If Men Were Free to Try; J.C. Sparks

4. To convey instantly the visual replica of an action, such as a presidential inauguration, to men and women in their living rooms all over America. 5. To develop a medical preventive against death from pneumonia. [63 ] 6. To transport physically a person from Los Angeles to New York in less than four hours. 7. To build a horseless carriage of the qualities and capabilities described in the 1954 advertising folder of any automobile manufacturer. Without much doubt you would have selected the first problem as the one easiest of.solution. In fact, the other problems would have seemed fantastic and quite likely would have been rejected as the figments of someone's wild imagination. Now, 54 years later, let us see which of these problems has been solved. Has the easiest problem been solved? No. Have the seemingly fantastic problems been solved? Yes, and we hardly give them a second thought.

It is not accidental that solutions have been found wherever the atmosphere of freedom and private owner ship has prevailed wherein men could tryout their ideas and succeed or fail on their own worthiness. Nor is it accidental that the coercive force of government-when hooked up to a creative :field such as transportation-has been slow, plodding, and unimaginative in maintaining and replacing its facilities. Does it not seem odd that a privately-owned auto mobile company found it expedient to sponsor a national contest with tremendous prizes and to conduct its own search in order to correct the faults of the publicly-owned and inadequate highway system? The highway dilemma has become more and more acute until someone other than the public owner seeks an answer. If the points of [64 ] ownership had been reversed in 1900-that is, motorcar development in the hands of the government, and high ways left to private individuals-we would today likely be participating in a contest sponsored by the privately owned highway companies to suggest how to improve the government's horseless carriage so that it would keep pace with the fine and more-than-adequate highways.

How could roads be built and operated privately? I do not know. This is a subject to which none of us directs his creative attention. We never do think creatively on any activity pre-empted by government. It is not until an activity has been freed from monopoly that creative thought comes into play. But go back to 1900. Could any of us then have told how to solve the six problems to which solutions have been found? Suppose, for instance, that someone could at that time have described the looks and performance of a 1954 automobile. Could any of us have told him how to make it? No, no more than we can describe how privately to build and operate highways today. What accounts, then, for the 1954 automobile and other C'fantastic" accomplishments? Government did not pre empt these activities! Instead, these have been left to the area of free, uninhibited, creative thinking. Millions of man-hours of technically skilled, inventive thought have been at work. And the end is not yet. Nor will there be an end if the inhibitory influence of government is con fined to its proper functions of protecting equally the life, liberty, and property of all citizens; if men are free to try their ideas in a competitive ~nd voluntary market.

[65 ] PROSPERITY BY PROCREATION tg :J.. A. JJarper ECONOMICS and obstetrics must have engaged in adultery to beget the new theory of baby prosperity. A quarter of a century ago, when we were being plagued with imagined surpluses, many economists were concerned with what they called the nationl's propensity to consume. Now this is being replaced with concern over the nationl's propensity to procreate, and belief in baby prosperity is sweeping the land through publications ranging all the way from light reading for the layman's Sunday afternoon to technical business forecasts. Here are a few samples: A popular magazine, having a thousand readers to the FREEMANl'S one, recently pub lished an article entitled "Our New Weapon Against Depression: The Baby Boom.l" A bankersl' bulletin heaped more dirt on Malthus' bones by asserting: "It's hard to see much depression coming up if the present population is to increase two and two-thirds millions yearly through 1960." A renowned Harvard economist, speaking of an "extraordinary bright" prospect for the economy, says: "In part, these bright prospects are the result of the rapid rate at which population has been increasing."