The Pied Piper and Our Children; J. K. Williams

minder and become a propagandist for sound economics, I did on one oc casion introduce the term and the concept of "opportunity cost" to the vocabulary and thinking of my charges by explaining that the "cost" of viewing "Difrrent Strokes" was not hearing Uncle John reading "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." The success of this exercise was testified to by an agitated telephone call from my sister, who informed me that ten year-old Patrick had reduced his class-teacher to despair by challeng ing the justice of a half-hour deten tion to which he and a fellow mis creant had been sentenced. He had informed his teacher that the oppor tunity cost of the detention for his partner-in-crime was not having to sweep the leaves off the front lawn of his home, whereas the opportu nity cost for Patrick was not playing 260 THE PIED PIPER AND OUR CHILDREN 261 football with two cousins visiting that afternoon.

"The Pied Piper of Hamelin" is, however, more than a children's poem. It tells a story adults do well to consider. It describes a people who lost their children. Because of the ir responsibility of the adults of Ha melin, they lost their children. Their fail ure to keep a promise solemnly made resulted in a strange Piper leading their children away into a mountain the adults could not enter and from which the children could not leave. Other Examples If we think this mass loss of chil dren is only the stuff of which fairy tales are made, we might be wise to think again. Think for a moment of the many pipers playing tunes to which young people, in this century, have responded. The children ofHa melin went laughing and skipping after their piper. The childrenofN azi Germany, and of Marxist-Leninist regimes, marched stiffly in rigid ranks after very different pipers, en tering a mountain not of delight but of despotism, decadence, and destruction.

We delude ourselves if we assert that pipers playing tunes composed by harbingers of hate either are not found, or are without influence, in nations founded on liberty, and born in the struggle of men and women . who dreamed of freedom for themselves and their children's children. Documenting this claim is tragically easy. I think, for example, of an ugly lit tle volume which, in Australia, is set for study in many of our schools: So cial Sketches of Australia: 1888 1975. This book has it that the his tory of my country is one of inhu manity and brutality, led by mean, cruel, small-minded people. Accord ing to the author, there is nothing in my nation's heritage worthy of ad miration or deserving of praise. It would be an impertinence for a vis itor to your country and the recipi ent of your hospitality to say too much about what he observes in your school system, but I am convinced that the text so distorting my na tion's heritage might be matched by parallel texts similarly distorting your· nation's heritage and studied by your children.

A Death-Wish Joseph Schumpeter, I submit, is all too right. He argues that market capitalism in a classically liberal so cial order generates a set of men and women consumed by a pathological hatred of the socio-economic system of which they are the beneficiaries. Paranoid and careless, this set of people have as their power-base the so-called "knowledge industry." Their paranoia finds expression in the belief that they, uniquely rep resenting the forces of goodness, are 262 THE FREEMAN May the persecuted victims of existing so cial structures which are the em bodiment of evil and which conspire to destroy them. Their carelessness pe'rvades their impassioned rejec tion of those values which, over long centuries, have proved vital for the emergence and sustaining of civili zation and of liberty. They are in capable of understanding what Mi chael Oakeshott was asserting when, in his inaugural lecture at the Lon don School of Economics, he sug gested that "the greater part of what we have is not a burden to be carried or an. incubus to be cast off, but an inheritance to be enjoyed."

It is not difficult to see this twisted mentality at work. It is seen in jour nalists and academics who deter minedly keep the minds of their readers and their students fixed upon what is contemptible, thereby nurturing a sour sardonic attitude of rejection which, in the course oftime, is extended to the most valuable realities the human heritage has to offer. Their task is not difficult, for in the mixed constitution of things it is easy to pick out what is bad, to ignore what is good, and to draw the black veil of hatred over a complex of light and shade, when it still of fers considerable scope for kindness, sympathy, and improvement. More over, their task is facilitated by ideas and ideals which, at least superfi cially, conceal the dynamism of hate under a cloak of compassion. Some of these ideas and ideals I shall ex plore here. The Rhetoric of Rights On July 4, 1776, the then thirteen colonies on your eastern seaboard solemnly in· Congress declared that all men "are endowed by their Cre ator with certain unalienable rights." In so declaring, a nation made its own an idea and an ideal for which men and women, over many long years, had fought, suf fered, and died. The liberty of all people to dream their own dreams and to strive to make such dreams reality was, at long last, proclaimed to be a right possessed by all rather than a privilege conferred upon some by a caste or a class born to rule.

It may seem strange to' observe that such a positive and enriching concept of unalienable rights equally possessed by all people enshrines an essentially negative term. Yet it does. A "right" all people enjoy by virtue of their humanity signifies the ab sence of an obligation to refrain from certain activities or to surrender cer tain goods. A right to free speech sig nifies the absence of an obligation not to voice certain opinions. A right to possess certain goods signifies the absence of an obligation to surren der those goods. The only obligation to the possessor of such a right gen erated in other people by that right is also negative: namely, the general obligation not to disregard or defy 1985 THE PIED PIPER AND OUR CHILDREN 263 that right. The right of one person, X, to engage in some activity gen erates the correlative obligation in other people not coercively to pre vent X engaging in that activity; the right of X to own something gener ates the correlative obligation in other people not coercively to make X surrender that something.

Let us suppose an individual claims the right to climb a moun tain. He is claiming that he is not obliged to refrain from attempting to climb that mountain. He is further claiming that other people are obli gated not to prevent him from mak ing such an attempt. What is not being claimed, however, is that other people are obligated to provide him with the equipment or train him in the skills necessary successfully to climb the mountain. Rights equally enjoyed by all do not generate posi tive obligations in other people. Why not? Simply because rights equally enjoyed by all are grounded in what human beings all share: a comm~n humanity. If I were to claim that I have a right to own a wrist watch, and that men and women wealthier than I am are obligated to provide me with that wrist watch, I am grounding my alleged right in what I and those allegedly obligated to provide me with a wrist watch do not have in common, namely, wealth in excess of some arbitrary measure.

Claimed rights for some generating positive obligations for other people presuppose two distinct classes of people: people enjoying a purported right to certain goods and services, and people burdened with an obli gation to produce and provide those goods and services. Such a state of affairs is incompatible with the in sistence that all people equally enjoy the same rights. A Shared Determination Again, it would be possible by a shared act of human will to ensure that the equal rights of all people are recognized and respected. Men and women could, by an act of will, re frain from actions involving vio lence, theft, and deception which, by their nature, ignore and defy the rights of their fellows. Such a shared determination to refrain from aggression against other people could not, however, produce food suf ficient for all to eat or paid employ ment sufficient for all to enjoy. In deed, the imagination fails when one attempts to describe what would be needed to produce the goods and ser vices sufficient for all people every where to enjoy the right affirmed in the twenty-second article of the Uni versal Declaration ofHuman Rights promulgated by the United Nations, namely, the full development oftheir personalities in "economic, social, and cultural" spheres.

rt is not denied that men and women exercising their shared rights can contract with one another 264 THE FREEMAN May and thereby incur contracted posi tive rights and correlative positive obligations. Nor is it denied that men and women may morally be obli gated in positive ways to those peo ple with whom their lives are en twined, even though those people enjoy no right to such compassionate and caring behavior. The Good Samaritan In the wellknown Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, it is asserted that the priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan traveler are obligated to assist the wounded victim of rob bers; it is neither asserted nor im plied that the victim has any right to these people's solicitude. The de mands of charity have nothing what soever to do with any claimed rights. The demands of clarity, however, dic tate that we use the term "right" to signify what Wesley Hohfeld, in his celebrated classification of rights, calls "liberties." The right of a per son to do A or to own B signifies sim ply the absence of any obligation to refrain from doing A or to surrender B, and the correlative obligation in other people not to force that person to refrain from doing A or to surren derB.

In 1881, however, an influential English philosopher, Thomas Hill Green, gave eloquent expression to a seemingly plausible view. All civ ilized people agree, he suggested, that freedom "is the greatest of blessings." Yet freedom, "rightly understood," means not simply "freedom from restraint or compul sion." Rather, it signifies "a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoy ing" particular things. A person is thus not really free to climb a moun tain unless he possesses the equip ment and skills necessary so to do. Or so asserted Green, surrepti tiously transforming the concept of freedom. Accompanying this meta morphosis was a corresponding transformation of the notion of a right. Some men and women alleg edly do enjoy rights creating correl ative positive obligations in other people. Arbitrary Claims The vision of rights equally en joyed by all and grounded in the hu manity of each and every person faded. In its place emerged a ple thora of arbitrary claims and selfish desires pretentiously called "rights."

President Roosevelt spoke of the rights of all to "freedom from want [and] freedom from enforced idleness or unemployment," albeit granting to privileged unionists the "right" coercively to prevent non-unionists laboring at wage rates below those arbitrarily decreed by unions, a "right" guaranteeing unemploy ment for the weak and the margin alized of a community. Inexorably, a society of free men and women pursuing their diverse 1985 THE PIED PIPER AND OUR CHILDREN 265 visions of the good life, yet bound to gether by the ties of interdepen dence and trust forged in the market place, gave way to a society of com peting special interest groups, vying for favors and thrusting their snouts ever deeper into the government trough. Inexorably, the weakest and poorest went to the wall, the privi leged assuaging their consciences by demanding that those they had forced out of work be paid unem ployment benefits, and that those they had condemned to perpetual poverty be granted welfare pay ments. The politics of principle ca pitulated before the politics of ex pedience, parties competing with one another in the task of formulating policies which benefit groups of peo ple who know what they are receiv ing, and disadvantaging those who do not know what they are paying.

How harmless the tu-ne sounded when first played by the piper. How captivating the melody of positive rights proved to be when first heard. Yet how dark is the mountain into which that piper and that melody would lead us. Equality As the noble cry for rights enjoyed by all was transformed into the shrill demand for special privileges en joyed by some, the dream of equality too became a nightmare. The docu ment speaking of the unalienable rights of all insists that all men "are created equal," and the two asser tions go together. All are equal in that all possess the same rights; the demand for equality is the demand for the recognition, in all people, of those rights human beings as hu man beings share. What is morally outrageous is the notion that the rights of different groups of people differ, and that this difference is grounded in one or more of the cri teria defining these varied groups.

Springing from this revolutionary insight is the principle of equality before the law. Rule must be by known general principles ofjust con duct equally applicable to all in an unknown number of future in stances. Any precept, even if it en joys the approval of the majority, which places the interests of some before the interests of others, or prescribes one vision of the "good life" but proscribes alternative non coercive visions, is thus anathema. Justice does wear a blindfold, treat ing all alike. Dividing the Wealth There are those, however, simi larly speaking of "equality," who dream a different dream. Professor J.R. Lucas puts it thus: "The equal ity vouchsafed us by the equality be fore the law, although valuable and not vacuous, is still much less than the equality the egalitarian seeks." In truth Professor Lucas is too kind: the equality the egalitarian seeks is 266 THE FREEMAN May incompatible with equality before the law, and the equality of rights upon which the rule of law rests.

This other vision of equality today is the. vision of many. Confining our attention merely to economists, one thinks of the late Arthur M. Okun, who asserts that "equality in the distribution of incomes ... would be my ethical preference. Abstracting from the costs and the consequences, I would prefer more equality of in come to less and would like complete equality best of all." Joining him is Charles E. Lindblom, who asserts that the closer societies move toward absolute equality of income and of wealth, the more they "approximate [to] the humanitarian vision." Cer tainly, no economic reasons for this ideal are proffered. Perhaps the absence of any eco nomic defense of egalitarianism is no accident. The late Henry C. Simons, in his celebrated study of progres sive taxation, utterly demolished in his capacity as an economist all pseudo-economic defenses of such a policy and its egalitarian underpin nings, but concluded that "drastic progression in taxation" is an im perative because the distribution of wealth and income effected by mar ket capitalism in a free society "re veals a degree (and/or kind) of in equality that is distinctly evil or un lovely [sic]." Such a strange appeal to an aesthetic consideration is echoed by Professor A.B. Atkinson who, in a volume detailing real and imag ined inequalities obtaining in con temporary Britain, finds it unnec essary to devote more than a page to explaining what is wrong with these inequalities, and apparently regards as decisive an observation by an other writer to the effect that "equality has a particularly power ful aesthetic appeal." Precisely how an aesthetic judgment can lead to a moral imperative and justify the de gree of political coercion that imper ative allegedly legitimates, is, sad to say, not explained.

Equality of Results Let us get back to basics. The word "equality," and its cognate expres sions "equal" and "equally," signify a relation. Two or more objects are "equal" in respect of a given quality or characteristic if they possess that quality or characteristic to the same degree. Two or more lengths of wood may be "equal" in length. Two or more material objects may be "equal" in mass. Absolute equality in all characteristics or qualities is impossible, for if two entities, A and B, are distinct, then each possesses at least one characteristic or quality the other lacks-minimally, spatio temporal location. Used of human beings, the adjective "equal" is quite inappropriate, for it is utterly im possible to specify any characteristic or quality all people possess to the same degree. That is fortunate: it 1985 THE PIED PIPER AND OUR CHILDREN 267 means that people are not inter changeable, for if A and B are equal in some respect they are, in that re spect, interchangeable.

This truism leads to a familiar di lemma. If "equal" opportunities are extended to people of unequal abil ities, unequal outcomes result. Yet if opportunities are so allocated that equal outcomes· result, that alloca tion of opportunities must have been characterized by inequality. A policy defended on the grounds of equality can thus no less plausibly be at tacked on the ground of inequality. Such was painfully evident in the controversies surrounding the much publicized and debated Bakke case. Prima facie, it seems impossible to formulate any public policy which generates equality along all of the important dimensions in which hu man beings have an interest. Em pirically, it is far from obvious that the rectification of various social in equalities of outcome by manipulat ing the distribution of opportunities (by, for example, policies of positive discrimination) has proved particu larly beneficial from the viewpoint of the "victims" of the alleged injus tice being rectified.

Nor is it obvious that the "correc tion" of all inequalities affecting the well-being of human beings results in a morally "more desirable" state of affairs. The grotesque worlds of L.P. Hartley's Facial Justice, in which handsome men and beautiful women are "cured" by surgery rem edying their envy-provoking ex cesses of sexual appeal, and of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeran, in which people with abilities above the norm are "equalized" by the im plantation of anti-pacesetters, are hardly morally desirable worlds. The examples, admittedly, are bizarre, but they usefully underscore the di rectionless nature of the imperative to eliminate inequalit,ies. Equal Abuse Similarly, the prescriptive inter pretation of "equality" is, consid ered in isolation, of little or no rel evance to social ethics. People are treated equally if they are treated equally badly; they are treated with equal consideration or equal respect if they are treated with equally little consideration or equally little re spect. The moral imperative to treat human beings with consideration or respect is more demanding than the imperative to treat them with equal consideration or equal respect. The demand for "equality" is not, in other words, a· demand for quality.

Nor does a commitment to equality somehow "add" to the value of mor ally contemptible behavior: the sa dist who occasionally softens and spares an intended victim is not "morally worse" than the consistent sadist who tortures all of his victims with egalitarian efficiency. Human history testifies to the ter268 THE FREEMAN May rible consequences of the attempt somehow to make human beings "equal." Even the seemingly benign attempt to establish equality of wealth or of income demands, as Robert Nozick has argued, a dicta torial State ruthlessly suppressing individual liberty. Nozick's point was eloquently stated some two cen turies ago by David Hume, who noted that even if possessions are "rendered ever so equal," the ex changing of goods or the giving of gifts rapidly would "break" that equality. "The most rigorous inqui sition is requisite" to check such be havior on its "first appearance," as is "the most severe jurisdiction to punish and redress it."

Once again, however, pipers play ing a tune based on the theme of an "equality" quite other than equality of rights and equality before the law, are, today, familiar figures. The young follow them. The identity of these pipers is not difficult to deter mine. One thinks of such household names as Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. One thinks of prominent journalists contributing to once respected newspapers. And if one is wise, one recalls the adults of Hamelin, who remembering their principles too late, lost their children. EconomicGrowth Finally, I draw your attention to the understanding of wealth and of conquest ofpoverty that captured the minds and the imaginations of those who, long ago, first dared a dream of a world in which destitution was no more. How foolish their dream seemed to their contemporaries. Everyone knew that poverty, historically, was the norm. Everyone knew that life expectancy was, in the France of 1800, twenty-four years for males and twenty-seven years for females, and France was then the wealthiest nation in the world. Everyone knew that in 1780, over eighty per cent of French families spent ninety per cent of their income upon bread.

Everyone in eighteenth-century Eu rope and European colonies knew that life, for the masses, was basi cally nasty, brutish, and invariably short. Everyone knew that the wealth of nations was something given and unchanging, and that one nation could improve its situation only by worsening the situation of other nations. But a dream was born. Maybe wealth could be created. Maybe trade and exchange could benefit all. Maybe the material well-being of all could be increased. Maybe if the hu man spirit was unfettered and was released to experiment and to cre ate, food sufficient for all to eat and clothing sufficient for all to wear and shelter sufficient for all to enjoy might become a reality. And it happened. In one short cen1985 THE PIED PIPER AND OUR CHILDREN 269 tury the working populace of Britain quadrupled. Real per capita income doubled between 1800 and 1850, and doubled again between 1850 and 1900. This sixteen-fold increase in wealth-this sixteen-fold increase in the goods and services available-did more in one hundred years to ame liorate poverty and exorcise the specter of destitution than had mil lennia of human history and eigh teen centuries ofpreaching about the virtue of charity.

DiscoveringUses for PreviouslyIdle Resources Men and women began to see that resources were not simply "there" to be enjoyed but were created when human creativity and hitherto use less products of nature came to gether. Human creativity took a black, viscous substance, known from Biblical days and once margin ally useful for the making of ink and perfume, and gave it a new use. A new source of energy-oil-thus came into being. Human creativity took dead rocks-anthracite coal and discovered how to ignite these rocks, and the steamship and the lo comotive became realities. People actually began to think of progress; began to realize that the new and the unexpected could burst into being, displace what was the case. and al ways had been the case, and better satisfy human needs and desires. Yet, during the 1960s many men and women, like mediums conduct ing a seance, conjured up the dead.

The old picture of wealth as some thing fixed and unchanging was res urrected. The old vision that de picted the gains of some as demanding corresponding losses by others rose from the ashes. To take but one case, Paul Ehrlich in 1968 published a volume, The Population Bomb, proclaiming a dis mal future for this fragile planet. I cite this volume because it asserted that 1984 would witness the fulfill ment of the dire prophecies Paul Ehrlich made. I, as a visitor to this nation-if Ehrlich's most hopeful scenario for the future had become a reality-would be observing a coun try within which steak was but a memory. Between 1973 and 1983 the world would have witnessed one bil lion men, women, and children starving to death. The United States would have imposed strict food ra tioning. Riots would have torn this country apart when Congress during the mid-1970s passed the Family-size Regulation Act. Smog would be ubiquitous. The telephone system would be no more. Unemployment would be the lot of twenty-seven per cent of the potential workforce.

Globally, disaster would reign. Since India's food production had reached its maximum potential in 1967 1968, that nation, and similar Third World nations, would be haunted by the dread horsemen of famine 270 THE FREEMAN May and of death. Or so Paul Ehrlich prophesied. He was wrong. In the 1970s I~dia, after three disastrous decades of so cialist agricultural policies, largely deregulated agriculture. Price con trols on food were lifted. Tax reforms were effected enabling farmers to re tain more of the earnings from the produce they sold. Decisions as to what to plant were taken from cen tral planners and restored to farm ers themselves. In September 1977 U.S. grain exports to India began to wane, for India was almost self sufficient in food. In 1983 India be gan to agonize over the new but wel come problem of how best to store surplus crops. Instead of rising, the birth rate in less developed coun tries has fallen from 2.2 per cent yearly in 1964-1965 to 1.75 per cent yearly in 1982-1983. Global food production, whether measured by grain prices, production per con sumer, or the famine death rate, is vastly better today than ever before.

The cost of such minerals as copper is falling, not rising, human inge nuity having made from sand a sub stance performing one of the uses to which copper once was put, and hav ing launched space satellites substi tuting for the millions of tons of cop per cable global communications once demanded. A higher percent age of the U.S. populace today en gages in paid employment than ever before. Paul Ehrlich and his fellow doom sayers are demonstrably wrong. Yet the pipers of cataclysmic disaster continue to play their dirge. Herbert I. London recently penned a volume entitled, Why Are They Lying To Our Children?, documenting the pro longed after-life of discredited dog mas about the limits of growth. Sur veying sixty-eight school textbooks, London notes that the future therein depicted, based on demonstrably false statistical evidence, flawed methodological assumptions, and ut ter economic ignorance, is a future of depleted resources.

So in my own country. A set text book for all students in my State de sirous of sitting university entrance examinations is penned by a biolo gist, Professor Charles Birch, and it too depicts a desert-like future, with ering any hope of a world in which destitution is no more. The very best strategy that Charles Birch, and his U.S. counterparts, can recommend is a world government coercively re distributing present wealth. What has failed in the U.S.S.R., failed in mainland China, failed in Tanzania, failed in Cuba, and failed wherever it has been tried is, apparently, to be implemented on a global basis. Observed disaster is not, it would seem, sufficient to silence the dread piper playing the terrible tune that is "socialism." Play he still does, and the young-and sometimes the not so-young-mindlessly follow.

1985 THE PIED PIPER AND OUR CHILDREN 271 Conclusion Yet, I cling, and shall continue to cling, to the hem of hope. For there is another piper playing a very dif ferent tune. He was heard during the fifth cen tury B.C. in the city-state of Athens, and human beings began to dream of rule not by a tyrant's whim or a mob's caprice, but by law. He was heard by those men and women in medieval England, who made Magna Carta-the great Constitutio Liber tatis-a reality, and forged a weapon before which all despots trembled, knowing their days were numbered. He was heard again in the eigh teenth century by thinkers who challenged the world of guild and of caste and of privilege and of legally fixed relations that was mercantil ism. He was heard again by those who fled tyranny for a new and bet ter world, and who penned the Vir ginia Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the First Ten Amendments to that Constitution.

And he still is heard by ordinary peo ple who, suffering under today's ty rants, listen to their short-wave radios and, with tired and hurting fingers, transcribe the works of Sol zhenitsyn and risk the concentration camp and the so-called psychiatric hospital in obedience to this other piper playing this other tune. And what about us? We too have heard the piper who lures us by the song of liberty. We know we shall lose our children. After all, we know we never owned them in the first place. Yet to what pipers shall we lose them? I spoke earlier of those sad and sorry men and women who betray the heritage of which they are the beneficiaries. I spoke earlier of their attempts to cheat our young people of that heritage. I thus remind you of the task the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead laid upon the shoulders of men and women such as we. What is that task? Simply to bring before the growing minds of our children "the habitual vision of greatness." When Matthew Arnold was installed as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, the great Benjamin Jow ett pleaded with him to do one thing: "Teach us not to criticize, but to ad mire." Taken at face value, that plea was somewhat wholesale. There is that in my nation's history, and in your nation's history, which ought not to be admired. That is where crit icism comes in. Yet the irony is that our shared heritage enshrines the very principles by which that merit ing criticism is identified and that meriting condemnation stands condemned.

To insinuate a note of admiration in a generation reared in skepticism and cynicism is no easy task. Yet to no less a task are we called. You and I have caught a glimpse of the stars, and it is for us to say "No!" to those 272 THE FREEMAN who would shield the eyes of our children from ever seeing those stars. In the final analysis, we can not fail. For at the very heart of life yes, at the very heart of God-lies freedom. Humankind, bearing the imago Dei-the Image of God-can never be content until freedom is a reality known to all and enjoyed by all. The tune the piper of liberty plays is the tune that pulsates and throbs through all that is, and which finds voice in that tiny part of the cosmos which has become aware of itself, the human spirit. God grant that you, that I, that our children, keep our ears open to the piper who testifies to the reality of liberty built into the very fabric of our being. For it is only as we and our children follow that piper that we shall discover what Whitman sang of: "life immense in passion, pulse, and power"; and what the Reprints . ..

Jewish Rabbi of Nazareth meant when He spoke of "life, and life abundant." @ -BIBLIOGRAPHY Green, T. H. "Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract," in The Works of Thomas Hill Green, ed. R. L. Nettleship. London: Mac millan, 1889. Hohfeld, W. Fundamental Legal Conceptionsas Applied in Judicial Reasoning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Lindblom, C. E. Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems. New York: Basic Books, 1977. London, H. I. Why Are They Lying to Our Chil dren? New York: Stein and Day, 1983. Nozick, R. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Okun, A. N. Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1975. Schumpeter J. Capitalism, Socialism, and De mocracy. New York: Harper and Row, 1942. Simons, H. C. Personal Income Taxation. Chi cago: University of Chicago Press, 1938. Simon, J. L. The Ultimate Resource. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

A Page on Freedom Each of these brief messages is a handy way to share with friends, teachers, editors, clergymen, employees and others a thought-starter on liberty. It also serves to introduce the reader to our work at FEE. See page 259 for this month's Page on Freedom. (Copies of previous messages are also available; specify title when ordering.) Small quan tities, no charge; 100 or more, 5 cents each. Or, feel free to reprint the message in your own format if you'd prefer. We hope you'll enjoy this feature! Order from: FOUNDATIONFOR ECONOMICEDUCATION,INC. IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON,NEW YORK 10533 Dennis Bechara Eminent Domain and The Rule of Law ONE ofthe distinguishing features of a free society is its defense of the right of private property. As every individual has the right to his life, . so has he the right to those things necessary to sustain life-among them, the private ownership of prop erty and the ability to keep the fruits of his labor. Those rights not only as sure that the individual enjoy the life and liberty promised him by a free society, but also assure continued freedom, independence, and security for all.