Book Reviews

Read, formerly the Manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and Executive Vice President of the National Industrial Conference Board. Mr. Read is a curious mixture of American go-getter, Tolstoyan Christian, Herbert Spencer libertarFrom The Freeman of July 14, 1952, a fortnightly for individualists, of which Mr. Chamberlain served as one of the editors. 700 ian and dedicated medieval monk. Every strand of his personality is entwined in his Foundation, which, in Emersonian terms, is simply the lengthened shadow of the man. The Foundation, which has a most capa ble staff of economists and libertar ian thinkers, lives on voluntary con tributions, which it never solicits. Mr. Read holds to the Emersonian belief that a good mouse trap advertises itself by its own goodness-and the world of people who wish to see all totalitarians, Statists, Welfare Staters and believers in political compulsion at the bottom of the ocean (figuratively speaking, of course) has been beating a path to his door.

Recently the Foundation pub lished a book, "Essays on Liberty." Consisting of the cream of the Foun dation's releases to date, this book is ESSAYS ON LIBERTY 701 the definitive answer to the captive intellectuals of the New-Fair Deal in America and to the various issues of Fabian Essays which have, over the course of three or four genera tions, rotted out the entire social fabric of Great Britain. In this book we have such notable things as Dean Russell's discovery that the first Leftists in the French Revolutionary National Constituent Assembly in 1789 were libertarians who were pledged to free their econ omy from government-guaranteed special privileges of guilds, unions and associations whose members were banded together to interfere with the workings of the free mar ket. These first Leftists, as Mr. Rus sell succinctly tells the story, held a slim majority in their parliament for two years. They did a remarkable job of confounding authorit~rians.

Then they were bowled over ~y the J acobins, the terroristic Leninlsts of their day. The tragedy that flowed from Ro bespierre's and Marat's despicable Statist counter-revolution has be deviled the world ever since. Not only did it pervert the whole vocabulary of freedom; it also established the theory of the totalitarian "general will" which permits any majority, whether "transient" or not, to ride roughshod over the God-given nat ural rights of the minority. In the guise of killing royal totalitarian ism it popularized the totalitarianism of 51 per cent of the popula tionand the supposedly individ ualistic peoples of western Europe have been kowtowing to this totali tarian conception since that evil day when the first head spurted blood under the guillotine that was set up in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity. DevelopmentsAfter 1933 In America, as Betty Knowles Hunt and other contributors to Mr.

Read's book make plain, the com plex of ideas flowing from the Robes pierrean counter-revolution never managed to become domesticated until after 1933. In Europe they had rent control and a concomitant shortage of houses, as Bertrand de Jouvenel shows in an excellent pa per in this book, but in America a people free of rent control could re build the entire city of San Fran cisco after an earthquake in what amounts to the twinkling of a gnat's eye. In England, as Sir Ernest Benn says in an essay called "Rights for Robots," the Webbs and the other Fabians robbed the people of their Christian heritage of individual re sponsibility (which nurtures the di vine, or the creative, spark), but in America (see W. M. Curtiss's amus ing "Athletes, Taxes, Inflation") a Babe Ruth who climbed out of an orphanage to hit sixty home runs in a single year could reap the full re ward for a highly individualized skill.

702 THE FREEMAN November The period of Babe Ruth's develop ment and ascendancy preceded, of course, the reign of Franklin I. After 1933 came the deluge, which is mea sured accurately by the cosmic wa ter meters operated by Maxwell An derson, C. L. Dickinson, Russell Clinchy, W. M. Curtiss, F. A. Harper and other contributors to Mr. Read's volume. Not that these people deal in per sonalities: Mr. Read's genius is for collecting writers whose self-im posed duty is patiently to explain the principles (or the perversions of principles) that underlie the antics and convolutions of the various saints and devils who have been struggling for the control of our destiny. The approach in "Essays on Liberty" is not that of daily, weekly or fort nightly journalism, which must in evitably deal to some extent in the personalities that make or mar principles. Mr. Read's idea is to plant seeds that will mature in the full ness of time; he doesn't aspire to compete in immediacy with the edi tors of papers and magazines.

Nevertheless, Mr. Read is a jour nalist on a high level; he knows that principles (or their lack) are at the bottom of elections, wars, and legis lative and administrative acts. The thing that distinguishes Mr. Read from most of our journalists is that he seeks to assess personalities in terms of their basic philosophies. Long ago, as a young Chamber of Commerce man in the San Fran cisco region of California, Mr. Read was a Light Brigade soldier who simply executed the commands from on high. In those days the national Chamber of Commerce, under Henry Harriman, was promoting what amounted to trade association fas cism. (It was the Harriman thinking that created the Blue-Eagled NRA, that ill-starred adventure in price wage-and-production fixing that had us all salaaming to Iron Pants John son in the days of the first New Deal.) Read Meets Mullendore: A Conversion to Freedom A crusader then as now, Mr. Read went down from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1932 to lecture W. C.

Mullendore of the Southern Califor nia Edison Company on the virtues of NRA-ism. The trip south was his Road to Damascus, for in the space of an hour the persuasive Mr. Mul lendore tore all of Mr. Read's think ing apart. The new Saul-become-Paul emerged from the Mullendore pres ence a changed man, a firm believer in freedom and voluntarism in all their phases, social, political and economic. The session with Mr. Mullendore was a pedagogical reve lation to the young Mr. Read. It started him thinking about tech niques and means of bringing collec tivists of one stripe or another to a full realization of the Slave State implications of their position. As Mr.

1983 ESSAYS ON LIBERTY 703 Read thinks back on it, The Foun dation for Economic Education-and the "Essays on Liberty" -were really born in Mr. Mullendore's office that day. Like most men of individualistic distinction, Mr. Read is not a mere product of our more conventional educational institutions. He learned the rough way. In World War I he was dumped from the torpedoed Tuscania into the Irish Sea. Saved from a watery grave, he knocked about England in war camps as a rigger in America's pioneer air force, learning the truth that you can't fake or fudge a problem in mechanics. He came home to take on Chamber of Commerce jobs in Palo Alto and San Francisco. During his years with the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce he had a wonderful time fighting the myriad versions of collectivist lu nacy that flourished on the Pacific Coast in the wake of Ham-and-Egg ism, Townsendism, and Upton Sin clair's attempt to hornswoggle the voters with his EPIC (End Poverty in California) platform.

With Mullendore and others he started the Freeman Pamphleteers, a group which gaily revived such forgotten individualistic worthies as Bastiat and William Graham Sum ner. Meanwhile, as a hobby, Mr. Read was exploring the fascinations ofgood food, and making himself into a cor don bleu cook. He can look at a com plicated recipe in a cookbook and taste the thing accurately in his mind. Since he can also smell a be liever in State compulsion fifty or even a hundred miles away, Mr. Read is a fit candidate for some of Profes sor Rhine's future investigations into extra-sensory perception. He is a canny and extremely perceptive man with a vested interest in other peo ple's variations, and if his assem bled "Essays on Liberty" were to be made even an elective part of our school curriculum America might have a new birth of freedom vir tually overnight. , Books by Leonard E. Read The following 23 books by Leonard Read are available, some in cloth, others in paperback. For ordering information and special quantity discounts contact: The Foundation for Economic Educa tion, Inc., Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533.

Accent on the Right Anything That's Peaceful Awake for Freedom's Sake Castles in the Air Comes the Dawn The Coming Aristocracy Deeper Than You Think Elements ofLibertarian Leadership The Freedom Freeway The Free Market and Its Enemy Having My Way How Do We Know? Let Freedom Reign Liberty: Legacy of Truth The Love ofLiberty The Path ofDuty Seeds ofProgress Talking to Myself Then Truth Will Out Thoughts Rule the World To Free or Freeze Vision Who's Listening? 704 Freeman VOL. 33, NO. 12 • DECEMBER1983 The Two Faces of Risk Ernest G. Ross 707 The free economy affords a greater number of risks, but without such deadly penalties for failure. Economic Forecasting: How Good Is It? There is uncertainty and risk in human affairs. Henry Hazlitt 712 Why Socialism FailsWhy Markets Survive Bill Anderson 716 How the powerful urge of self-interest keeps the market in operation. The Irony of Eternal Vigilance Ridgway K. Foley, Jr. 729 A warning against trying political action to get one's "fair share."