively, massed specifically against the labor reform bill being debated in the Senate, but a symbol of something far broader and deeper than that one issue.

They came from Ohio and Massachusetts and Missouri. There is no memory of their having taken to the pavement in the past. For decades businessmen big and small have been the target of much political contempt and odium, often with justification. They were the representatives of profit and greed (a distinction rarely made), purveyors of shoddy products and pollution. Businessmen searched for influence in the subterranean corridors of power, using lawyers and fixers, fearful of bureaucrats, reporters and sunshine.

Now they have new status, or, rather, they can have it if they are wise. Part of the tax revolt, the outcry against Big Government and all the rest, is a new national appreciation of the economic system and the people who make it go. If they are not folk heroes yet, they can at least go to the Senate chamber, as they did last week, with pride.

For a long time the picture of J.P. Morgan with the midget on his knee was the Washington view of capitalism--a bloated buffoon. John Kennedy once described a small-town banker as a man with shoes that were too tight, the pain from below traveling up to his face. Only a couple of years ago, Senator Henry Jackson lined up seven big oil executives as though they were schoolboys, and denounced them for their big profits in the oil crunch.

But mortgages and tuition bills and beef prices have jolted a majority of Americans into the realization that their way of life may depend on their understanding the U.S. economic system and helping to get it back in tune. In short, almost all Americans are in some way now linked with business concerns. There is a vague understanding that while capitalism is far from perfect and not even very romantic, as Political Commentator Irving Kristol explains, it performs the job of distributing goods and services, and preserving individual freedom, better than any other system.

Professor Benjamin Vandegrift, of Washington and Lee, sees a whole new breed of middle-management executives who have graduated from the campus activism of the '60s and are now moving into politics to preserve their dreams. New York's Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is almost poetic on the subject of the entrepreneurial ethos. "The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people," he says. "They were founded by people with extraordinary energy, intelligence, ambition, aggressiveness. All those factors go into the primordial capitalist urge." M.I.T. Professor Louis Banks takes the next step. It is now plain all across the nation, he says, that many of those business folks do a better job of problem solving than the Government.

The other night at the Harvard Business School Club of Washington, Jack Valenti, former White House aide and a refugee from the Great Society, said amen. All America, he declared, is now in a "silent struggle" to preserve "economic freedoms."

"In my judgment the largest asset of America is the very one that is so easily squandered," Valenti boomed. "It is the enterprising entrepreneur, the risk taker, the competitive antagonist, the builder of plants and factories, the creator of new enterprises and the expander of old ones, the people who make better mousetraps, cheaper and faster. If our economy is not strong, we will have neither the zest nor the vitality for other adventures, however useful and attractive they may be."

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