Book Reviews

The Communist Manifesto,.written by Marx jointly with Engels, with its ominous words about a "specter" haunting Europe in 1848,was original ly published in London. With turmoil in the mid century air, the authors felt justified in saying that all history was the history of class struggles. But in what they called "pre-history" there had been no classes, and property had been held in common. "In other words," says Kuehnelt-Leddihn, "they adopt the Rousseauistic notion of a paradisiacal past, a Golden Age, a secular version of the biblical story." This about ended Marx's connection with Adam and Eve and the Garden. Says Kuehnelt-Leddihn, "A violent critique of bourgeois civilization follows, a passage that highlights the dominant characteristic of Marx: self-hatred. Marx, the typical product of bourgeois culture, is antibour geois;Marx, of Jewish origin, is anti-Jewish; Marx, a permanent resident of capitalist Britain, is anti capitalist; Marx, married to an aristocrat, is antiaristocratic. "

In Paris the self-hating Marx "wrote his first bitterly hostile essay on the Jews. Marx nurtured a real hatred for the Jews, in whom he saw the very embodiment of bourgeois capitalism. But his prejudice had a racist as well as a sociological character. " Marx had to have access to big libraries. (The "idiocy of rural life " did not provide access to books.) So Marx found a library and working space in the British Museum, which he "used to his dying day." His financial support came from Engels, and from the New York Tribune. With Engels, Marx agreed that the bourgeoisie had played a role in history in building up the mid dle classes. They killed feudalism. But the bour geoisie, as Marx and Engels saw it, had done too well. They had exhausted their internal markets. Now, with foreign markets drying up, hadn't the time come for a new ruling class, the proletariat? Hence the call: "Proletarians of all countries, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains."

With their doctrine of inevitability, Marx and Engels might have allowed things to rest there. But to hurry the process of change along, they advocat ed 10 measures. One was for confiscation of real estate to pay the costs of government. Another was for highly progressive taxation. A third was abolition of the right to inherit. The trouble with the Manifestois that history refused to support it. Most of the 10 points advo cated by Marx and Engels have become common place. But the wealthy remain wealthy, and the poor have been catching up to them. Eduard Bern stein first pointed this out in Germany. It was in Russia that the "revolution" occurred, without his torical prediction or warrant. Bill Buckley has published Kuehnelt-Leddihn's columns in NationalReviewfor the past 35 years, and writes the preface to this book. Buckley does not find it remarkable that Kuehnelt-Leddihn believes in minority rule. Nor do I. Majorities should be contained-there should be whole areas left beyond their reach. The Bill of Rights does what it can to give minorities their scope. It may not be enough, but it helps.

We have escaped the worst features of the French Revolution, which could not provide for a legal succession and fell victim to Bonapartism. The checks and balances provided by Madison and the other Founders work, even though they were established by 55 men who misapplied the thinking of Montesquieu, who didn't see that Parliament in England was all-powerful. There's an appendix entitled "What Is Left?" listing 41 succinct earmarks of modern collec tivism-socialism, Communism, welfarism, and the like. For example, Left is "Messianism assigned to one group: a nation, a race, a class." Again, Left is "Totalitarianism: pervasion of all spheres of life by one doctrine." Left is the "Provider (Welfare) State: from the cradle to the grave." The sub-appendix headed "What Is Right?" has only one item: "The opposite of all the above or its absence." It should be obvious after reading Leftism Revisitedthat no party or system is ever 100 per cent Left or Right. It's a question of what predom inates, and where we are headed.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn is surely one of the more remarkable personages of our time; a few minutes in his company convinces one of that, as will time spent with any of his books. He is fluent in nine languages and can get by in as many more-a skill which serves him well in his constant travels which take him into all parts of the globe. He's a prodi gious reader, as the 150pages of notes in this book attest; there are keen comments on books and shrewd profiles of authors. This man does not write to soothe; some will be infuriated by this or that opinion expressed in these pages, but every reader will grow a little. D 277 CHILD LABOR AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION by Clark Nardinelli Indiana University Press, Tenth and Morton Streets, Bloomington, IN 47405 -1990 -194 pages - $25.00cloth Reviewedby David M. Brown W hile there are many reasons for the "anti-capitalist mentality" so prevalent among intellectuals (and, in somewhat less virulent form, among the general public), dis tortions of our economic past must surely rank prominently among them.

As E A. Hayek put it in Capitalismand the His torians,"Few men will deny that our views about the goodness or badness of different institutions are largely determined by what we believe to have been their effects in the past. ... Yet the historical beliefs which guide us in the present are not always in accord with the facts; sometimes they are even the effects rather than the cause of political beliefs. Historical myths have perhaps played nearly as great a role in shaping opinion as historical facts. Yet we can hardly hope to profit from past experi ence unless the facts from which we draw our con clusions are correct." More reliable accounts of the past must sup plant these false historical beliefs if our endan gered heritage of economic and political freedom is to be revived. This is so even in an age in which the opposite of economic freedom-socialism -seems to be almost universally discredited.

Without a real appreciation of capitalism's virtues and achievements, the only substitutes offered for presumably defunct socialism will be obnoxious "new" versions of the "mixed economy," unneces sarily burdening denizens of both the East and the West for numberless years to come. So by all means, let's get the history right. In this slim but fact-packed volume, economist Clark Nardinelli observes that many historians regard child labor as symbolic of the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. Following the lead of con temporary factory-system critics like Richard Oastler, they often begin with an arbitrary moral assumption-that child labor is immoral or ex ploitative on its face-and squeeze the facts to fit that assumption. "The study of child labor and the industrial rev olution has, I believe, paid too little attention to the 278 THE FREEMAN • JULY 1991 economic reality of that labor," Nardinelli writes.

"Child labor can easily be the outcome of family decisions to improve the well-being of children. The important decision with respect to child labor, moreover, may not be between working and not working but between working at home and work ing away from home.... Under the conditions of the early industrialrevolution, childlabor may well have made children (and'the family) better off." This possibility was never even considered by many of the earliest criticsof child labor in the fac tories. With proto-Marxian outrage, Richard Oastler compared the situation of working minors to that of slaves: "... Ye are compelled to work as long as the necessity of your needy parents may require, or the cold blooded avarice of your worse than barbarian masters may demand! ... Ye are doomed to labour from morning to night for one who cares not how soon your weak and tender frames are stretching to breaking." Oastler's lurid charges have had a sweeping influence on the per ceptions of later writers.

But support for these claimscomes mainly from the 1832ReportoftheSelectCommitteeon the Bill for theRegulationofFactories,recounting testimo ny that we now recognize to be skewed in favor of the prosecution. The Committee, led by M. T. Sadler, a pal of Oastler's, was originally supposed to hear evidence from both critics and supporters of the British factory system. But instead, only antagonistic witnesses-carefully coached by Oastler-were allowed to be heard, and their hor ror stories remain "the basic indictment of child labor in early industrial Britain." In a later inquiry, held in May 1833, factory overseer John Redmen offered more favorable testimony. He recognized instances of mistreat ment, but contended that "generally they are as well treated in mills as anywhere else. Those par ents who look after their children now, and place them now with masters who treat them well, will manage them well when they are turned out of the mills at six o'clock: those parents who now place their children, for the sake of higher wages, with spinners who illtreat them, rather than with neigh bors or friends, will, I suppose, treat them in the same way as they do now, that is, neglect them."

This kind of testimony has exerted considerably less influence among historians, perhaps because, as Hayek argues, political beliefs have indeed shaped historical ones. There is no evidence that parents typically sent their children to work out of arbitrary greed or negligence; rather it was a matter of survival. In this connection Nardinelli cites the work of David Vincent, whose study of working-classautobiogra phies concluded that their authors "believed that their parents made them labor because they could not afford to do otherwise, and that as children they were simply trapped in the poverty of the family and the class into which they had been born." There is evidence that the increased pro ductivity and opportunities of the factory system made it possible for more children and parents to survive than would have in a more primitive econ omy. Furthermore, despite long hours by today's standards, children working in the factories were usually assigned peripheral and relatively easy tasks. It could be a much tougher slog out in the country,where the hours were certainly no shorter.

Although he is sound and scholarly on most points, the author plunges into muddy waters when he tries to prove something about exploita tion with statistics. He notes that for many critics, if a child has to work at all he is being exploited, whether or not his earnings mean the difference between life and death. Their assertion implies that how children were actually treated in particU lar cases is irrelevant. But his own "neoclassical" definition is no improvement: "According to the neoclassical def inition' economic exploitation exists when the val ue of the worker's marginal product (that is, what the worker adds to the revenues of the firm) exceeds the wage rate." Nardinelli himself con cedes that measuring the marginal productivity of child labor is a ,dubious chore, but his premise is wrong in any case. Wage rates on the market are determined competitively. Of course they are relatedto the marginal product of the labor; that's whya CEO tends to be paid more than a clerk. But whether "exploitation" exists has to do with behavior, not with meeting the requirements of some academic formula that presupposes the evil of "excessive" capitalist profit. (Especially since the values can be plugged into the equation only afterwages have been paid and profits have been earned-with the profits coming later, if at all.) When the text strays from common-sense eco nomics it can be annoying and wrongheaded, but there are only 10 or 12 pages here that' are com pletely useless.

The only other problem, for the general reader, is the sheer inclusivenessof the argument. Because Nardinelli has apparently absorbed all the extant literature on the subject of child labor in the Indus trial Revolution, he sometimes deals with arcana that could be of interest only to fellow academics. But, on the other hand, he covers many areas about which solid information is urgently needed. He shows that anecdotes by themselves reveal lit tie without an understanding of which direction the trends are going, and what the historical con text is; and he unveils that context. Despite its rather dry tone, Child Labor and the Industrial Revolutionis a clear and important contribution to setting capitalism's historical record straight. D David M. Brown, a free-lancewriter, is also the managing editorof the LaissezFaire Books catalog,and the publisher ofa monthlynewsletteron cultureandcurrentaffairs.

THE CRISISIN DRUG PROIDBITION edited by David Boaz Cato Institute, 224 Second Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003 • 1990. 148 pages· $8.00paper Reviewedby WilliamH. Peterson Prohibitionis an awfulflop. We like it. It can'tstop whatit's meantto stop. We like it. It's lefta trailofgraftand slime, It don'tprohibit wortha dime, It'sfilled our land with viceand crime. Nevertheless,we'refor it. So wrote Franklin ~ Adams (as recalled by con tributor James Ostrowski in this volume) kidding the 1931 report of the Wickersham Commission, a blue-ribbon panel of eminent Americans appoint ed by President Hoover. Hoover and the nation were perplexed by the wholesale defiance of law, the mushrooming of speakeasies, the rise of the Mafia, the wave of organized crime that swept over America in the 1920s. Amazingly, the Wickersham Commission con cluded that, although "there is as yet no adequate observance or enforcement" of Prohibition or the 18th Amendment, the Government should "sub stantially" increase appropriations and crack down harder on the lawbreakers. Nonetheless, proponents of legalization won the struggle: in BOOKS 279 1933, just two years later, the 18th Amendment was repealed and Prohibition was dead.

Ostrowski, the head of Citizens Against [Drug] Prohibition, is right to review the story of [alcohol] Prohibition and point up the wisdom of Santayana that those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it. For today President Bush, like the Wickersham Commission of yesteryear, escalates the War on Drugs, seeking appropriations of $11.7 billion in Federal anti-drug funding for fiscal1992, an increase of 11 percent over 1991. James Ostrowski is one of 28 leading critics of drug prohibition gathered in this timely and most important Cato study. They cover the opinion spectrum from left to right, from Anthony Lewis, Richard Cohen, and Hodding Carter III to Charles Murray, Milton Friedman, and William F. Buckley Jr. They include the editors of The Economist, Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, New York State Senator Joseph Galiber, Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell, and Prince ton University Professor Ethan Nadelmann.

The critics see the government's intervention of prohibiting drugs bringing on the Law of Unin tended Consequences with a vengeance: a sharp increase in street crime, the spread of AIDS (through exchanging contaminated needles), the swelling of our prisons with drug offenders, chil dren lured into drug dealing, destruction of inner city'communities, a further decline in respect for the law,the corruption of law enforcement officials from Latin America to the ghettos of Harlem and Watts, Chicago and Washington, D.C. To be sure, legalization wouldn't solve the drug problem entirely. But, notes editor and Cato's executive vice president David Boaz in his intro duction, legal drugs are getting weaker-low-tar cigarettes, nonalcoholic beer, wine coolers. He points out that 41 million Americans have quit smoking, and sales of spirits are off. Too, as Amer icans become more health conscious, they are turning away from drugs. Boaz feels drug educa tion would do more to encourage the trend if it were separated from drug enforcement.

Professor Nadelmann argues there would be no dramatic increases in drug use after legalization. He cites evidence from the Netheriands, the American states that have already decriminalized marijuana, Asian countries when drugs were legal, and 19thcentury America-where all drugs were legal.

280 THE FREEMAN • JULY 1991 How would legalization be implemented? Back to editor Boaz. He suggests the nation might apply "the alcohol model." Thus marijua na, cocaine, and heroin would be sold only in spe cially licensed stores, perhaps in liquor stores, perhaps in a new kind of drugstore. Warning labels would be posted in the stores and on the packages. It would be illegal to sell drugs to minors. It would be illegal to advertise drugs on television "and possibly even in print." It would be illegal to drive under the influence of drugs, and there would·be added penalties for commit ting other crimes under their influence, as is the case with alcohol. Such concessions from well-known libertarian Boaz indicate how much the War on Drugs has backfired, how much America needs to debate here and now the question: "Does Prohibition Create More Problems Than It Solves?" D Dr. Peterson, an adjunct scholar with The Heritage Founda tion, holds the Lundy Chair of Business Philosophy at Campbell University, Buies Creek, North Carolina.

Ludwig von Mises LIBERALISM: IN THE CLASSICAL TRADITION LIBERALISM: In The Classical Tradition by Ludwig von Mises is a book-length essay that sums up the ideas and principles of classical liberalism as they apply to the twen tieth century. First published in Germany in 1927, it was published in the United States under the title The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth in 1962 and reissued in the mid-seventies by The Institute for Humane Studies. It was republished by The Foundation for Economic Education in association with the Cobden Press in 1985, and has recently been reprinted. 230 pages • $12.95 paperback Order from: The Foundation for Economic Education 30·South Broadway Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533 THEFREE IDEAS ON LIBERTY 284 Beating the System: Soviet Entrepreneurs Work on the Wild Side SheilaMelvin Enterprisingyoungrisk-takersare carvingnichesfor themselvesin the wreckage of the Sovieteconomy.