As WFB frames the question in his opening statement, "We tend to date the modern welfare state to 1965, with the Great Society policies of President Lyndon Johnson. In constant dollars we have spent $5 trillion on welfare, yet the percentage of the American people technically below the poverty line is about the same. In identical constant dollars we fought the Second World War at a cost of $3 trillion. The haunting indictment of our experiences with the welfare state is that (a) more human welfare could be achieved without it, and (b) it has, in fact, helped to corrode the great aspirations of our country." Mr. Galbraith, taking up the baton of his father, John Kenneth, responds: "My friend Bill Buckley, who was once a conservative, tonight plays the role of the radical, the abolitionist, the William Lloyd Garrison of the welfare state. What would he abolish? Not poverty, not insecurity, not the fear effacing illness without the means to pay for doctors, not the penury of a penniless old age. No. He would abolish precisely those institutions that protect Americans from those evils ..." A splendid battle over our mixed economy and where it should be heading.