Winter 2024

Michael Dukakis has been a liberal, a champion of fiscal responsibility and in his latest phase an enthusiastic practitioner of industrial policy, translated into cooperation between state government and corporate enterprise on terms exceedingly generous to the latter. His running …

Imbued with a salutary populist distrust of bankers, Americans only grudgingly and belatedly accepted the public need for a central bank analogous to the Bank of England and similar institutions in Western Europe. Major bank failures early in this century …

I was born in 1920 in the old Women’s Hospital of St. Luke’s at 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Two-thirds of a wretched century later, I reside one block west and five blocks north on Broadway and 115th Street, overlooking …

The drive for “privatization” first began to gain momentum, like such key elements of the Reagan agenda as deregulation and acceleration of weapons procurement (the infamous MX was a Carter favorite), in Jimmy’s  administration. Its advocates claim that privatization not …

Walk north on a balmy evening from Lincoln Center in Manhattan along Columbus Avenue for fifteen or twenty blocks and treat yourself to a vision of youth ala mode. No costume is outré when clothes are expected to make statements …

For individuals of a certain age and experience, Elizabeth Durbin’s sympathetic but clear-headed exploration of the British Labour party’s attempt in the 1930s to define a program at once intellectually coherent and politically appealing recalls their own groping for a …

Analogies both tempt and mislead. Still, it is hard to avoid recalling the merry 1920s, the last occasion when international and domestic credit stimulated pundits to project endless prosperity premised upon ever-rising stock prices. Roger Babson saluted Hoover’s victory in …

At the very beginning of this meticulous essay in intellectual history, Gertrude Himmelfarb employs Samuel Johnson and R. H. Tawney to make a point of importance, that attitudes toward the poor in England have changed less in the last two …

Unemployment averaged 7.1 percent in 1977, declined in the next two years to 6.1 and 5.8 percent, and jumped upward again in 1980 to 1977’s 7.1. For January 1981, the month the Carter administration departed, the statisticians registered a figure …

When queried by the New York Times‘ John Oakes, Milovan Djilas, age 71, readily conceded that “Socialism is not so clear to me today as when I was young.” It is an appealing feature of the Yugoslav version of communism …

I know George Gilder as a likable chap, prey to surges of emotion that last long enough to translate themselves into entire books. In the wake of the 1964 Goldwater debacle, Gilder, then in his Ripon Society phase, wrote with …

Supply-side economics, the official Reagan alternative to the scorned Keynesian prescription, amounts to a gamble on the proposition that lower taxes will stimulate enough new investment and effort to flood supermarkets and showrooms with cheap merchandise of steadily improving quality. …

We asked Dissent editors whom they, as individuals, were going to vote for. Some threw up their hands, some groaned, some wrote a few words. Here is a representative sample of those who wrote their personal opinions — Eds. Irving …

Howard Jarvis stumps the country preaching salvation through lower taxes. One of the country’s best congressmen, Don Fraser, loses to a millionaire convert to the same gospel, and Vice President Mondale travels to his home state to urge his fellow …