Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN LEONARD READ is the very anti thesis of the arm twister. He does not teeter on your lapel to shout in your ear. But his phrases, gent ly repeated in his wisely rumina tive essays, do succeed in grabbing people. There is his reiterative use of the phrase "the freedom philos ophy," for example. Pundits have spent many hours trying to figure out a modern substitute for the once-honorable word "liberalism," which has been stolen by the' col lectivists. The' best the pundits have been able to come up with is the clumsy word "libertarian ism." It doesn't quite fill the bill and I have noticed that people like Professor Ben Rogge of Wabash College, who is himself the com314 plete libertarian, now use the phrase "the freedom philosophy" to indicate their body of beliefs. In his latest collection of free dom philosophy essays, Having My Way (Foundation for Eco nomic Education, $4.00 cloth, $2.50 paper), Leonard Read tosses off the word "dictocrat" on page eleven. It was a new coinage to me, and I placed a check beside it. Further on in the book Mr.

Read made an adjective of it, "dic tocratic," using the adjective three times within three pa.ges. Rather good, I thought. "Dictocrat" cov ers a multitude of characters who try to get their way by force, in cluding the force of seizing other people's money to pa.y for their 1974 HAVING ]\iY WAY 315 experiments. "Dictocrat" brings out the common strain that you will find in Communists, .Social ists, Anarchists-of-the-deed, So cial Democrats, Majority Rule fanatics, Planners, Collectivists, and what.-not, including all the many varieties of Progressive or Liberal (modern sense) who need forgiveness, for they know not what they do. Let me hasten to say that Mr. Read is not being pejorative in his use of "dictocrat." He doesn't pin it on specific people, knowing that to do so would only succeed in alienating possible converts to his own freedom philosophy. Mr. Read has his Marquis of Queensbury code. He uses the word in a coolly scientific spirit. A "dictocratic scheme," to him, is the antithesis of a "free market scheme." That is all there is to it, and it is enough.

Economics and Morality The older he grows, the more Leonard Read thinks that econom ics must be considered a branch of moral philosophy. If one does not have moral scruples in the market place, one will inevitably .distort the processes of production and ex change. If, by using intervention ist compulsions, you take more out of the system of exchange than you put into it, you will be guilty of diminishing productivity and multiplying scarcity. This, to Mr. Read, is thievery. Try as he may, Mr. Read cannot imagine a society totally composed of thieves: pa.ra sites, he says, die in the absence of a host. He is forced to conclude that economics and morality de pend on the same values. Since they do, there is little sense in talking about keeping economics "value free." With morality on his mind, Mr. Read is more concerned with what the interventionist, or dictocratic, philosophy does to bring inj ustice to individuals than he is with the usual statistical expressions of economic thinking. Above-market wages and below-market hours create unemployment, a statistical category. But this is the cold, "value free" way of putting it.

Mr. Read prefers to emphasize that minimum wage laws make the relatively poor suffer. They be come victims of a legally sanc tioned form of theft. The Power of Example Mr. Read would object to any characterization of his essays as sermons. A sermon is a form of intrusion - the dictionary defines it as "a lecture on conduct or duty," or as a "homily." Leonard Read lectures no one; he writes, so he says, to clear things up for himself in order that he may get on with his own life-project of 316 THE FREEMAN May trying to perfect his own under standing. If he can improve him self to the point of becoming an example for other people, then so much the better. But he does not mean to be intrusive. He has found that the surest way of scaring peo ple off is to set out consciously to do the other fellow good. For all his lack of intrusiveness, however, Mr. Read conducts a very subtle pastorate. He preaches the Word by redefining it. As he be comes older he finds himself going more and more back to the roots of language. He cannot believe that it makes sense to let the "meek" inherit the earth if the meek be defined as "timid, shrink ing, apologetic" Casper Milque toasts. But, traced back through Greek to its Aramaic original, "meek" becomes something differ ent. As Gerald Heard has said, the word stands for something oppo site to "overbearing" or "aggres sive." "Meek" suggested itself to the King James translators be cause, in Elizabethan usage, it im plied a "wonderful, inherent, teachability." So the Beatitude should read, "Blessed are the teachable, for they shall inherit the earth." As for the' meaning of "earth" in this context, Mr. Read is reasonably sure that it relates to "man's earthly potentialities."

Learning from Mistakes Mr. Read is always willing to change his mind, if his pursuit of root definitions leads him to be lieve that he has been wrong. Once he believed that it was "unfor tunate" that inequality should ex ist. Now he considers it would be a terrible misfortune if everyone could be made equal. We all ben efit from the discoveries of the gifted. True, people should be re garded as "equal before the law," but this very equality must mean that crooks and murderers will be treated differently than honest men. It is not even true to say that everyone is "equal in the sight of God." The Deity is not to be insulted by implying that Judas Iscariot could be the "equal" of Peter when called before the Heavenly bar. God, says Mr. Read, should not be condemned as near sighted. In talking about willingness to confess past errors, Mr. Read tells a remarkable story about his en counter almost thirty years ago with John Maynard Keynes. He had invited Keynes to oppose J.

Reuben Clark, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of L.atter Day Saints, on the subject of the U.S. foreign aid program. Keynes declined the invitation, saying "My mission is to obtain the Brit ish loan. Were I to stand before 1974 HAVING MY WAY 317 your audience and say what I now think, which is what I would do, I would disparage my mission." This is historically very inter esting. It accords with Keynes's praise of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Mr. Read doesn't want to single out Keynes as being alone in the fault of refusing to make public a confession of error. But, in view of the harm that "Keynesian" economics has done the human race, I hope Mr. Read's historical revelation will be read on the campuses where Keynes is still regarded as the master. ~ THE ENTERPRISING AMERI CANS: A BUSINESS HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by John Chamberlain, new and up dated edition. (New York: Harper & Row, 1974) 283 pages, $8.95.

Reviewer : John Davenport THE REPUBLICATIONof John Cham berlain's Enterprising Americans comes at an opportune time. Busi nessmen 'all over the world find themselves under attack and thus far, judged by public opinion polls, have had little success in meeting their critics. One reason for this fail ure, it seems to me, is that business is still portrayed by friend and foe as a kind of special interest group entitled to a fair share of profits, just as labor is portrayed as a separate group en titled to its fair share of wages and salaries. Our social philoso phers have succumbed to the di sease of "groupitus" which makes them advocates of ever stronger government measures to "counter vail" the power of highly organ ized and contending minorities. At the end of the road looms some form of the corporate state. This is the Galbraithian view of things and Mr. Chamberlain will have none of it. In his preface he defines business as "creative busy-ness" that includes just about everybody from factory worker and farmer to manager, investor and entrepreneur. From this van tage point he then traces Ameri can economic development from pre-colonial times forward. The result is a rich and many-plied story focusing on the inner dynam ics and motivations of men who transformed a continent into a highly industrialized society which, for all its faults and cur rent problems, still gives its citi zens a better shake than any other society in history.

In the foreground as the tale pro gresses stand certain prime movers, 318 THE FREEMAN May familiar to most college students though all too often portrayed in unflattering terms - Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and the genius of Edi son. But interwoven in the story are other aspects of America all too often forgotten in our haste to deify, or more often today to villify, the work of the titans. We watch William Pepperrell of Kittery, Maine, transforming the rocky shores of New England into a jumping-off-place for ships and world-spanning trade. We are re minded of the effects in Montana and the Dakotas of Sam Colt's revolver and his development of mass production methods. The du Ponts of Wilmington back a sci entist, Dr. Wallace Crowthers, and we have nylon and the artificial fibers which today largely clothe a nation. Bell Laboratories and Dr. William Shockley perfect the tiny transistor, and lo! - we enter the age of the computer - not to men tion the space rocket and satellite probing the far reaches of Mars and the universe.

It is because Mr. Chamberlain has an eye for such details and interrelated consequences, and be cause he has cast his book in the form of history rather than ab stract argument, that it carries a profound message. The message is that the much-maligned business man, far from being a greedy exploiter, is in fact the essential intermediary between man, the consumer, and man, the producer - between the demands of the pub lic for goods, and the desire of most of us for jobs and productive work. In a complex civilization characterized by the division of labor, someone must play this role, and on the evidence, the business man has played it surpassing well. In the end Mr. Chamberlain's history of what businessmen have done is a spirited defense of the market process which, in support ing the free society, may one day make possible the good society. ~ POPULATION, RESOURCES, AND THE FUTURE: NON-MAL THUSIAN PERSPECTIVES, ed ited by Howard M. Bahr, Bruce A.

Chadwick, and Darwin L. Thomas (Brigham Young University Press: Provo, Utah, 1972), $3.95 paper bound. Reviewed by Bruce D. Porter EVER since Parson Malthus penned his Essay on the Principle of Pop ulation, prophets of gloom by the handful have denounced childbirth as the source of human woes. In more recent ye'ars, however, that handful has multiplied geometric ally (and common sense but arith metically), to make it "common 1974 OTHER BOOKS 319 knowledge" that a population crisis of immense magnitude is at the door, about to thrust civilization to its doom. "In the belief that non-Malthu sian perspectives on population are not receiving the attention they de serve," fourteen top scholars join forces in Popula,tion, Resources, and the Future to refute numerous myths about overpopulation and re source shortages. The: book is a significant contribution to ration ality. The scholars are highly critical of "population myopia" - the in creasing trend to blame all manner of social maladies on the infants coming into the world. Such a catchall diverts our attention from far more significant problems and creates a convenient scapegoat for erring politicians. Drumming up a crisis may only encourage hasty, possibly foolhardy solutions.

Several scholars challenge the Malthusian premise that resources inevitably run a losing race with population. The food supply, for example, has not only kept pace with the birthrate, but since the da.wn of serious agricultural re search in the first half of our cen tury, it has surpassed it, and the Green Revolution is only begin ning. If fully developed and allowed to produce, the world's present croplands could support our grow ing numbers many times over. The' same is true of housing and energy technology. R. Buckminister Fuller contributes an imaginative essay on the potential of engineer ing to handle increased population at increasing levels of affluence. He maintains that improved technol ogy rather than political organi zation will ultimately 'be the key to erasing housing, water and energy shortages. Certain environmentalists have identified overpopulation and "the exploitive system of capitalism" as the two main sources of our pollu tion problems. B. -Delworth Gard ner of Utah State University con vincingly demonstrates that most environmental damage involves public resources and lands, where common ownership eliminates in dividual responsibility for waste.

Contrarily, private ownership of well-defined properties normally works to reduce pollution to neg ligible' amounts. He proposes some unique, ideas on using the free mar ket system to control environmen tal abuses. Another major assertion of neo Malthusians has been that high population density is the major cause of crime, delinquency, civil unrest, suicide, and drug abuse. An analysis of demographic patterns dispels this idea. Our urban riots have typically occurred in a.reas declining in population; the highly crowded countries of England and 320 THE FREEMAN May Holland have among the lowest crime rates in the world. A case can even be made in favor of high density life - that it is good for people, their health and sanitation. The big picture we get is that population is only one of many fac tors contributing to social prob lems, and a minor one at that. "Mass starvation is not made in bedchambers, but in council cham bers." The closing essays of the book deal with the moral questions raised by population control. "Co ercive programs are incompatible with self-direction and personal freedom." In the realm of living, breathing people, there are values more. precious than survival itself.

Should the time indeed come when our numbers reach crisis pro portions (and these scholars agree the time is still distant), people will voluntarily bear less children. It may frighten some to thus trust humanity's future, to the wisdom of free individuals, but a far more foreboding spectre is that of a so ciety planned and ordered and lim ited, but alas! void of the values, digni ty and freedom we have come to take for granted. HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each ORDER FROM: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 ttle Freeman VOL. 24, NO.6. JUNE 1974 Mises and Fisheron Theoryand History William H. Peterson 323 Without a proper theory, we are unlikely to learn from history. Inflation:Harbingerof MonetaryUpheaval David A. Fyfe 327 The inflation we've exported is coming home to roost as foreign investors buy into America. Are You Concerned? Ernesto E. Blanco, P.E. 334 About the interventions which have precipitated our plight.