What Charlie Peters can learn from Henry Kravis.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg
• Position: Washington Monthly and its position on business enterprises

Gregg Easterbrook, an editor of The Washington Monthly from 1980 to 1982, is a contributing editor o >;f Newsweek.

Intellectual magazines like this are never exactly what you might call gold mines. Opinions, like farm products, are being overproduced-that's why the markets for both are depressed. But just because The Washington Monthly does not itself make money is no reason for the magazine to have such confabulated opinions about enterprises that do. Advocacy of the peacetime draft already having been taken (see Michael Kinsley, page 26), I choose economic doubletalk as my objection to the magazine's >;first 20 years.

* In the 1960s and 1970s the Monthly was unique among liberal intellectual publications in extolling the need for business growth and calling business an honorable profession. That's much to its credit. But for all the homage to the businessman the Monthly has published, the magazine blows a gasket whenever any corporation (except perhaps locally owned passenger train ventures in West Virginia) or individual (except perhaps the first-generation immigrant inventors of low-cost military >;hardware) actually clears a profit.

Isn't profit the organizing discipline of a market economy? Surely profit should not be the only goal. But it has to be one of the chief goals if all the many other benefits of market economics-prosperity, jobs, material security, a mechanism for the lower class to move up-are to be realized. Ivan Boesky was wrong to say that the word "greed" is good. But there surely is nothing wrong with the phrase "maximize profit." Occasionally companies make big profits via fra >;ud, monopoly, or other chicanery. Usually they make big profits because they deserve to-the market is pretty effective in distributing that reward. So Monthly, quit groaning about profit.

* What's so terrible about the service/yuppie/paper economy? The Monthly, often laments that the backbreaking, dangerous, soul-draining jobs in heavy industrial production are being replaced by highly paid white-collar desk jobs......???????? Sounds pretty good to me. Yes, it's true that those new whitecollar jobs re >;quiring higher education tend to shut out the traditional working class. But look how much the traditional working class has shrunk in the postwar years-because so many of its members or their children have moved up to the new, far larger white-collar class. I often stand on my head trying to figure out why this in itself is bad for America.

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