PAT'S UNKNOWN GURU

By TOM CURRY

WHERE DOES PATRICK BUCHANAN GET HIS ECOnomic ideas? When asked by TIME to name his gurus, he spoke admiringly of an obscure German economist named Wilhelm Ropke, who died in 1966. But Ropke would probably have mixed feelings about Buchanan's populism. The economist served on Germany's unemployment commission until Hitler took power in 1933 and fired him. Ropke went into exile in Switzerland but in the late 1940s served as a top adviser to Ludwig Erhard, architect of Germany's "economic miracle." Ropke warned of "the tendency for the increasingly centralized state of our times to surround like a parasitical vine both society and economy." In books such as A Humane Economy, he advocated a "Third Way"--neither freewheeling capitalism nor a state-run economy. He stressed "those mysterious powers of the human soul and of human society which cannot be expressed in mathematical equations." It is this aspect of Ropke's philosophy that inspires Buchanan's "conservatism of the heart."

But on trade, he and Buchanan part company. Revival of Germany's economy after World War II, Ropke argued, would come only from "the application of a principle that in the world of today surpasses every other in boldness and novelty...the principle of absolute and even, if necessary, one-sided free trade."

--By Tom Curry