Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN THE STORY is told that whenever Professor Ludwig von Mises en countered a gleam of originality in a paper submitted by a student, he would urge that student to de velop the perception or insight in a systematic way. The sixty-six authors who have contributed to the two volumes of Toward Lib erty, a collection of essays offered by the Institute for Humane Stud ies ($10.00) in honor of Mises on the occasion of his ninetieth birth day, are all, in one sense or an other, grad ua tes of the Mises "praxeological" school, students of "human purposive activity" (the quotation is from Murray Roth bard). What we have here, then, is originality as sparked by the most fecund economic teacher of our times, a vast expansion of per ceptions that could not have been developed by one man alone. Yet, as surely has been the case with Mises' own seminar students, the sixty-six contributors to Toward Liberty would certainly admit that they stand on the shoulders of one man alone, which gives Mises something of the stature of an Atlas. (Need we add that his par ticular Atlas,. unlike the flawed figure in the title of Ayn Rand's novel, has never "shrugged?") The unifying thread in these two volumes is provided by a com mon devotion to the principle of peaceful voluntarism, which en ables "human action" to prolifer ate in thousands of fructifying ways that are strangled in the crib in any interventionist atmosphere.

Within the basic unity, however, the diversity of the sixty-six essays presents an insuperable ob stacle to the reviewer. Many of the essays concentrate on the dire effects of state intervention in the economic processes of relatively 125 126 THE FREEMAN February free societies. Other papers focus on the impossibility of calculation in societies that have gone most of the way to communism. A few au thors pay their specific disrespects to the late Lord Keynes. Since the contributors come from seventeen different countries, it is interest ing to observe what local condi tions have done to affect specific approaches to voluntarism. Then there are the essays which seem to depart from the Misesian line but which really do not when one considers that in the wider Mises ian market "all human values are offered for option," even the values that affect economics only by in direction. The richness of the books is evi dent in the multiplication of stray observations that defy current orthodoxies. Picking at random, we have Paul Poi rot's observa tion that the most polluted prop erties are those not clearly sub ject to private ownership - rivers, streets, parks, schools and the body politic, to mention a few.

Hans Sennholz notes an irony in Milton Friedman's efforts to get away from the orthodox gold standard - "monetary freedom," says Sennholz, "would soon give birth to a 'parallel standard'" that would permit individuals to make "gold contracts," and so we would be back on a gold standard despite Friedman's efforts to do away with something that he regards as tyranny. Results of Intervention Looking at thirty years of rent control in Sweden, Sven Rydenfelt notes that the rich seem to wind up with the most desirable hous ing, while young families have frequently to wait for years for decent space. In' Yugoslavia, ac cording to Lj ubo ~irc, the attempt to superimpose an "as if" com petitive system on State enterprise can't get off the ground because the founding of new enterprises remains in the hands of political bodies. The English contributors , to TOlward Liberty struggle to find scope for free choice in an ad vanced welfare state. Ralph Harris sees some hope in the movement toward "selectivity in welfare,"

but he laments that right-wing paternalists gang up with left wing traditionalists to prevent a significantly large return to "pri vate welfare suppliers" in insur ance, medicine and education. Writing about the struggle of Latin American countries to achieve "take-off," Ulysses R. Dent of Guatemala remarks on the strange irony that the foreign aid ponied up by taxpayers in the capitalistic U.S.A. has provided the funds for socialistic takeovers.

1972 TOWARD LIBERTY 127 , Thus we export what we profess to hate. A Mexican contributor, Alberto Salceda, speculates that it was "Essene" corruption of Bibli cal texts that has made Jesus seem anticapitalist. In the non-Essene parts of the gospels Jesus fre quently endorsed the· Command ment that says "Thou shalt not covet," which means that he was no supporter of the envy that is at the root of modern efforts to spread "social justice" by force. The topic of GNP - gross na tional product - begets a sapient observation from Giuseppe Ugo Papi of Italy that a preoccupation with macroeconomics keeps us from seeing that augmentations of the GNP st~rt from below, in the potential of the individual. When governments try to expand the GNP by planning, they .. really lead to its diminution in real terms. An Irish contributor, George Alexander Duncan, thinks it odd that the governments of the United States, the United King dom and the French Republic have destroyed the economic basis of their Caribbean dependencies by susidizing extravagant beet sugar production at home - and then compound the idiocy by send ing "aid" to the cane-sugar coun tries to be wasted by politicos who neither toil nor spin.

Publishers and the Market Henry Regnery, the dean of our conservative publishers, obviously hopes he will not be condemned for lese maj esty when he points out that Mises' great work, Hu man AcUon, was originally pub lished by a university press that was "neither subject to the disci plines of the market nor to the restrictions that purely market considerations impose." Actually, despite Mr.· Regnery's trepidation, there was no doctrinal contradic tion involved in the fact that it was a noncommercial publisher, the Yale University Press's Eu gene Davidson, who accepted Hu man Action back in 1948 without the change of a single word. The Yale Press in Davidson's time (and maybe now, for all I know) was the recipient of support that was voluntarily donated by non governmental .benefactors, which brings it within the purview of Leonard Read's "anything that's peaceful" test. A voluntarily sub sidized university press is part of that wider market in which "all human values are offered for op tion." The voluntary subsidizers in the case of Human Action were getting what they paid for, which happened to be the circulation of a work which their chosen editor had rightly approved. So let Henry Regnery stop worrying; he has 128 THE FREEMAN February not had to make any exception from Misesian principle in writing his essay on "The Book in the Market Place."

I have merely scratched the sur face in this attempt to indicate some of the riches of the two volumed Toward Liberty. Sixty six essays are too much for one review. Fortunately they are not too much for a single reader, though he will need a command of four languages to read every word that is offered "for option" by the books' editors. ~ FIRST THINGS, LAST THINGS by Eric Hoffer (New York: Harper & Row, 1971, 132 pp., $4.95) Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton THE ICONOCLASTIC ex-longshore man is in rare form in his new book. Hoffer fits none of the con temporary pigeonholes but directs his shafts of idiocy and sham wher ever he finds them. Today's hunt ing is best on the left, and Hoffer's deadly aim picks off a number of cows held sacred by today's intel lectuals. What a pleasure to read a man who nonchalantly heaves dead cats into the stuffy sanctuaries of "liberalism." Consider his treatment of ecol ogy. The cry is "back to nature,"

but Hoffer reminds us that the great achievements of civilization have come from cities and that na ture has always been, in a sense, man's antagonist, something he must live with but also overcome or be destroyed. In Africa, for in stance, the real battle is not against colonialism but nature. Even in the great cities of our nation, he writes, the problem is still nature our inner natures which are turn ing many into primitive savages as self-discipline and outside controls are cast aside. Hoffer denies that mere expenditures of money will help the cities. The task, he writes, is to lure out the chronically poor and induce exiled suburbanites to return. One way to achieve the former is to end the welfare sys tem, and the latter will be accom plished when city governments per form their rightful functions well and relieve taxpayers of the burden of unnecessary expenditures. This is a book to stir up the mind, for despite his scorn for the pseudo-intellectual, Hoffer is the real thing, a man of ideas who has not gone "a'whoring after false gods." And he is an example of the best that America can produce in common men. Without family con nections, social position or inher ited wealth and with very little formal education, Hoffer neverthe less has been able to make his mark in the world of ideas. One hopes this won't be his last slim volume of hard thinking and clear writing.

~ the Freeman VOL. 22, NO.3-MARCH 1972 Utopia: Dream into Nightmare Alexander Winston 131 A historical review o'f utopian ventures, culminating In the twentieth-century welfare statism; prospects for a revival of freedom. . Digging Ditches A job worth doin'g is worth doing well. Robert W. Demers 140 On Appeasing Envy Henry Hazlitt 142 The very measures taken to appease envy often tend to aggravate it. The Foundingof the American Republic: 8. British Acts Become Intolerable Clarence B. Carson 147 Parliamentary pressures after 1766 lead eventually to open warfare. Who Is the Marginal Producer? W. A.Paton 160 The first to withdraw unless conditions improve is not necessarily foretold by the. firm's balance sheet. American Competitivism:Cause or Result? Ron Heiner 164 How can. we revive a competitive spirit if we reject· the condition of freedom that spawned it? Fixed Exchange Rates and MonetaryCrises Gary North 168 Price control, whether of goods and services or of money, interferes with the peaceful processes of trade.