The Japs capture Rockefeller Center - column

National Review, Dec 8, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The Japs Capture Rockefeller Center With some excitement, the reporter from CNN called to ask if I would make a statement on the Japanese acquisition of Rockefeller Center. The tone of voice was such as would have been appropriate in response to a bulletin in 1945 that the Japanese had reoccupied Okinawa. The clear implication is that all good men & true are invited to experience a xenophobic rush, and perhaps pour a little powder into our muskets.

Granted the special significance of Rockefeller Center. (Mr. David Letterman opined that Ronald Reagan was in Japan peddling skyscrapers.) And you could detect, without being paranoid on the subject, just a trace of the attitude that says: What would you expect of the Rockefellers? For all their fancy talk about charity and all that stuff, they'd sell out the heart of America for a buck!

Well, my reactions are different. The Japanese have a very special feeling about real estate. Membership in a golf club in the vicinity of Tokyo is $1 million. Did you know that the value of real estate in Tokyo is greater than the entire value of the United States, including Willow Run and every McDonald's hamburger stand? That's what the books tell you, which tells you a lot about the usefulness of books, given that the GNP of the U.S. is about $4.3 trillion, and that of Japan a mere $1.6. But land is a non-fissiparous object, the insight that made Henry George so famous a century ago. He pointed out that labor could be multiplied almost infinitely: the birth rate is a volatile and indeed, up to a point, a regulatable commodity; and tools--capital--are as abundant as you wish them to be (you instruct the assembly line how many hammers to make). But land speculation is infinitely inviting because there is only so much land.

It is a matter of pride with many Americans, let's face it. The very idea that that center of journalistic and architectural modernity, Rockefeller Center, should belong--to another country. Yet, economically, there is no way one can construe it as a damaging exchange. The Rockefellers now have $846 million they can do something else with--drill for more oil, build more buildings, train more Rockettes, endow more universities. And we have repatriated a whole lot of dollars we spent buying Sonys and Toyotas.

There is only one way, in the last analysis, that we can confidently assert our economic superiority to other nations: and that is to outperform them. If the Japanese are outperforming us in manufacturing, one can't get any angrier than we'd get if a Japanese athlete beat an American athlete at tennis. We could redouble our efforts to encourage our young tennis players; even as we must redouble our efforts to make American automobiles more attractive. Such efforts are being made, and here and there are paying off, but the fact of it is that 30 per cent of American purchasers prefer foreign cars, and it is entirely un-American to tell them they can't buy at the stall they wish to patronize.

But American ingenuity has always been a valuable resource, and here is an idea for the Rockefellers and their $846 million.

Why not buy the Eiffel Tower? Granted, it would take a little fixing. But is there any reason why the French government can't be persuaded to privatize the Eiffel Tower? It has been losing money lately, we learn. The Rockefellers could discreetly get behind a movement to persuade the city of Paris to sell the Tower, just as a U.S. lobby finally succeeded in getting the city of Paris to authorize the building of that great big Hilton Hotel--and then, one day, we'll see the U.S. flag flying on top of the Eiffel Tower! And we can use that great regal facility to beam out our entertainment programs, including the floor show at Radio City, if we can make a deal with what Spiro Agnew used to call the Fat Japs.