America now has, whether we know it or not, an imperial Counsellor. He is a new kind of appointee of the Nixon Administration, a White House aide but with Cabinet rank, empowered to range all over the sphere of domestic policy. The astute Business Week calls him "The adviser who may be closest to Nixon": Dr. Arthur F. Burns. (Business Week, March 1).
Arthur Burns, a professor of economics at Columbia University, was the first Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers of the Eisenhower Administration. In that Administration Burns took his stand against the old-fashioned conservatives who wanted to roll back some of the New Deal aggrandizement of the federal apparatus. Though he had his technical quarrels with the Keynesians, Arthur Burns was instrumental in saving the day for the permanent Keynesian policy of expanding during recessions and cutting back during booms, and in saving the very existence of the Keynesian-interventionist Council of Economic Advisers itself. Now that old-fashioned conservatives have disappeared from the Republican party, no one talks in terms of abolishing the CEA or its mandate toward perpetual statism.
One of the curious aspects of Arthur Burns's rise to the pinnacle of power is that, among all economists, he was preeminent as the supposedly valuefree "scientistn, the technician, the man who eschews politics and ideology. And yet here he is, at the peak of his career, in the most political, the most ideological job of them all. But, oddly, Burns himself does not acknowledge this fact. He stiZZ thinks of himself as a simple scientific technician, at the service of society; he now says of his own role: "I'm not interested in power and influence, I'm interested in doing a job."
Thus, Burns has become almost the caricature of modern American social science: a group of disciplines swarming with supposedly value-free technicians, self -proclaimed n o n-ideological workmen simply - "doing a job" in service to their masters of the State apparatus: that is, to their military-political-industrial overlords. For their "scientific" and "valuefree" outlook turns out to be simply marginal wheeling and maneuvering within the broad frames of reference set by the American status quo and by their masters who enforce that status quo. Lack of ideology simply means lack of any ideology that differs at all fundamentally from the ruling system.
But it seems that these are days of crisis, and in times like these, even the most narrow of statistical craftsmen must become "philosophers", i. e., must give the show away. So Arthur Prank Burns. Burns himself allows to Busines s Week that economic problems nowadays are "trivial", in comparison to the larger domestic concerns o v e r which he now assumes his suzerainty. For, Burns opines, the really important problem is that "a great many of our citizens have lost faith in our basic institutions . . . They have lost faith in the processes of the government itself." "The President keeps scratching his head," Burns goes on, "and I as his adviser keep scratching my head--trying to know how to build new institutions . . . to restore faith ingovernment."
So that is what our new imperial Counsellor is up to. The aggressively "scientific" statistician has become our purported faith-healer, our evangelical Witch Doctor, who has come to restore our faith in that monster Idol; the State. Let us hereby resolve,. everyone, one and all, that Arthur is not going to get away with it.
But soft, we must guard our flank, for there is a host of so-called "libertarians" and free-market advocates who swear UD and down that Arthur Burns is God's gift to a free-market economy. Which says a great deal about the quality of their devotion to liberty, as compared to their evident devotion to Power.
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This article has been reprinted with the kind permission of Mises.org.