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dueing something the entrepreneur also creates the wherewithal for
its purchase; he is the most truly giving figure in the world. The
rhapsodic invitation to cherish and love the rich with which this
claim is coupled will doubtless stick in some throats, but it is, I fear,
wholly sincere. What will bring this process to its knees, though, is a
policy by governments of undermining the family life that sustains
both ordinary work and entrepreneurial vigor and a taxation system
that makes it pointless to get out and innovate. Viewed in this light,
capital gains taxes that look like a way of taxing "unearned" bene–
fits are worse than income taxes precisely because they penalize the
man who hopes to become rich by building up his own firm rather
than working for others; and welfare benefits that look as if they are
most effective when they are paid directly to mothers are hopeless
because they deprive lower-class men of an incentive to work and
deprive women of an incentive to hold a family together.
The question, obviously, is whether the diagnosis is plausible,
and, if so, whether any remedies would work. One difficulty with
Gilder's own account is that it wobbles between pointing out the tre–
mendous triumphs of American capitalism and pointing out the
appallingly low savings ratio, low investment ratio, low growth rate,
and so on of the economy as a whole, so it's never quite clear
whether the system is in a terrible mess or not. The difficulty with
knowing how plausible his diagnosis is is largely a comparative
problem: successful economies elsewhere seem to adjust to levels of
taxation that are different from those he likes; families elsewhere
seem less vulnerable to the niceties of welfare systems. He himself
seems to think that so much is a matter of morale and of. faith that
it's not dear whether he'd be willing to be tied down to a detailed
causal account of just how high taxes and incompetent welfare
administration do the damage he suggests.
ALAN RYAN
THE NONCONFORMIST
FISH. By Monroe Engel.
Atheneum. $12.95.
On the jacket of Monroe Engel's
Fish,
Frank Kermode
says that the novel is "almost
too
well written, giving so much
