2 Responses to “Support Your Local “Socialist””

1. David Gordon, on October 5th, 2008 at 7:44 pm Said:

   I posted the following comment to the Chronicles website and it is now awaiting moderation.
   I regret that my article has caused any distress, but one key phrase in your comments shows that you take me to be saying more more than I had in mind. You attribute to me the view that Berry’s work repays careful study “on those rare occasions” when he sticks to what he knows. The quoted phrase is something you have added and is not my opinion at all. My objections to Berry’s views are entirely confined to those passages in his work where he advocates certain types of economic intervention by the state, e.g., parity pricing and those where he makes various claims about the way a capitalist economy works. I don’t think that these passages are central to Berry’s thought but they were the ones about which I was writing.

   More specifically, I do not claim that Berry’s is wrong to think that community dissolution and loss of connection with the land are problems. That is an issue I don’t address: His views seem to be thoughtful, but I don’t know enough about agriculture to comment on them and it wasn’t my purpose to do so. Berry is in my view certainly right to object if the government interferes with efforts by small farmers to survive; my concern, again, was only with proposals to enlist the state to intervene in their behalf.

   When I said that farmers haven’t been expelled by force, I of course wasn’t referring to the government’s removing farmers to build the TVA. I meant only that if farmers are producing for a market, then they must secure enough customers to keep them in business. If they cannot do so, and have to go into some other line of work, they haven’t in my view been expelled by force.

   My complaint about Berry is that he makes claims about economics, e.g., that a free market tends toward monopoly, about which there is a large literature that he doesn’t seem to know. He no doubt has practical business experience but, if he wishes to criticize economics , he needs to know the theory also..

   I certainly don’t regard Berry as a communist and my title wasn’t intended to liken him to Khrushchev. My—no doubt bad—pun was rather directed against an attitude in many of his followers, in which his every pronouncement is taken with the utmost seriousness. We must remember, we are told, that he is a “world class” novelist, etc. Well, Tolstoy was also a world class novelist who didn’t know much about economics.

   I do think that my remarks about his being a tobacco farmer were hitting below the belt and I withdraw them.

2. Christopher B. Hayes, on October 10th, 2008 at 12:39 am Said:

   FYI - I did take the title as painting Berry a Socialist. As for his support of some governmental interventions, I can’t place if I read it from him or had it quoted to me by a listener, but I’ve got it in my head that he holds such views in the same way he refers to traveling by automobile - there are costs involved in such things that he’d rather not pay, but to function within the status quo, when he absolutely has to get from A to C he’ll consider going through B if it lies on the only road that goes there.

   Sadly, most people won’t know about Mr. Berry until he’s passed away, and a bewildered country looks for smart commentary on what to do with a failing empire.

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