The Case for the Free Market; J. Chamberlin

John Chamberlain's monthly "Notebook" graced our pages for more than three decades. are marketable only at the end of the police club. He doesn't consider that people think well in committee. He refuses to vote when the choice is between two trimmers. He challenges the idea that the government is peculiarly fitted to run the post office, or to maintain schools, or to plan the coming of either a good or great society. In short, his opinions are such that he couldn't be elected to the office of dog catcher, let alone win a state primary. Nevertheless, Mr. Read, by insisting that the state should not intervene to keep people from doing anything at all that's peaceful, is beginning to shake up American society as no political figure has ever managed to do. I know this because I have witnessed the comeback of the freedom philosophy over the past twenty years. Mr. Read began in the nineteen forties as a still, small voice.

He had a few accomplices then. There were a couple of emigrant economists of the Vienna neo-liberal school taking issue with the dominant Keynesian hosts. Three wom en-Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson, and Rose Wilder Lane-were wondering what had gotten into men to make them think that the way to release energy was to deliver every body to the dictates of a public planning authority. The columnists, radio commen tators, and magazine writers who believed in economic freedom could be counted on a couple of hands. When the writer of this 401 402 THE FREEMAN • MAY 1996 review teamed up with Henry Hazlitt and Suzanne La Follette to start The Freeman, he was told by an old friend, his first night city editor, that he had better consult a psychiatrist, for surely he was sick, sick, sick. All of this was scarcely a generation ago. Mr. Read still sounds extreme to the con ventional way of thinking when he says that education would be improved if there were no tax-supported public schools. But pri vate schools throughout America have started to come back in recent years with a rush.

Mr. Read doesn't think you necessarily have to forbid socialistic enterprise by law to restore freedom. Take this matter of the federal monopoly of mail delivery, for in stance. Mr. Read is satisfied that if the law were changed to permit private corporations to undertake the delivery of mail, and if an unsubsidized Post Office were to be put on an accounting basis comparable to that forced on private industry, some ingenious free enterprisers would soon compete the government out of the mail business. For what, so Mr. Read asks, is so difficultabout delivering mail? The telephone company, in transporting the human voice three thou sand miles from New York to San Fran cisco, does something that takes much more ingenuity. And, so Mr. Read adds, the American Telephone and Telegraph Com pany showed a profit of $22 billion when the Post Office was losing $10 billion. That the climate has changed since Mr.

Read, with a handful of confederates, started to preach the freedom philosophy is proved by the lip service that is now being paid to libertarian generalities. A candidate for vice president resigns as co-chairman of the socialistic Americans for Democratic Action and makes a sudden appearance before a number of important businessmen to assure them that he isn't anti-business. An occupant of the White House invites a prominent publisher to Washington to as sure him he is all for self-made men. The TVA may still be regarded as sacrosanct, even when it bums· coal to add to the electricity that is made by use of water power, but it is getting tougher to sell huge river development schemes to the public. During the twenty years I've known him, Mr. Read has not, to the extent of my knowledge, ever argued for or against any specific Congressional bill as such. He has not attacked or supported specific men for specific public office. This is not because he values tax exemption for his foundation, for it is part of his fundamental creed. He can't have voted very often in his lifetime, for he believes that it isjust as wrong to vote for a small-scale trimmer as it is to vote for a big one. As this country reckons things, he is the completely nonpolitical man. He even argues that we might do better if we were to choose our Congressmen for non-recurring terms by lot, for by such a method we would get representatives who would have no stake in buying voters with their own money. Such obliviousness to the emotions that are unleashed in most breasts in a campaign year is a marvel to behold.

Yet I do not doubt that Mr. Read will one day be a chief architect of a change in this country that will have a profound effect on our philosophy of government. He is a positive force, and, being such, he shapes the adaptation of other people without but tonholing them, or demanding that they vote for this or that bill or this or that man. I say this with profound admiration, even though I have often, in my lifetime, voted for the man whom I have regarded as the "lesser evil." I have always been hopeful that a "lesser evil" might, in office,be more likely than a "greater evil" to see the light on the Road to Damascus. Almost invari ably I have been disappointed, yet I persist in coming back for more. But contact with Mr. Read has done much to make me serene in the face of continual disappointment in the electoral process. Even "greater evils" can be forced, by changes in the intellectual climate, to slow the pace toward socialist goals. And when the natural listeners and followers in the middle begin to listen to the intellectuals of the right instead of the intel lectuals of the left, even the greatest of "evils" will begin a new career of trimming in the right direction. 0 THEFREEMAN IDEASON UBERTY Bastiat, Liberty, and The Law by Sheldon Richman "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to .live at the expense of everyone else."