Book Reviews

Communism is always being saved by retreats which deny its own premise. Staying close to home, Leonard Read applies this insight to our own variety of col lectivism. His Accent on the Right (Foundation for Economic Edu cation, $2 cloth, $1.25 paper) should be a convincing answer to the many Fabian Radeks among us who attribute the economic strength of the United States to government interventions, which is equivalent to saying that the brake is what makes the automo bile move. To the Fabian Radeks, Leonard Read says, in effect: "There must be something to this voluntarism, for we're still much more alive than they are in Moscow and Pe king." True, we are always doing violence to the rule that affluence derives from liberty. At one point in his book Mr. Read lists some of the prohibitions on our freedom of choice. We pay farmers for not growing peanuts and cotton. We support socialist governments, in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. We take tax money from the people in or der to put a man on the moon. We subsidize below-cost pricing in lots of things, and pay for the subsi dies by funny-money shenanigans that inflate the prices of every thing else. We "renew" slum areas, driving the poor people out to cre510 THE FREEMAN August ate new slums on the other side of town. We keep businesses from hiring apprentices and from put ting teenagers to work by our in sistence on a minimum wage law.

We refuse to let private enterprise deliver first-class mail. We even prevent people from going out of business if they happen to be hav ing trouble with union labor. first, Identify the Problem Mr. Read is unflinchingly honest when it comes to recognizing the hobble's on our freedom of choice. But he is not one for maintaining a defeatist posture. "Find the wrong," he says, "and there's the right" - meaning, of course, that the identification of sin always suggests its opposite in something better. Despite "profuse expendi ture, heavy taxation, absurd com mercial restrictions, corrupt tri bunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inun dations" - the quotation is· from Lord Macaulay, who wrote in 1839 - we do not seem to be "able to destroy capital so fast as the ex ertions of private citizens have been able to create it." Or, as Leonard Read adds, quoting some Brazilian entrepreneurs, "We get things done while the politicians sleep."

Our inventiveness and ability to specialize have, ever since the time of Adam Smith, always managed to race far ahe'ad of the restraints on willing exchange. Regress has not been able to keep pace with progress. So Leonard Read con tinues to count his blessings. He is, as Ayn Rand would probably say disapprovingly, something of a mystic. But only to the extent that he sees Creation going on around him as the world changes and mu tations occur. Mr. Read likes the free market, in goods, services, the exchange of ideas, ideals, knowl edge, wisdom, information, faiths, doctrinal concepts, discoveries, in ventions, and intuit~ons - because it is in harmony with "Creation: Capital C." Competition, in short, is in the grain of things. Government-Induced Poverty Leonard Read doesn't listen much to politicians, for he consid ers it a delusion to expect that gov ernment can end poverty. Govern ment has nothing to hand out ex cept what it garnishees from tax payers. Obviously, says Mr. Read, this subtracts from private owner ship and is a dead-end road. Sav ings are drained from those who have, which is not conducive to the capital formation on which production - and even taxation rests.

The alleviation of poverty, as Mr. Read says, is a· by-product of private ownership and the free market. Conversely, it should be 1968 ACCENT ON THE RIGHT 511 stated that poverty is a by-product of government intervention. The migration of the Negro poor who have been pouring into the de serted inner core areas of our cities is a government-created phe nomenon. It all began in the nine teen thirties, with the best inten tions in the world. The big think ers of the day decided that too much cotton was being raised. So we had politically decreed acreage reduction, plus subsidies to owners for the land that was taken out of use for the "soil bank" and such. The bigger farmers who got most of the subsidy money poured some of it into fertilizers which en abled them to grow more cotton on less land. And, with the rest of the subsidy money, they went in for the new planting and har vesting equipment that enables them to dispense with the Negro cotton chopper.

No doubt the mechanization of farming would have conle anyway. But the process was accelerated by the politicians. And the Negro poor, displaced all at once,have not had the time or the opportun ity to make an orderly transition to new ways of life. Technological Impact We see something similar hap pening in California. To get rid of Mexican labor, the government has put hobbles on the so-called braceros who used to cross the border from Sonora, Chihuahua, and Lower California to pick tomatoes. The idea was to make room for Americans as field hands on the California ranches. But the Ameri cans, for one reason or another, failed to come out from the cities to take the jobs. Unable to get their tomatoes picked, the Cali fornia farmers put in a hurry call to the inventors and the agricul tural cross-breeders. Within an amazingly short time the cross breeders had perfected a tomato plant which bears fruit that ripens all at the same time. And the in ventors came up with a machine to pick the fruit of the new plant.

Result of the whole process: The poor Mexicans have been deprived of the opportunity to get capital insufficient amounts to buy land of their own below the border. And the Americans who were ex pected to take the place of the Mexicans in the fields are still liv ing on relief in the skid rows of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other West Coast cities. Mr. Read, who believes in the necessity of mobility, would have a hard time explaining our policy to the Mexican government, which has been surprisingly silent on the subject of the hobbles we have placed on bracero labor. If I were the President of Mexico, I would be hopping mad. Not only do we 512 THE FREEMAN August create poverty by government in terventions at home, we also ex port poverty to our neighbors. Luckily for Mexico, she can ab sorb the blow. The reason: The Mexican middle classes have been creating capital faster than the politicians, many of whom still pay lip service to the "revolution,"

have been able to drain it"away by taxation. The Mexicans might echo Mr. Read's Brazilian friends: "We get things done while the politi cians sleep." + History of Intervention THE HISTORY of government limitation of price seems to teach one clear lesson: that in attempting to ease the burdens of the people in a time of high prices by artificially setting a limit to them, the people are not relieved but only exchange one set of ills for another which is greater. Among these ills are (1) the with. holding of goods from the market, because consumers being in the majority, price fixing is usually in their interest; (2) the dividing of the community into two hostile camps, one only of which considers that the government acts in its interest; (3) the practical difficulties of enforcing such limitation in prices which in the very nature of the case requires the cooperation of both producer and consumer to make it effective ....

From an address by MARY G. LACY, Librarian of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (U. S. Department of Agriculture), delivered before the Agricultural History Society on March 16, 1922.