Word: wriston
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...wasn't there at the Camp David hair-down sessions, let alone when the Cabinet-level jobs were handed out, was America's premier banker, Walter Wriston. His absence was unsurprising if unfortunate because, along with being the most innovative of moneymen, the Citicorp chairman delivers outspoken opinions with a rapier tongue that belies his early career as a State Department diplomat. In a glass house 15 stories above Park Avenue, he sits at a circular desk (the better to gather aides around to chew over ideas) and, eyebrows arched and wisecracks flying, tosses out some sharp-edged...
Narrow, single-interest groups are preventing the compromises that are essential to democracy, Wriston says. Nobody, not even the President, is empowered to make a tradeoff, to decide that the nation will incur some risks and costs and unpleasantness to build the productive base and acquire the energy that is needed to head off unemployment and prevent the lights from going...
...solution, Wriston argues, would be to grant the President and a panel of four or five wise people the absolute authority to suspend all restrictions in order to permit the construction of five to ten huge energy projects. "By limiting the number of projects, we would limit damage to the environment. We have to be prepared to say, 'The steam shovel starts tomorrow morning, and the snail darter will go the way of all flesh, but the lights won't go out.-" If, on the other hand, the U.S. remains unwilling to compromise, it will be plagued...
Freedom is also being eroded, he contends, because Government guidelines are trying artificially to hold down wages and prices. Wriston has the intriguing idea that those prices and wages represent an essential form of economic speech, that money is a form of information. Thus, the Government is sore at business because it has been the bearer of bad tidings...
...large group of editors, Wriston has criticized the press because "it often remains silent, or sometimes greets with approval the steady infringement of any right that does not involve free speech. One of the great unreported stories of the past 30 years is the steady erosion of individual rights that is turning us into a different kind of country. If we put a floor under wages and a ceiling over prices, a free man cannot long stand erect. Someone has to make it clear that the collision course between Government price and wage controls and personal liberty is inevitable because...