An Ideal America; L.E. Read

· .. to choose his own trade and to apply for any fob he wants-and to quit his fob if he doesn't like it or if he.gets a better offer. · . . to go into business for himself, be his own boss, and set his own hours of work-even if its only three hours a week. · .. to use his honestly acquired property or savings in his own way-spend it foolishly,investit wisely, or even give it away. ••. to offer his services .. or products for sale on his own terms, even if he loses money on the deal. [55 ] o 0 • to buy or not to buy any service or product offered for sale, even if the refusal displeases the seller. o ••to disagree with· any other person, even when the rnajority is on the side of the other person. o ••to study and learn whatever strikes his fancy, as long as it seems to him worth the cost and effort of studying and learning it. 0 ••to do as he pleases in general, as long as he doesn;'t infringe the equal right and opportunity of every other person to do as he pleases.

The above, in a nutshell, is the way of life which the libertarian philosophy commends. It means no special privilege from government for anyone. It is the way of individual liberty, of the free market, of private property, of government limited to securing these rights equally for all. [56 ] THE FORGOTTEN MAN A NATION begins to decline when it neglects its own clas sics. But no trend is necessarily permanent, and classics can come back. Take the case of William Graham Sum ner's What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, for exam ple.Published originally in 1883, this little classic of individualism was long unavailable to the general reader. But in the last few years, it has been made available by several different organizations. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other has had the strangest of histories. It was written at a time when the fallacies of welfare state thinking were just beginning to take hold in America. A professor of economics at Yale in the early eighties, Sumner sensed the oncoming so..