Public Policy

The Littauer School of Public Administration, which bestrides Kirkland Street like a great Grecian temple, likes to conduct studies of public policy useful both in the classroom and practical government. Before the war, it used to issue, under the name Public Policy, some of the findings of its students and professors. Now there is another report, the first since 1940. Because it limits itself to but a few Littauer projects, and because some of the better pieces are only hazily connected with public administration, the book is more than a progress report.

The book contains articles on subsidies, and bureaucratic problems, comparative government, and civil rights. There is also an admirable book review, in which Carl Friedrich, professor of Government, effectively undermines the attempt by Professor Harold Lasswell of Yale to de-humanize public policy in order to make it a science.

The most interesting, and most disturbing portion of the subsidies section is Dale Hathaway's report on just how few farmers understand the basic economics of the Government's parity program. Almost all who don't understand it have an opinion on it anyway. They usually equate high parities with justice and universal goodness. Those who understand the economics best were least willing to accept controls on their production.

The contribution of Arthur A. Maass, associate professor of Government, points out how ill equipped is the Bureau of the Budget to trouble-shoot for the President in disputes between differing Presidential agencies. Maass illustrates his point with liberal examples from his own field of conservation and resources planning. From Maass' analysis it seems that the Budget Bureau under Truman set a precedent for two growing practices in Washington today: postponement of embarrassing decisions, and such a fear of making mistakes as to hamper suggestion of new ideas.

Associate professor Robert McCloskey's article on "The McCarran Act and the doctrine of Arbitrary Power" finds the author fighting for civil liberties in a thoroughly rational and often brilliant manner, against the doctrine that the Supreme Court should restrain itself from striking down some of the overly-broad anti-Communist measures in the McCarran Act. It is the same kind of battle fought by men like Justice Sutherland on behalf of another kind of liberty twenty years ago. The same principles are there: that individual liberty needs Court protection from legislative whim; that "a state does not possess a sovereign right to behave unreasonably in its relations with its subjects"; that arbitrary subversive legislation can easily be extended to permit the grossest kind of abuse.

The parallel with Sutherland's economic freedom shows that, in the end, the issue is one of values. McCloskey makes a convincing case for the traditional sanctity of civil rights. But if security--against real or imaginary dangers--is going to be a superior value to the people, the history of the Court shows that the people will have their way. The Courts cannot hold out long as the only protectors of civil liberties--although, as McCloskey points out, the present Court does not even seem to be trying.

This importance of values in public policy is stressed by Friedrich in his criticism of Lasswell, whom he thinks regards values as "the useless babbling of metaphysicians." Whether Lasswell would really eliminate values in his drive to make policy a science, I do not know. But it is refreshing to turn from Lasswell's categorization of the "eight steps in decision-making" and other abstractions to a book like Public Policy, which attacks practical governmental problems, never forgetting that government must deal with people. The book illustrates the fundamental soundness of Littauer's approach to public administration.