Corporate Philanthropy

Your editorial attacks the Capital Research Center for its study of corporate contributions to groups which seek to undermine the system of free enterprise that has given America peace, prosperity and freedom. As the author of the preface to that book, I feel compelled to respond.

Your editorial attacks this book as an “exercise of the radical right,” of which I am presumably a representative. I don’t know what you mean by “radical” in this context. My views on the role of corporations in society and on many other subjects are well known, and mainstream enough that my book, “A Time for Truth,” spent the better part of a year on the best-seller lists. Can a defense of individual liberty and our free enterprise system be called extreme? I don’t think so, and I doubt the people who read my book--or indeed most other Americans--consider my views very radical.

I believe that many business leaders are quite clearly feeding the mouth that bites them. They are financing advocacy groups which see free enterprise as the enemy of the people, which believe that government can make decisions better than individuals, and which think that “group rights” count for more than the rights of the individual.

I have recommended for years that corporations wishing to promote peace, a clean environment and sound race relations, for instance, steer their gifts to organizations whose work in these fields is consistent with both the aspirations of our people and the survival of our free enterprise system. To declaim such views as representative of the “radical right” simply shows the ease and abandon with which your editorial writers label people whose views they happen to dislike.

WILLIAM E. SIMON

Morristown, N.J.