THE CORPORATE PRINCES

Goldman's letter can now be used by the antinukes to claim that the idea of superior health and safety of nuclear power is ridiculed even by the nuclear industry. It is interesting to speculate what makes a vice-president of a large nuclear corporation write such an erroneous and self-damaging letter.

Incompetence? Hardly. NUS is a major corporation with sub-divisions all over the US and an international division as well. You don't make it to V.P. of such a large organization merely by infighting or sheer luck.

The usual cover-up to avoid offending coal-burning utilities?

No: Goldman's letter admits "the bottom line validity of Prof. Beckmann's comparison of coal and nuclear on public health."

So what's there left as an explanation? Only that NUS, like most other big corporations, is manned by what in the editorial I have called the corporate princes of servility, conformity and benightedness. Goldman is probably a very typical V.P. of a very typical big corporation. Far from realizing (let alone defending) the morality of capitalism, the typical big corporation goes out of its way to have a special "affirmative action" department and special programs to demonstrate its "social responsibility." Its of-ficers have never heard of Mises, Hayek or Bastiat; only of Nader, Lovins and Brokaw, whom they seek to appease rather than refute. Self-interest and property rights are diluted away in this oversized collective: a big corporation is a small government.

[Conversely, Reagan's government, now that all who aimed for more than their image on the evening news have been hounded out, has acquired the mentality of a big corporation. On Decem-ber 3, Treasury Secretary Baker sent a letter to Rep. Rostenowski making it clear that he is opposed to the takeover of Shoreham by Commissar Cuomo. Because it is totalitarian and unconstitu-tional for a state government to expropriate a private company?

Because a power shortage may threaten Long Island? Because the burning of oil involves greater hazards to health and safety than Shoreham? No: because the financing of the expropriation by tax-free bonds would involve a substantial drain on federal revenues.]

Goldman wrote the letter, I speculate, because PR etiquette re-quires that a corporate prince disassociate himself from the odium of any usurper of conformity in his realm; failure to do so would reflect badly on his corporation's servility to media-molded perceptions.

I may of course be wrong in the individual case of Goldman; but you can find tens of such assumed Goldmans in almost any big corporation. In this connection I recommend a very interest-ing article containing the Pinto revelations (see editorial):

"Mugged by Reality" by P.H. Weaver in the March Reason. First I should warn you that the author's logic is no less than feeble-minded. Disappointed with corporate management, he has grown sympathetic to the New Left, to the revisionist historians and to Ralph Nader. Should he turn against drug abuse, he will pre-sumably become a Shiite Muslim.