Book Reviews

Leonard Read's advice to the rebellious student would he to start a rebellion within one's self against the waste of opportunity. He is a good advocate of his own cause, for he practices what he 1969 THE COMING ARISTOCRACY 377 preaches. Moreover, he doesn't of f end as a preacher by trying to bulldoze. He depends on lucidity and logic on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Forums for Libertarians I have known Leonard Read for more than twenty-five years, and have watched him work at the task of perfecting his own understand ing of what he calls the freedom philosophy. In moments of pessi mism I have doubted that any Readean band of true aristocrat's can save the world. With Mao Tse-tung extolling the virtues of power as it comes from the barrel of a gun, with IVloscow clobbering the Czechs for tentatively suggest ing some minor experiments with a free market, and with our own students embracing nihilism and anarchy, who is going to be left alone to try to rise above personal mediocrity?

But then I think of Leonard Read's contributions to the rise of the Mont Pelerin Society, for example. The Mont Pelerin mem bers who have gathered once a year to try to make true correla tions in the Read sense are no longer regarded as a tiny sect with no influence on a world that is bound willy nilly for collectivism. Last September Warren Nutter was simply a student of the fail ure of communist economies to become more than inefficient in industrial-military complexes. He appeared at the Mont Pelerin con ference in Scotland to read a paper on the turmoil in East Europe. Today he is in the Pentagon, acting as Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird's adviser on the Soviet economic potential. Another Mont Pelerin member, Martin An derson, is in the White House, doing research that can be trusted to keep President Nixon from re lying too heavily on state inter vention in economic matters. We have been developing freedom phi losophy thinkers to counterbalance the popular John Kenneth Gal braiths and Arthur Schlesingers, and Mr. Read's quiet work in pro viding forums and focus for the libertarians has had much to do with the change.

Obstacles to Surmount Life is not easy for anybody who wants to perfect his under standing of the freedom philoso phy. For, as Mr. Read points out, if we were to try to divorce our selves from every last activity tainted with socialism, we couldn't exist. We couldn't ride on a train (rates set in accordance with the rules of the Interstate Commerce Commission) ; we couldn't use the airways (they are subsidized); we couldn't eat bread (the govern ment controls wheat plantings); 378 THE FREEMAN June we couldn't wear cotton clothes (cotton price supports). To live the freedom philosophy to perfec tion would be suicidal. But to take life, even one's own, is contrary to the higher law. So Leonard Read supports compro mise, but only to the extent that it is absolutely necessary to function in the world. He finds Medicare, for example, to be less tolerable than using the socialized mails, and can forswear accepting its help with less difficulty. He is more of a saint in this than I am: the government has stolen so much from me in a lifetime of taking my taxes to pay for social ism that I intend to get anything out of it that I can as partial retri bution. If Medicare can pay me for an expensive operation, I will consider it as a restitution of something that should have been left to me in the first place.

Leonard Read is not surprised to see our so-called higher educa tion in trouble. Working against the philosophy of the Founding Fathers, we set up our primary schooling in the early nineteenth century on a compulsory basis. This, in turn, necessitated a second compulsion: Parents must be taxed to pay the school bill. With the government supplying the schools, it necessarily dictated the curriculum. As long as the compulsions were limited to the early grades, where the teaching of skills in reading and writing and arithmetic took up the teachers' time and pre vented them from going off into realms of philosophy, the danger of indoctrinating the students in favor of socialism was not marked. But when the Federal government began its programs of aid to higher education, we were really in for trouble. College students are all mixed up about the means and ends of higher education. They have come to take it as a right which the state is called upon to provide without charge.

But when the state pours in money to support scientific experiment that might help the Pentagon im prove its military efficiency, the students resent it. They have been so badly educated in logic that they can't see that the government has a right to get something for its money. In accepting state aid for higher education, the student has, in effect, sold himself to the state whose power he dislikes. Other Signs of Light If the young haven't yet caught up with Leonard Read, they are bound to do so as they fight to escape from a bureaucratized world. The "freedom philosophy" makes inroads in the strangest places. Just the other day Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, 1969 THE COMING ARISTOCRACY 379 of all people, condemned the bu reaucrats of the Tennessee Valley Authority for proposing yet an other big dam. Justice Douglas waxed wroth because the proj ect would destroy some of the best trout fishing in America. In other words, the Justice had finally tumbled to the fact that the free dom philosophy and conservation are not mutually exclusive causes.