Book Reviews

Time, however, seems to be proving the case for Isabel Pater son. With our parochial schools foundering, and our colleges trad ing in their institutional integrity in return for Federal cash, the State-supported and State-domi nated system is winning all down the line. Education is not improved thereby: the mediocre mass holds back the students of distinction. With a quota system of "ethnicity" being substituted, via "affirmative action," for excellence as a cri terion of pupil acceptance, the diploma means less and less. The State has not yet outlawed the high school or college teaching of such things as free enterprise economics or a biology that tells the truth about individual varia tions, but there is a subtle pre sumption in our school lounges and on our campuses that political solutions must be sought for all our complex problems. We are be coming a standardized people, ready to accept "controls" with out bleating. When the ultimate in flationary blow-off comes, we will be doormats for our first dictator.

It will be done by way of "Welfar ism"; our Fuhrer, taking a tip from the late Huey Long, will do as Fascists do but will call it Pro gressivism. The end results of a State-stand ardized educational system are be coming more and more apparent even to some of our professional "educationists." What was wildly heterodox when Isabel Paterson was writing is now being accepted as common sense by a wide variety of scholars and legal critics who want a pluralistic society to pre vail. These scholars and critics are fortunate in having a few inde pendent foundations such as the Institute for Humane Studies and the Center for Independent Edu cation around to support their 501 502 THE FREEMAN August ruminations by underwriting sym posiums. So we have a good book at hand: The 12-Year Sentence, edited by William F. Rickenbacker (Open Court, $6.95) . The book con sists of papers prepared for an education symposium held in Mil waukee, Wisconsin, in the Fall of 1972, with an added introduction by Professor Benjamin A. Rogge of Wabash College.

The Coercive Intrusion Professor Rogge sets the scene by conjuring up the stuff of our daily headlines. Day in and day out we are subjected to bitter contro versy over busing, sex courses, so cialist indoctrination, school pray ers, the educational role of prop erty taxes, the place of "relevance" in curricula, etc., etc. None of these controversial topics would be par ticularly bothersome if it weren't for the fact that schooling is com pulsory from the ages of six to sixteen. With the State absorbing most of the available education money, few parents can afford to pick private schools that can really educate children without regard to specious standards of relevance or whatever. So an overwhelming proportion of our younger popula tion is now being subjected to what Ben Rogge calls "the coercive in trusion of the collective into the life and mind of the individual." Professor Rogge says the whole subject of compulsory schooling is "ripe for rethinking," and the con tributors to The 12.,.Year Sentence make a good beginning at the job.

Murray Rothbard, delving into the historical origins of the idea of compulsory attendance at State supported schools, tells us about the Saxony School Plan devised by Martin Luther and put into prac tice through an edict drawn up by his disciple Melanchthon. The Saxon and Wiirttemberg systems created under Lutheran influence were the models for the Prussian system of compulsory s,chooling. In America, Calvinist Massachusetts (unlike Pilgrim Plymouth) enacted a compulsory literacy law for all children. The law gave judges the power to seize the children of recalcitrant parents and "appren tice" them for State instruction. Horace Mann in Massachusetts It was the Massachusetts system that ultimately triumphed through out most of America. Mr. Roth bard traces the careers of the "educationists" through their school journals. Horace Mann, the editor of the Common School J our nal, became the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Edu cation, and his annual reports dur ing the 1840s promoted the "free"

compulsory line throughout the whole country. What Horace Mann did in Massachusetts, Henry Bar1974 THE 12-YEAR SENTENCE 503 nard did in Connecticut, Calvin Wiley in North Carolina, Caleb Mills in Indiana, and Samuel Lewis in Ohio. These are the big names in the adaptation of the Prussian system to the United States. It was all done in the name of "de mocracy." But it was a "democ racy" with an unconscious totali tarian ingredient. The idea, in the words of Samuel Lewis, was to take a diverse population (the new Irish, the German 'Forty-eighters,' etc.) and mould it into "one peo ple." As Mr. Rothbard says, the moulding was not an easy process. "The pesky Catholics," he writes, "often insisted on establishing their own parochial schools." But quantitatively, the Horace Manns achieved a great success. In 1922 the State of Oregon actually passed a law prohibiting all pri vate schools and compelling all children to go to public school.

This seemed the culmination of a dream, but it was interrupted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1925. In the Pierce v. Society of Sisters decision, the Court declared that "the child is not the mere creature of the state." Mr. Rothbard notes ironically that the Ku Klux Klan, in pushing for the aborted Oregon law, had made common cause with the Horace Mann educationists. The Pierce decision, so Mr. Roth bard says, points the way to a fundamental choice: "it will," he writes, "either be Pierc'e and lib erty or Horace Mann and the Ku Klux Klan." Reducing the Options Other contributors to The 12 Year Sentence - Gerrit Worm houdt, Robert Baker, E. G. West - are concerned lest the American people be cheated out of a choice by the economics of the situation. Our Supreme Court decisions and our statute laws and judicial inter pretations may protect the public in its ultimate right to choose be tween a State-supported system and a private system of education, but when government taxes virtu ally everybody at a high rate to support public schools there is little left for the private school.

Our inflation has made a bad situ ation almost incredibly worse. Our courts have actually twisted the First Amendment out of shape in regard to the "freedom of re ligion" clause. It is a negation of "freedom of religion" when a State refuses to refund money, via vouchers or remission of taxes, to citizens who consider it part of their religious duty to send their children to parochial schools. For money reasons, then, Mr. Rothbard is not likely to see any big showdown between Pierce and Horace Mann and the Ku Klux Klan. The latter are winning by 504 THE FREEMAN August default. The private school main tains its legal right to exist, but who can afford the luxury of sup porting two sets of schools simul taneously? The fight was lost in Britain, ac cording to historian E. G. West, through negligence. As Britain became more wealthy in the Nine teenth Century, individual enter prise responded by developing pri vate education. But the State school people had the better propaganda.

The individual, in Britain, never managed to fight. We'll need many more sympo siums and books like The 12-Year Sentence to keep the U.S. from going the way of Britain. There is a formidable educationist hier achy, guaranteeing jobs and tenure to teachers, to overcome if the private school is to be saved. Tax remission would be only a begin ning. But the case against com pulsion in education is now being cogently stated, and that, at least, is something. ~ LAW, LEGISLATION AND LIB ERTY. Volume 1: RULES AND ORDER by F. A. Hayek (Univer sity of Chicago Press, 1973), 184 pages, $7.95. Reviewed by Henry Hazlitt DR. HAYEK'S great treatise, The Constitution of Liberty, appeared in 1960. In the years since then he has continued to explore at an even more basic level the problems with which it dealt. The present small volume, Rules and Order, is proj ected as the first of three. It is to be followed by a second vol ume dealing with The Mirage of Social Justice, and a third treat ing The Political Order of a Free Society.

Dr. Hayek may seem to be go ing once more over the same ground as he did in The Consti tution of Liberty. In certain re spects he is. If he had known when he published that book that he was going to proceed to the task attempted here, he confesses, he would have reserved that title for this successor. It is only in the present book, he adds, that he addresses himself to the ques tion: "What constitutional ar rangements, in the legal sense, might be most conducive to the preservation of individual free dom ?" The outstanding thesis of this book is that "a condition of lib erty in which all are allowed to use their knowledge for their pur poses, restrained only by rules of just conduct of universal applica tion, is likely to produce for them the best conditions for achieving their aims." In explaining this thesis, Dr. Hayek elaborates more fully his contention, which will be familiar 1974 OTHER BOOKS 505 to his past readers, that both eth ics and law had their origin in the tendency of men to develop prac tices and follow rules without clearly being aware of the social purposes served by those rules.

"Man acted before he thought and did not understand before he acted." The rules on which men acted developed over generations of experience. Those societies in which individuals followed supe rior rules increased their chances for survival. Thus there evolved beneficent practices and institu tions which, as the eighteenth century philosopher Adam Fer guson put it, were "the result of human action but not of human design." Both ethics and law in their origin emphasized the enormous importance of acting on principle. It was only when men did this unswervingly that they could de pend on each other's actions; that they could avoid conflict, maxi mize peaceful cooperation, help further each other's purposes, and therefore best further their own. A few other eighteenth-century philosophers, outstandingly David Hume, recognized this. But in the nineteeth century the refusal to recognize as binding any rules of conduct whose justification had not been rationally demonstrated became an ever-recurring theme.

As a striking illustration of how this led to immoralism, Hayek quotes from a talk given by Lord Keynes in 1938. Speaking about the time, 35 years before, when he himself was twenty, he said of himself and his friends: "We entirely repudiated a per sonal liability on us to obey gen eral rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, expe rience, and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very im portant part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most ob vious and dangerous characteris tic. We repudiated entirely cus tomary morals, conventions, and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists . . . we recog nized no moral obligation, no in ner sanction, to conform or obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case." To which he added: "So far as I am concerned, it is too late to change. I remain, and always will remain, an immoralist."

The reader will recognize in this passage an ominous key to the present. It is the spread of precisely this attitude since then to ever-widening circles that helps to explain the moral and political decay in the last few decades, ranging from politicians in the highest offices who proudly call 506 THE FREEMAN August themselves "pragmatists" down to such lunatic-fringe movements as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Again and again Dr. Hayek em phasizes that "Freedom can be preserved only by following prin ciples and is destroyed by follow ing expediency." The direct effects of any interference with the mar ket order will be clear and visible in most cases, while the more in direct and remote effects will mostly be unknown and therefore disregarded. When we decide each issue on what appear to be its in dividual merits, we always over estimate the advantages of central direction. Dr. Hayek applies his principles to ethics, politics, and law: "Law in the sense of enforced rules of conduct is undoubtedly coeval with society; only the observance of common rules makes the peaceful existence of individuals in society possible." Law is older than legis lation. Our forefathers thought of law as something existing inde pendently of human will; not as something to be invented, but something to be discovered.

There is not space here to elab orate Dr. Hayek's theme, or to enumerate all his contributions. I must content myself with saying that his analysis of the origin, nature, and function of law is one of the most profound and enlight ening ever written. I have only two criticisms of this book. One is that Dr. Hayek's exposition is conducted too re morselessly on a highly abstract plane. One longs for concrete illus trations or examples, which are almost never offered. This unre lieved abstractness has long been a defect of Hayek's style; but in his earlier books, notably The Road to Serfdom, he more than atoned for it by his gift for pithy aphorism. Here he holds on to his sentences too long and over stuffs them with subordinate clauses. This makes for more difficult reading than even the profundity of his thought can justify. My second criticism is one of substance. Dr. Hayek is adamantly opposed, quite properly I think, to what might be called ad hoc util itarianism. He wishes to empha size the importance of acting in flexibly in accordance with prin ciple, with established rules. But he admits that ethical and legal progress has been made possible only by the constant "improve ment" of these rules. Yet he never specifically asks, what is the cri terion for deciding how a partic ular rule is to be improved? It is not merely consistency with other rules. Is it not, in fact, whether a proposed modification is likely to have more desirable social re suIts? And is not this a utilitarian test? Is it not at least a form of 1974 OTHER BOOKS 507 "rule utilitism?" A judge in striv ing to interpret and perfect the common law, no less than a moral philosopher, must have some cri terion in mind. Dr. Hayek rightly rejects all ad hoc applications of utilitarianism, but he seems to me possibly to have lost sight of the need for some utilitarian test for rules or laws themselves.

But I do not wish to overem phasize either of these objections. Compared with Hayek's contribu tion they are minor. This is a book of cardinal importance. It helps to lay more solid philosophical foun dations for ethics, law, legislation, and liberty. ~ THE LIBERTARIAN ALTERN ATIVE: Essays In Social and Political Philosophy, edited by Tibor R. Machan ( Chicago: Nel son-Hall Company, 1974) 553 pp. $12.50. Reviewed by Allan C. Brownfeld The Libertarian Alternative, a selection of essays in social and political philosophy, fills an im portant gap in the literature of American thought. Thirty prominent exponents of liberatarian ideas argue from their individual perspectives for the restructuring of collectivist institutional, cultural, and intel lectual elements to achieve the libertarian alternative of a free so ciety, based on individual rights and functioning through a free economy.

In an essay which introduces the reader to libertarianism, Pro fessor John Hospers declares that, "The political philosophy that is called libertarianism is the doc trine that every person is the owner of his own life, and that no one is the owner of anyone else's life; and that consequently every human being has the right to act in accordance with his own choices, unless those actions in fringe on the equal liberty of other human beings to act in accordance with their choices." Political theories, both past and present, argues Hospers, "have traditionally been concerned with who should be the master (usually the king, the dictator or govern ment bureaucracy) and who should be the slaves, and what the extent of the slavery should be. Liber tarianism holds that no one has the right to use force to enslave the life of another, or any portions or aspect of that life." To those who agree that the rights of life and liberty are in deed essential, but who denigrate the right to property, Hospers re plies that, "the right to property is as basic as the other two; in deed, without property rights no other rights are possible. Depriv508 THE FREEMAN August ing you of property is depriving you of the means by which you live ... The right to property is not the right to just take it from others, for this would interfere with their property rights. It is rather the right to work for it, to obtain noncoercively, the money or services which you can present in voluntary exchange .... If one is not free to use that which one has produced, one does not possess the right of liberty."

In an essay entitled "The Ana tomy of The State," Professor Murray Rothbard argues that the collective term "we" has "enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If 'we are the government,' then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical; it is also 'vol untary' on the part of the in dividual concerned. If the govern ment has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of an other, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that 'we owe it to ourselves.'" "'We' are not the government . . . the government does not in any accurate sense 'represent' the majority of the people, but even if it did, even if 70 per cent of the people decided to murder the re maining 30 per cent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority ..."

In an essay concerning "Skin ner's Behaviorist Utopia," Dr. Bruce Goldberg rejects the Skin nerian thesis that man does not possess free will and is, instead, merely a result of his conditioned responses. For Skinner, the only alternatives are "good control" and "bad control." To this, Goldberg responds: ". . . this is simply the product of a bit of sham reason ing. What, one wants to ask, do you say about the possibility of establishing a society in which people are not subject to a rigid conditioning process in the hands of 'behaviorist' engineers, but in which they are able to encounter many and diverse influences and make up their own minds about which they regard as the more im portant and which the less?" Skin ner would reject it. Goldberg, affirming man's unique individ uality, believes that anything else would deny man's humanity. Discussing "Involuntary Mental Hospitalization," Dr. Thomas S.

Szasz poits out that persecution of men and women for religious differences, or on the basis of race, may have been eliminated in mod ern Western society only to be replaced by a new kind of perse cution. "Modern liberalism," he writes, "allied with scientism, has met the need for a fresh defense 1974 OTHER BOOKS 509 of oppression and has supplied a new battle-cry: 'Health.' In this therapeutic-meliorist view of so ciety, the ill form a special class of 'victims' who must ... be 'helped' - coercively and against their will, if necessary - by the healthy .... In the therapeutic state toward which we appear to be moving, the principal require ment for the role of big brother may be an M.D. degree." Contributors to this collection include Henry Hazlitt, F. A. Har per, Milton Friedman, Nathaniel Branden, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Anne Wortham and Yale Brozen. In seven areas of concern they make penetrating analyses of the relation of justice, liberty, and the individual; the interaction of states and societies; the failure of contemporary statism; the dy namics of free societies in for eign affairs; the response of eco nomics to a free market; and the prospects for and obstacles to libertarianism.

On matters of foreign affairs the libertarians appear especially weak and dogmatic, seeming to misunderstand the very real na ture of totalitarianism as repre sented in this century by Nazism, Fascism and Communism. Accept ing a seemingly utopian conception of man as good, and as being cor rupted by such institutions as the state, many libertarians would dismantle our military defenses and, in effect, leave us naked be fore our enemies. They would soon learn that such an approach would not enhance freedom, but would destroy it totally. Other than this serious blind spot, the thoughtful material in this volume is a welcome addition to a growing debate within the nation about the need to redis cover the dynamics of a truly free society. Libertarianism has much to contribute to that debate, and this volume, edited by Tibor R. Machan, represents a significant survey of a political and social en tity which, its supporters believe, "may represent the wave of the future."

~ THE ECONOMICS OF ENERGY - What Went Wrong and How We Can Fix It by Roger LeRoy Miller (New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1974, 131 pp.) $4.95 Reviewer: Robert M. Thornton BUSINESSMEN, in popular mythol ogy, are all in favor of free enter prise. Not so! Like most other peo ple, they are tempted by political favors that will spare them the challenge of cOlnpetition. They de nounce "unfair" competition and argue persuasively that the priv ileges they want are really for the benefit of consumers! We must re510 THE FREEMAN August sist these flimsy arguments and insist on really free enterprise ... for the consumer's sake! This is the main thrust of Dr. Miller's excellent little book which teaches some important general truths about economics while ana lyzing the "energy crisis." There is a "crisis," he explains, because we have not had a free market for energy; government interference has distorted the market and as a result we suffer from "shortages"

of energy in its several forms. We hear congressmen denounc ing oil companies when it was the government itself that extended privileges to the industry. With equal duplicity the oil companies now protest government interfer ence, although in the past they have sought government favors. Government supported the price of petroleum products by controls on the import of inexpensive oil; and it kept the price of petroleum prod ucts down by enforcing price con trols on the industry! Naturally we get a mess. As to the evils of an international oil cartel, Miller wisely notes that the urge to "cheat" is unbearable in such situ ations and that only government can enforce cartel allocation re strictions to hold down supply and keep the price high. Another government policy that helps bring on an "energy crisis" is the use of fixed rates for electricity instead of charging more during peak periods. The regula tors save us from paying the true costs of our actions - the expenses for expanding facilities and re ducing environmental damages.

Also, the Federal Power Commis sion has kept the price of natural gas so low that it encouraged high consumption and discouraged ex ploration for new sources. Conservation, writes Miller, does not mean limiting the use of a re source but correctly determining what we are to use and when we should u~e it to maximize the bene fits. He stresses the importance of private property rights because when no one owns a particular re source, there is no incentive to use it economically. Several measures have been re commended to "fight" the "energy crisis." One is price controls, but these are effecti ve only in creating disruptions in the economy; they get people to respond to distorted price incentives. By not allowing the prices of refinery products to rise, they take away incentives to increase supply or reduce demand. Rationing has been suggested, too, but no system would be fair and would lead only to black markets and an expanding bureaucracy.

Higher taxes on fuel would have the same disadvantages as price controls and rationing plus they would put more of our money into 1974 OTHER BOOKS 511 government hands. Setting lower speed limits means more fuel used by trucks than when they are per mitted to operate at efficient rates of speed. Also, a reduced speed limit means more trucks will be needed to haul the same amount of goods and that in turn means greater fuel demands. The only answer is the free market. Miller scoffs at the idea of try ing to achieve self-sufficiency re garding energy needs. Prosperity comes from being able to buy where cheapest and to enjoy the benefits of free trade instead of suffering the high costs of pro tectionism; specialization rather than autarchy means more for everyone. One would like to see this easy to-read, relatively inexpensive book widely distributed. It makes so very clear that the free market is not a system designed to benefit only businessmen but one that benefits all of us. We must insist on the free economy for the con sumer's sake.

~ THE TIME IT NEVER RAINED by Elmer Kelton (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1973) $6.95, 373 pp. Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton THE HERO of Elmer Kelton's fine contemporary novel is Charlie Flagg, a Texas rancher past mid dle age. It is man against the ele ments as Charlie fights to save his herds during a six-year drought, and at the same time live with the social changes of his time - rela tions between father and son, white Americans and Mexican Americans, ranchers and towns people, citizens and government. A true hero he is, too, not afraid to take an independent stand for what he knows is right and risk everything to keep his integrity. He was no saint, no unreal char acter from the storybooks but a real man with all that implies, both bad and good. He could be unreasonably bull-headed and can tankerous. With all his tolerance and fair-mindedness, he still suf fered from a prejudice that ex pressed itself in a mild form of paternalism. The story does not have the conventional happy end ing; but, unlike some modern works of fiction, it leaves the reader joyous, not despondent.

One puts down the book with tears in the eyes, yet a smile on the face.

512 THE FREEMAN August Men and women such as Charlie Flagg and his wife founded and settled this country and made it prosper by taking the bitter with the sweet and accepting responsi bility for themselves. Such per sons seem to be in short supply today, which may explain why our nation "ain't what it used to be." This independent, yea-saying-un to-life spirit must be recaptured by Americans if we are to have a rebirth of liberty in the ."land of the free." At a time when more and more people not only accept government handouts but demand them as a right, it is good for the soul to read a story, albeit fictional, of a man who refused to go on the dole and willingly faced the conse quences of being his own man. , HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each ORDER FROM: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 24, NO.9. SEPTEMBER 1974 RewardingFailure A national policy that is a sure road to disaster.