The Literature of Liberty; E. Opitz and R. Batemarco

Leonard's point was that a speech is little more than entertainment unless it persuades listeners to head for the library and hit the hooks. The main tool of the spoken word The Reverend Mr. Opitz, a contributing editor of The Freeman, was a senior staff member of the Foundation for Economic Education until his retirement in 1992. He was book review editor of The Freeman for many years. In addition to editing the book review section of The Freeman, Dr. Batemarco is a marketing research manager in New York City and teaches economics at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York. is rhetoric, which engages the imagination, the emotions, and the will. The written word, when seriously employed, also does this and much, much more. A good book aims at the intellect, relying mainly on reason and logic, using rhetorical devices only to buttress the argument, and employ ing examples from history and common experience to drive a point home.

An ordinary speech, after thirty or forty minutes, vanishes into thin air, except for the fragments which linger in the memory. And memory is fallible, as every speaker is painfully aware when reading the recon structionofhis remarksby a reporter, even by a reporter who is both trained and sym pathetic. Once the speech is ended, a lis tener cannot easily refresh his memory of a specificpoint or a marvelous illustration that faded in an overextended attention span. The written word is different. A book may become a permanent possession which you can turn to again and again to better grasp the argument used by the writer to reach his conclusion-which so impressed you at the time, but which you now cannot recall! Find the right page, the matter becomes clear and the author's point clicks into the right slot in your memory bank. Thus did Leonard, in the course ofa very successful career as a public speaker, reach the conclusion that The Book is the most successful tool of genuine education. He decided to found an institution whose major purpose would be the publishing of books expounding the freedom philosophy in the contemporary American idiom.

Some of the great classics of liberty were 393 394 THE FREEMAN • MAY 1996 available in the mid-1940s: The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Federalist Papers, and some of the writings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison-all in eigh teenth-century prose, which differs some what from twentieth-century American! John Stuart Mill's On Liberty was available, but Herbert Spencer's Man versus the State was almost impossible to obtain in the 1930s in this country. Late in that decade Jim Gipson, the dedicated publisher in Idaho, read Albert Jay Nock's essay on Spencer and persuaded Nock to re-edit Man versus the State and provide a new introduction. The book got one appreciative review in a nationally syndicated column, but sales were meager. And then came an order for 500 copies from the Los Angeles Chamber! Thenceforth, as Leonard relates, he took cartons of the book to every meeting of the Chamber members and laid them under heavy persuasion to buy a copy of Spencer's classic collection of essays.

In 1943 three dauntless women, friends of Leonard, wrote challenging books on their own, opposing collectivism and upholding the ideal of individual liberty. In alphabeti cal order they were Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom; Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine; and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. This last, a novel, has attracted a large following and-together with Ms. Rand's later writings-constitutes the cement binding together a significant movement of our time. The God of the Machine was remaindered in 1946, but is now back in print with an excellent and comprehensive new introduction. The Dis covery of Freedom was reincarnated by Henry Grady Weaver, and self-published as Mainspring. FEE bought the rights to this book, expanded the title to The Main spring of Human Progress, and has sold about a millioncopies. Lane turns first to the ancient Israelites, the people of the Old Testament, who planted the first seeds of freedom. Her final section explores our own sector of the planet where those early seeds came to fullest expression in America's founding documents and the political insti tutions they projected. These two sections of Lane's book cover ground fairly familiar to most readers, but chapter ten on the Saracens is an eye-opener. Islam is one of the three great monotheistic religions; it is worldwide, and has made contributions to western art, philosophy, literature, and sci ence, especially during the Middle Ages.

The Holy Qu'ran offers spiritualguidancefor all Muslims, and it also deals with the laws, morals, and customary practice incumbent in every Islamic society. It has much to teach members of other faiths as well. The Foundation" opened for business" in mid-1946; its first publication followed shortly. This was a book on wage theory by the head of the economics department at Yale, Fred Fairchild, a founding trustee of FEE. Fairchild's name is well remembered as one of the authors of the most widely used economic texts of the 1920sand early 1930s, Principles of Economics, in two fat blue volumes, by Fairchild, Furness, and Buck. A series of pamphlets began to roll off FEE's presses, on economic topics of im portance: tariffs, inflation, price controls, and the like. These were staff-written, in excellent prose, timely, and attractively printed. Nothing quite like them was avail able and the after-market orders came in by the tens of thousands.

Leonard had accumulated a small mailing list of friends and acquaintances from his years with the Chamber, and people who had been impressed with one or more of his speeches and left a card. They responded to his modus operandi: FEE would be a small group of scholars doing independent re search and writing which, after surviving peer criticism, would be issued as a pam phlet. Each publication would be sent to those on the mailing list, and to others on request. Leonard had faith that if FEE's work was worthy, it would arouse interest, which would lead to financial support (a neat bit of symbiosis), and it worked. Leonard wrote a pamphlet with an intriguing title, "Students of Liberty. " It was part confes sion, along the lines of: We of the FEE staff set out to be teachers, but the more deeply we delved into the complex issues of human freedom the more we realized that we were only learners-at best! We will do our best to learn, and we invite anyone interested in this learning process to look over our shoul ders and share our results. At the first indication of your interest your name willbe added to our mailing list without cost or obligation. . . .

Leonard abhorred fundraising, but he did have a low key way of informing the FEE readership that FEE depends on voluntary contributions. For example, he'd enclose a reply envelope with this typical colloquy: "How's The Foundation doing financially, Leonard? ... We're doing as well as you want us to do; if you want us to do better, tuck your check in the attached reply en velope!" This seemed to work well for the first thirty or so years of FEE's operation; but time, and the mores, change. FEE got into the book business early. on. Henry Hazlitt, a founding trustee, had written Economics in One Lesson, which was published by Harper and has been one of the bestselling economics texts ever well over a million copies worldwide, in twelve languages, with about a third of these sold by the Foundation. Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French politician and economic journalist. Leonard came under Bastiat' s spell, espe cially his essay on The Law, which carefully elucidates the proper role of government in society. The mid-nineteenth-century Brit ish translation was unsatisfactory, so a FEE staffer was asked to put The Law into modem American idiom. Dean Russell's livelyprose transformed the book into a best seller, with sales of more than half a million copies.

In the early 1950s FEE published four books: F.A. Harper's Liberty: A Path to Its Recovery; W. M. Curtiss's The Tariff Idea; Dean Russell's The TVA Idea; and Read's Government: An Ideal Concept. During this same period, FEE began to anthologize material previously published as pamphlets, (and, later included selections from The Freeman). Thus began the series of vol umes, of about 400 pages each, called Es says on Liberty, volumes I through XII, published from 1952 to 1965. THE LITERATURE OF LIBERTY 395 Dr. Paul Poirot assumed editorship of The Freeman with the January 1956issue. Every month for thirty years Paul Poirot sifted through a pile of manuscripts, published the essays and reviews consistent with FEE's purpose, and wrote graciously to those whose manuscripts he rejected. Bound volumes of The Freeman have ap peared annually since 1965, each carefully indexed: a veritable encyclopedia.

The literature produced by the Founda tion-pamphlets, books, its journal-plus its hundreds of seminars and summer schools began to affect public opinion. Here and there a professor, or a clergyman, began to feel a kinship with our "freedom philos ophy." More and more young people began to question the collectivist consensus. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (then called the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists) began its operation from an officeon FEE's third floor, circulating FEE's literature to college students. The word continued to spread; new journals appeared, thinkers of our persuasion began to teach and write; and the intellectual climate began to change, to the point where even some mainstream publishers produced an occasional book "of our kind." Now FEE's book catalogue stocks more than 400 titles! Under President Sennholz's energetic publishing program, FEE continues to expand its own releases.

A sampling, herewith, of the current FEE catalogue: Ludwig von Mises is acknowledged by many as the greatest economic thinker of our time; perhaps of all time. Before coming to the United States in 1940,Mises had made a name for himselfwith his Theory ofMoney and Credit, Socialism, and other volumes of like stature. After arriving on these shores he contacted Henry Hazlitt, who had re viewed Socialism in the New York Times, and with whom he had corresponded. Haz litt introduced Mises to Leonard Read, who later enlisted Mises as an adviser for the Foundation. Mises' masterpiece, Human Action, was in gestation at this point, and in 1949 it was published by Yale University Press, but only after FEE had agreed to buy a sufficient 396 THE FREEMAN • MAY 1996 number of copies to cover publication costs. The FEE catalogue lists fourteen Mises titles in addition to Human Action. Hans Sennholz earned his doctorate un der Mises at New York University, as did· FEE Trustee Israel Kirzner, who is now a professor at that university. Selections from both appear in the catalogue.

Adam Smith's 1776 The Wealth of Na tions is also listed, along with two seminal eighteenth-century works of political phi losophy: Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and our own classic, The Federalist Papers. During the latter part of the nineteenth century there appeared two books which, taken together, represent the fountainhead of the Austrian School: Carl Menger's The Principles of Economics, and Bohm-Bawerk's three volume Capital and Interest (English trans lation by Sennholz). Nobel Prize Laureate Hayek studied with Mises in Vienna, and is represented in the catalogue with The Road to Serfdom, The Constitution of Liberty, and eight other titles. Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson is there, along with eight other titles and a 350-page anthology of his writings. And there's the late Murray Rothbard's compre hensive Man, Economy and State in two hefty volumes.

When a revived Freeman was launched in New York in 1950, John Chamberlain was one ofits three editors, and was writing most of the book reviews. The Foundation took overthejournal in 1955and moved its offices to Irvington. Chamberlain, one of the na tion's finest book critics, continued his bril liant Freeman reviews until his death in 1995.Four of his books are in the catalogue. George Roche left the FEE staff to be come President of Hillsdale College. His Legacy of Freedom was written while he was at FEE. It is carried by FEE along with eight other titles. Veteran FEE staffer Bet tina Bien Greaves has spent a lot of time with her typewriter (now computer), and in research. She spelled out basic Austrian economics in two folio volumes: one, a book of theory, listing activities for classroom or personal instruction, and the second, Edmund Opitz was FEE's resident theologian and Freeman book review editor until his retirement in 1992.

a collection of readings. She spent years of research in completing Mises: An Anno tated Bibliography. I myself, a longtime FEE staffer, am represented in the cata logue with two books dealing with those sectors of society where economics, politi cal theory, and theology interact. In the early days of FEE some words of Albert Schweitzer were at work in the hinterland of Leonard's mind: "Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it. . . . A new public opinion must be created pri vately and unobtrusively." This was· the tactic of liberty as Leonard expounded it. Behold how it works! Leonard Read's dream of a library of books expounding the literature of liberty has been fulfilled . . . and more. His own contribution to. that library began in 1937 with his first book, The Romance ofReality.

Twenty-seven more books followed, books of essays in the Emersonian vein, distilling the wisdom he had gained in a lifetime of work in the vineyard. Leonard left the body in 1983, but his inspiration lingers on in the thousands of people who live now at higher levels of achievement because of their en counters with him. -EAO Part II M y initial encounter with The Freeman took place in the fall of 1974 when I saw an issue in the magazine display case at Georgetown University's Lauinger Library. It was a memorable time for partisans of liberty. For us, 1974 was that darkest part of the night which comes before the dawn. The year in which Richard Nixon was forced from office for the least of his misdeeds marked the end of a decade in which gov ernment made stepping beyond its proper bounds into an art form. The most conspicuous encroachments of that era included the welfare state programs of the so-called Great Society, the sending of half a million conscripts to fight a war having no direct bearing on our national security, spoiling the achievement of elim inating government-sanctioned constraints based on race (Jim Crow) by establishing others (affirmative action), creating govern ment agencies like OSHA and the EPA to micromanage the affairs of private busi nesses, the explicit adoption of Keynesian ism as a guide for management of the econ omy, abandonment of the last vestiges of the gold standard, and the imposition of wage and price controls.

By 1974,the effects of these policies were starting to manifest themselves: the emer gence of an underclass typified by welfare dependency and unprecedented rates of il legitimacy, rising unemployment, high in flation, a plummeting dollar, and long wait ing lines for gasoline. The one bright note in this rhapsody of ruination was that more fingers were pointing at government as the culprit than at any time since the reign of George III. At this same time, Austrian Economics was starting to re-emergeafter three deTHE LITERATURE OF LIBERTY 397 cades of undeserved obscurity. A confer ence on Austrian Economics held in South Royalton, Vermont, in June 1974 was a major event in the formation of a new generation of Austrian economists. Later that year, F.A. Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, reviving interest within the economics profession at large. Conferences and prizes are all well and good, but neither compares with books in terms of laying the groundwork for a deep understanding of what is meant by a free society, how far we have strayed from that ideal, and how to return to it. Certainly books were what did it for me. Let me share with you some of the books that were instrumental in shaping my development as an economist and an adherent of FEE's freedom philosophy. Although my initiation into the literature of liberty is a mere sam pling of an exhaustive body, I hope other developing expositors of freedom will find this list helpful.

The first steps of my transformation from a college graduate who had but an inchoate feeling that something was wrong with the Keynesian economics he had recently learned to a full-fledgedAustrian were taken under the guidance of Henry Hazlitt. I read his The Failure of the "New Economics" side-by-side and chapter-by-chapter with Keynes's The General Theory of Employ ment, Interest and Money, which Hazlitt's work so brilliantly took to task. Not only did Hazlitt make clear to me what a powerful engine of analysis Austrian economics was, he even permitted me to understand Keynes more clearly than the English inflationist's own murky prose was capable of doing. Another book which not only deepened my economic understanding, but also chan neled it in directions far afield of anything I had heard in a university classroom was The Foundations of Modern Austrian Econom ics, edited by Edwin G. Dolan. This book contained the papers presented by Murray Rothbard, Israel Kirzner, and Ludwig Lachmann at the aforementioned South Royalton conference. I was already aware, through Hazlitt, that the Austrians had their own theory of business cycle. This book, 398 THE FREEMAN • MAY 1996 with its many discussions of methodology and the role of values in economic science, set me to thinking about a whole new set of issues distinguishing the Austrian approach from the standard fare served up in most universities' economics departments.

The case for the free market does not rest on economics alone. The moral case for capitalism is even more important, es pecially in a century where interventionists and socialists of every stripe have had so much success in usurping the moral high ground. Ayn Rand's greatest appeal to me is that she refused to let them get away with it. Never much drawn to novels, I made my acquaintance with her powerful ideas through two of her books of essays: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Her smit ing of collectivism root and branch and her defense of reason versus the adulation of emotion, which so dominates our culture, made an immediate and lasting impression. She and her other contributors, especially Robert Hessen and Alan Greenspan, put a revisionist spin on such issues as antitrust legislation, the gold standard, and American economic history. I was fortunate to have read her works, and doubly fortunate to have done so when I was old enough not to have been infected by her hostility to religion and personal charity, as were many who first read her in their impressionable teen years.

Indeed, the more I understood about free market capitalism, the more I realized that it ultimately rested on the biblical in junction "Thou shalt not steal. " One author who hammered this point home to me most effectively was Frederic Bastiat. His Selected Essays on Political Economy con tains such classic essays as "The Law," "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen," "The State," and "Property and Plunder." With ineluctable logic, he strips away the pretensions which delude people into be lieving that pillage is "less criminal because it is carried out legally and in an orderly manner, " by the state, of course. While the religious basis of Bastiat' s moral case for capitalism was implicit, Edmund Opitz spelled out the relationship between revealed religion and economics in Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies (1970). The confusion of Christian charity with the welfare state has not only caused too many Christians to reject free market economics, but has also caused too many free-market economists to reject Christianity. By spelling out the unbridge able nature of the chasm between Christian charity and the welfare state, Opitz helped to reduce both types of rejections. He also showed the inadequacy of purely material istic conceptions of the production process, citing Mises' claim that, "[p]roduction is a spiritual, intellectual, and ideological phe nomenon."

The spiritual side of production was also emphasized by George Gilder in his influ ential paean to the supply side, Wealth and Poverty. While somewhat flawed in its mac roeconomics, this book put the future oriented, risk-taking behavior of the entre preneur in its rightful place as the key to economic prosperity. The sheer creativity of entrepreneurs precludes either modeling and describing an economy accurately with the contents of the econometrician's tool box or of running it from the command post of the central planners. With a plethora of irresistible examples to flesh out the sources of wealth and poverty, Gilder brings to life the entrepreneurs who make prosperity pos sible. I already mentioned that even in my undergraduate days, I knew that something was wrong with the Keynesian macroeco nomics I was taught, even ifI could not quite put my finger on precisely what. It was not until a few years later, when I was on the other side of the desk as a college professor, that I could no longer sidestep the inade quacies of standard microeconomic theory.

The book which most clearly elucidated the nature of the problem to me was Friedrich Hayek's Individualism and Economic Or der. It was here that I read the clearest explanation I've seen to date of how the standard model of pure competition actually justifies the suppression of competition in the name of competition. His incisive treatment of the nature and role of knowledge in economic activity permitted me to under stand the workings of the economy in a totally different way. His chapters on the socialist calculation debate provided a clas sic application of his theoretical insights. Clearly, if these books are right, a great portion of the economics profession is wrong. And if those trained in economics can't get it right, one might expect non economists to be totally at a loss. But not in the case of Paul Johnson. That journalist's monumental history of the twentieth cen tury, Modern Times, explains much of the tragedy that has befallen those years as the inevitable consequences of moral relativ ism. It is one of the few histories I have ever read which embraces sound economics.

Finding his chapter on the depression of the 1930s to lean heavily on Murray Roth bard's America's Great Depression was a pleasant surprise. In laying bare the ties that link socialism and fascism, in showing how Third World despots ravaged their home lands while pinning blame on a West only too eager to plead guilty, and even in reha bilitating the tattered image of President Warren G. Harding, who with seventy years of hindsight turns out to have been a sur prisingly tough act to follow, Johnson is at once informative, entertaining, and icono clastic. While Johnson looks at some of the root causes of this century's worldwide plunge into statism, Robert Higgs takes a different approach. He wields public choice theory with consummate skill to show the oppor tunistic nature of the state in Crisis and Leviathan. His theme of government growth feeding upon crisis helps us to un derstand not only how government arro gates ever more power to itself, but also why it seldom relinquishes that power once the precipitating crisis is over. The historical record he thus analyzes illustrates this pro cess occurring regardless of the party in power. In so doing, it makes clear how much more important are the similarities which bind such presidential pairs as Hoover and Roosevelt and Johnson and Nixon than the differences which distinguish them.

THE LITERATURE OF LIBERTY 399 Of course, saying that there are tenden cies for the government to grow is not the same as saying that such growth is auto matic. Government cannot grow without many people choosing for it to grow. The recent demise of various socialist regimes around the world indicates more and more people choosing for it not to grow. In this country, the headlong rush to grant ever more power to the state has been, if not stopped, at least slowed. Perhaps the ideas in the aforementioned books have had some consequences which were not unintended. More people, including some in positions of power, seem to possess sound economic ideas, strong convictions regarding the sheer immorality of the redistributive appa ratus of the state, and the ability to foresee the inevitable results of the state extending its tentacles into myriad activities where it does not belong than was the case in that pivotal year of 1974. All of the books whose influence I have cited have helped contrib ute to that outcome.

And the Foundation for Economic Edu cation has helped by disseminating these books and others. Henry Hazlitt was a founding trustee of FEE, which published the most recent edition of his Failure of the "New Economics." The Foundations of Austrian Economics features contributions by Israel Kirzner and Murray Rothbard. Kirzner long served as a trustee of the Foundation and has contributed many arti cles to The Freeman over the years, while Rothbard has also had a number of pieces grace the pages of FEE's monthly. The translation of Bastiat's Selected Essays in Political Economy that I read was published by FEE. Edmund Opitz, author of Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies, served many years on the Foundation's staff; and Robert Higgs, Crisis and Levia than's author, is a contributing editor of The Freeman. While neither Gilder, Hayek, Johnson, nor Rand had any officialrelation ship with FEE, those works of theirs which I mentioned are currently carried in the FEE book catalogue.

May FEE's next fiftyyears build upon the framework it has laid in its first fifty.-RB A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK reprinted from The Freeman, November 1964 The Case for the Free Market by John Chamberlain E very fourth year we get involved in the frenzied madness of a presidential election. Watching the quadrennial show, Leonard E. Read correctly estimates that politicians are powerless of themselves to change things. The politico, when he is running for office, is a mere resultant of forces. The way to move society on its axis is not to play politics. It is to persuade teachable people to think as you do. And the best way to do this is to be a good personal living example of the philosophy you hope to spread. Leonard Read is not running for office, so he can freely say what some people would describe as the damnedest things.-His book, Anything That's Peaceful: the Case for the Free Market wouldn't! get him through the New Hampshire primary. He believes that government should be limited to such things as keeping the peace, preventing fraud, dispensing justice, and fending off attacks by foreign powers. He says it is violent coercion to force Social Security on any body. He thinks that Robin Hood, who advocated taking money from one set of people to give it to another, should properly be called Robin Hoodlum. He argues that any type of government economic interven tion forces human energy into shapes that Mr. Chamberlain (1903-1995) wrote the lead book review for The Freeman for more than thirty-five years.