Let’s review. “Reopening” is a sham. Shops, restaurants and small businesses, under “reopening”, are being micromanaged by the government–Communist-style. There’s no way they can make a profit and stay open this way. Hair salons can’t survive on two customers at a time, with everyone wearing a gas mask. Retail stores don’t survive on curbside service. You’ve got the Internet for that! Restaurants have the thinnest of profit margins to begin with, and can’t afford restrictions like one-third or one-half capacity. And they’ve already been closed for two months. Plus, we’re told that if someone so much as sneezes, everything will shut down totally again. The message from our tyrants: “You’re lucky we even let you stay open this much. And don’t get used to it.”

Originally, the lockdown was temporary–just to “flatten the curve.” That has long since happened. Now the lockdown is until we get a vaccine. When will we get a vaccine? Will there ever be one? And here’s another question nobody (yet) is asking: Let’s say we have a vaccine tomorrow. How do we ensure that every single person will get the vaccine? Let’s assume that everyone submits and agrees to a vaccine. That won’t happen. Vaccines are (to some) controversial and risky. Even people OK with vaccines will be shaky about this one, because it will clearly be a rush job managed by a government desperate to say “we did something”. But even if every single person submits to a vaccine, how can the government guarantee nobody was left out?

Clearly, that’s impossible. So that will be the next excuse. People like the Michigan governor (who will be in office literally forever, since her permanent emergency order will permit the suspension of elections) will say, “So long as there are holdouts on the vaccine, we clearly can’t reopen.” You can expect that attitude in all Democratic states and probably most Republican ones too, eventually. Why the latter? Because Republicans usually cave, in the end. At least, they always have. And red states can turn blue, and once they do, it’s all over.

And remember: All of this happens in the context of an ever-declining GDP and 25 percent unemployment (as of now). What happens when we get to 50 percent unemployment? Or a negative GDP? On our present course, we will. At what point do we wake up one day and realize we’re … Venezuela? The government cannot print money forever. As much as the sheep would like to believe that everyone can be guaranteed a $50,000/year national salary for sitting at home merely because the government wills it, that salary doesn’t do you much good if (1) there’s little to spend it on, because everything is closed; and (2) the currency becomes worthless, which is what happens when the government hyperinflates the money supply (as it must, to keep sending out stimulus checks). Google “fiat currency” and read what economists have to say about this.

I don’t mean to be negative. But the facts are all negative. Everything the government is doing is WRONG. Virtually all of the gullible assumptions most of us hold right now are WRONG. And the premise that nothing can change until we have a vaccine that there’s no way every single person will inject is fatally WRONG.

The only way out of this mess? To concede that everything we did in the last few months was incredibly, stupidly and savagely WRONG. Like “the greatest mistake in all of human history” wrong.

It’s hard to admit such a big mistake. The arrogant SOBs who inhabit political office will NEVER admit it. They are hopeless, and should be punished, although you can never get back all the lives, wealth and hopes they have already destroyed.

But we the people had better admit our errors, and fast. Because there will be a point of no return, on our present course. I hope we’re not already there.

—Michael J. Hurd

Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy. It is the institution the presence of which characterizes the market economy as such. Where it is absent, there is no question of a market economy.

Ownership means full control of the services that can be derived from a good. This catallactic notion of ownership and property rights is not to be confused with the legal definition of ownership and property rights as stated in the laws of various countries. It was the idea of legislators and courts to define the legal concept of property in such a way as to give to the proprietor full protection by the governmental apparatus of coercion and compulsion, and to prevent anybody from encroaching upon his rights. As far as this purpose was adequately realized, the legal concept of property rights corresponded to the catallactic concept.

However, nowadays there are tendencies to abolish the institution of private property by a change in the laws determining the scope of the actions that the proprietor is entitled to undertake with regard to the things that are his property. While retaining the term private property, these reforms aim at the substitution of public ownership for private ownership. This tendency is the characteristic mark of the plans of various schools of Christian socialism and of nationalist socialism. But few of the champions of these schools have been as keen as the Nazi philosopher Othmar Spann, who explicitly declared that the realization of his plans would bring about a state of affairs in which the institution of private property will be preserved only in a “formal sense, while in fact there will be only public ownership.”

There is need to mention these things in order to avoid popular fallacies and confusion. In dealing with private property, catallactics deals with control, not with legal terms, concepts, and definitions. Private ownership means that the proprietors determine the employment of the factors of production, while public ownership means that the government controls their employment.

Private property is a human device. It is not sacred. It came into existence in early ages of history, when people with their own power and by their own authority appropriated to themselves what had previously not been anybody’s property. Again and again, proprietors were robbed of their property by expropriation. The history of private property can be traced back to a point at which it originated out of acts that were certainly not legal. Virtually every owner is the direct or indirect legal successor of people who acquired ownership either by arbitrary appropriation of ownerless things or by violent spoliation of their predecessor.

However, the fact that legal formalism can trace back every title either to arbitrary appropriation or to violent expropriation has no significance whatever for the conditions of a market society. Ownership in the market economy is no longer linked up with the remote origin of private property. Those events in a far-distant past, hidden in the darkness of primitive mankind’s history, are no longer of any concern for our day. For in an unhampered market society, the consumers daily decide anew who should own and how much he should own. The consumers allot control of the means of production to those who know how to use them best for the satisfaction of the most urgent wants of the consumers. Only in a legal and formalistic sense can the owners be considered the successors of appropriators and expropriators. In fact, they are mandataries of the consumers, bound by the operation of the market to serve the consumers best. Capitalism is the consummation of the self-determination of the consumers.

The meaning of private property in the market society is radically different from what it is under a system of each household’s autarky. Where each household is economically self-sufficient, the privately owned means of production exclusively serve the proprietor. He alone reaps all the benefits derived from their employment.

In the market society, the proprietors of capital and land can enjoy their property only by employing it for the satisfaction of other people’s wants. They must serve the consumers in order to have any advantage from what is their own. The very fact that they own means of production forces them to submit to the wishes of the public.

Ownership is an asset only for those who know how to employ it in the best possible way for the benefit of the consumers.

[This article is excerpted from chapter 24 of Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach.]

Author:
Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that is called praxeology.

“The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.”
― James Madison

If only we had listened.–Michael J. Hurd

So what’s the Democratic response to coronavirus? Keep businesses closed down indefinitely. Keep 25 to 50 percent of the population unemployed. Cheat by mail, ensuring one-party rule. Permanent unemployment checks, paying people not to work. It’s an obscene act of national homicide-suicide. ANYONE who still supports this mob of maniacs I will hold personally responsible for all forthcoming destruction. Leftists and Democrats? You can all go to hell.—Michael J. Hurd

“Since Day 1 of this crisis, Delaware’s response to COVID-19 has been driven by the science.” So claims Delaware’s Governor John Carney and all the other tyrants now ruling most of America.

I am so SICK of this. Science, facts, reason and logic SHOULD be our guide. But much of science is subject to interpretation. Science, at present, knows far less about viruses than what it does know. Politicians, because they want power, pretend to talk to scientists who know everything. But they do not. We all should have been left free to decide for ourselves how best to handle this.

These arrogant career politicians have removed our ability to think for ourselves. They impose one-size-fits-all, irrational and contradictory mandates with the goalposts constantly moved. It’s like a sick joke. What they call “science” means listening to people employed by the government who support their narratives.

Their “scientific” advisors are POLITICAL advisors, first and foremost. People with similar credentials (M.D., Ph.D., etc.) who offer opposing theories and conclusions from outside the political power structure are ignored — if not outright censored by leftist-fascist operations like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. We are left with only ONE version of science … the politically correct one.

In poll after poll, huge majorities of Americans claim they don’t trust the government or politicians. Or the media, either. Yet when push comes to shove, they listen obediently to paid-off politicians/media hacks and let them define “science” in a way that alters the course of civilization forever.

Did anyone ever study the history of any authoritarian government? Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, etc.? They always have a crew of “scientists”: The scientists and doctors who say what the rulers want to hear.

Science would be a profoundly beneficial tool if divorced from the depraved, moralistic know-nothings who distort and abuse it. Get real, people. And get science the hell away from government.—Michael J.Hurd

Continue reading →

The Myth That Americans Were Poorly Educated Before Mass Education–Epoch Times

Parents the world over are dealing with massive adjustments in their children’s education that they could not have anticipated just three months ago. To one degree or another, pandemic-induced school closures are creating the “mass homeschooling” that FEE’s senior education fellow Kerry McDonald predicted two months ago. Who knows, with millions of youngsters absent from government school classrooms, maybe education will become as good as it was before the government ever got involved.

“What?” you exclaim! “Wasn’t education lousy or nonexistent before government mandated it, provided it, and subsidized it? That’s what my government schoolteachers assured me, so it must be true.”

The fact is, at least in early America, education was better and more widespread than most people today realize or were ever told. Sometimes it wasn’t “book learning,” but it was functional and built for the world most young people confronted at the time. Even without laptops and swimming pools, and on a fraction of what government schools spend today, Americans were a surprisingly learned people in our first hundred years.

I was reminded a few days ago of the amazing achievements of early American education while reading the enthralling book by bestselling author Stephen Mansfield, “Lincoln’s Battle With God: A President’s Struggle With Faith and What It Meant for America.” It traces the spiritual journey of America’s 16th president—from fiery atheist to one whose last words to his wife on that tragic evening at Ford’s Theater were a promise to “visit the Holy Land and see those places hallowed by the footsteps of the Savior.”

In a moment, I’ll cite a revealing, extended passage from Mansfield’s book, but first I’d like to offer some excellent, related works that come mostly from FEE’s own archives.

In 1983, Robert A. Peterson’s “Education in Colonial America” revealed some stunning facts and figures. “The Federalist Papers, which are seldom read or understood today even in our universities,” says Peterson, “were written for and read by the common man. Literacy rates were as high or higher than they are today.” Incredibly, “A study conducted in 1800 by DuPont de Nemours revealed that only four in a thousand Americans were unable to read and write legibly.”

Well into the 19th century, writes Susan Alder in “Education in America,” “Parents didn’t even consider that the civil government in any way had the responsibility or should assume the responsibility of providing for the education of children.” Only one state (Massachusetts) even had compulsory schooling laws before the Civil War, yet literacy rates were among the highest in our history.

Great Britain experienced similar trends. In 1996, Edwin West wrote in “The Spread of Education Before Compulsion in Britain and America in the Nineteenth Century” that “when national compulsion was enacted [in 1880], over 95 percent of fifteen-year-olds were literate.” More than a century later, “40 percent of 21-year-olds in the United Kingdom admit to difficulties with writing and spelling.”

Laws against the education of black slaves date back to as early as 1740, but the desire to read proved too strong to prevent its steady growth, even under bondage. For purposes of religious instruction, it was not uncommon for slaves to be taught reading but not writing. Many taught themselves to write, or learned to do so with the help of others willing to flout the law. Government efforts to outlaw the education of blacks in the Old South may not have been much more effective than today’s drug laws. If you wanted it, you could find it.

Estimates of the literacy rate among slaves on the eve of the Civil War range from 10 to 20 percent. By 1880, nearly 40 percent of southern blacks were literate. In 1910, half a century before the federal government involved itself in K–12 funding, black literacy exceeded 70 percent and was comparable to that of whites.

Daniel Lattier said in a 2016 article titled “Did Public Schools Really Improve American Literacy?” that a government school system is no guarantee that young people will actually learn to read and write well. He cites the shocking findings of a study conducted by the US Department of Education: “32 million of American adults are illiterate, 21 percent read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates are functionally illiterate, which means they can’t read well enough to manage daily living and perform tasks required by many jobs.”

Compulsory government schools were not established in America because of some widely-perceived failure of private education, which makes it both erroneous and self-serving for the government school establishment to propagate the myth that Americans would be illiterate without it.

As Kerry McDonald wrote in “Public Schools Were Designed to Indoctrinate Immigrants,” the prime motivation for government schooling was something much less benign than a fear of illiteracy. Her remarkable 2019 book, “Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom,” explains the viable, self-directed alternatives that far outclass the standardized, test-driven, massively expensive and politicized government schooling of today.

If you’re looking for a good history of how America traveled the path of literacy to a national education crisis, you can find it in a recent, well-documented book by Justin Spears and associates, titled “Failure: The History and Results of America’s School System.” The way in which government short-changes parents, teachers, and students is heartbreaking.

I promised to share a passage from Stephen Mansfield’s book, so now I’m pleased to deliver it. Read it carefully, and let it soak in:

“We should remember that the early English settlers in the New World left England accompanied by fears that they would pursue their ‘errand into the wilderness’ and become barbarians in the process. Loved ones at home wondered how a people could cross an ocean and live in the wild without losing the literacy, the learning, and the faith that defined them. The early colonists came determined to defy these fears. They brought books, printing presses, and teachers with them and made the founding of schools a priority. Puritans founded Boston in 1630 and established Harvard College within six years. After ten years they had already printed the first book in the colonies, the Bay Psalm Book. Many more would follow. The American colonists were so devoted to education—inspired as they were by their Protestant insistence upon biblical literacy and by their hope of converting and educating the natives—that they created a near-miraculous culture of learning.

This was achieved through an educational free market. Colonial society offered ‘Dame schools,’ Latin grammar schools, tutors for hire, what would today be called ‘home schools,’ church schools, schools for the poor, and colleges for the gifted and well-to-do. Enveloping these institutions of learning was a wider culture that prized knowledge as an aid to godliness. Books were cherished and well-read. A respected minister might have thousands of them. Sermons were long and learned. Newspapers were devoured, and elevated discussion of ideas filled taverns and parlors. Citizens formed gatherings for the ‘improvement of the mind’—debate societies and reading clubs and even sewing circles at which the latest books from England were read.

The intellectual achievements of colonial America were astonishing. Lawrence Cremin, dean of American education historians, estimated the literacy rate of the period at between 80 and 90 percent. Benjamin Franklin taught himself five languages and was not thought exceptional. Jefferson taught himself half a dozen, including Arabic. George Washington was unceasingly embarrassed by his lack of formal education, and yet readers of his journals today marvel at his intellect and wonder why he ever felt insecure. It was nothing for a man—or in some cases a woman—to learn algebra, geometry, navigation, science, logic, grammar, and history entirely through self-education. A seminarian was usually required to know Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French and German just to begin his studies, instruction which might take place in a log classroom and on a dirt floor.

This culture of learning spilled over onto the American frontier. Though pioneers routinely moved beyond the reach of even basic education, as soon as the first buildings of a town were erected, so too, were voluntary societies to foster intellectual life. Aside from schools for the young, there were debate societies, discussion groups, lyceums, lecture associations, political clubs, and always, Bible societies. The level of learning these groups encouraged was astounding. The language of Shakespeare and classical literature—at the least Virgil, Plutarch, Cicero, and Homer—so permeated the letters and journals of frontier Americans that modern readers have difficulty understanding that generation’s literary metaphors. This meant that even a rustic Western settlement could serve as a kind of informal frontier university for the aspiring. It is precisely this legacy and passion for learning that shaped young Abraham Lincoln during his six years in New Salem.”

Not bad for a society that hardly even knew what a government school was for generations, wouldn’t you say? Why should we blindly assume today that we couldn’t possibly get along without government schools? Instead, we should be studying how remarkable it was that we did so well without them.

When I think of the many ways government deceives us into its embrace, one in particular really stands out: It seeks to convince us how helpless we would be without it. It tells us we can’t do this, we can’t do that, that government possesses magical powers beyond those of mere mortals and that yes, we’d be dumb as dirt and as destitute as drifters if we didn’t put it in charge of one thing or another.

When it comes to education, Americans really should know better. Maybe one positive outcome of the virus pandemic is that they will rediscover that they don’t need government schools as much as the government told them they do. In fact, we never did.

Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners ambassador for Global Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also author of “Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction” and “Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism.” Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook. This article was originally published on FEE.org
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The Epoch Times is independent of any influence from corporations, governments, or political parties. Our only goal is to bring our readers accurate information and to be responsible to the public.

Ludwig von Mises

Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy. It is the institution the presence of which characterizes the market economy as such. Where it is absent, there is no question of a market economy.

Ownership means full control of the services that can be derived from a good. This catallactic notion of ownership and property rights is not to be confused with the legal definition of ownership and property rights as stated in the laws of various countries. It was the idea of legislators and courts to define the legal concept of property in such a way as to give to the proprietor full protection by the governmental apparatus of coercion and compulsion, and to prevent anybody from encroaching upon his rights. As far as this purpose was adequately realized, the legal concept of property rights corresponded to the catallactic concept.

However, nowadays there are tendencies to abolish the institution of private property by a change in the laws determining the scope of the actions that the proprietor is entitled to undertake with regard to the things that are his property. While retaining the term private property, these reforms aim at the substitution of public ownership for private ownership. This tendency is the characteristic mark of the plans of various schools of Christian socialism and of nationalist socialism. But few of the champions of these schools have been as keen as the Nazi philosopher Othmar Spann, who explicitly declared that the realization of his plans would bring about a state of affairs in which the institution of private property will be preserved only in a “formal sense, while in fact there will be only public ownership.”

There is need to mention these things in order to avoid popular fallacies and confusion. In dealing with private property, catallactics deals with control, not with legal terms, concepts, and definitions. Private ownership means that the proprietors determine the employment of the factors of production, while public ownership means that the government controls their employment.

Private property is a human device. It is not sacred. It came into existence in early ages of history, when people with their own power and by their own authority appropriated to themselves what had previously not been anybody’s property. Again and again, proprietors were robbed of their property by expropriation. The history of private property can be traced back to a point at which it originated out of acts that were certainly not legal. Virtually every owner is the direct or indirect legal successor of people who acquired ownership either by arbitrary appropriation of ownerless things or by violent spoliation of their predecessor.

However, the fact that legal formalism can trace back every title either to arbitrary appropriation or to violent expropriation has no significance whatever for the conditions of a market society. Ownership in the market economy is no longer linked up with the remote origin of private property. Those events in a far-distant past, hidden in the darkness of primitive mankind’s history, are no longer of any concern for our day. For in an unhampered market society, the consumers daily decide anew who should own and how much he should own. The consumers allot control of the means of production to those who know how to use them best for the satisfaction of the most urgent wants of the consumers. Only in a legal and formalistic sense can the owners be considered the successors of appropriators and expropriators. In fact, they are mandataries of the consumers, bound by the operation of the market to serve the consumers best. Capitalism is the consummation of the self-determination of the consumers.

The meaning of private property in the market society is radically different from what it is under a system of each household’s autarky. Where each household is economically self-sufficient, the privately owned means of production exclusively serve the proprietor. He alone reaps all the benefits derived from their employment.

In the market society, the proprietors of capital and land can enjoy their property only by employing it for the satisfaction of other people’s wants. They must serve the consumers in order to have any advantage from what is their own. The very fact that they own means of production forces them to submit to the wishes of the public.

Ownership is an asset only for those who know how to employ it in the best possible way for the benefit of consumers.

Author:
Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that he called praxeology.

Lawrence W. Reed
Culture Self-improvement Freedom Philosophy Character Virtue Responsibility
Editor’s Note: This essay is drawn from the new, second edition of Lawrence Reed’s book, Are We Good Enough for Liberty?

Author’s Note: In a previous essay, I challenged my readers to ask themselves, “Are we good enough for liberty?” In the following piece, I will ask a second question that is the other side of the same precious coin: do we believe in liberty enough to be good? In other words, will you treat the ideas of liberty as mere fodder for political posturing and internet debates? Or do you love liberty enough to embrace it as a life philosophy? The future of freedom hinges on the answer to that question, so please read on!

FEE’s eminent founder, Leonard E. Read, often opined that it was the duty of every lover of liberty to introduce it to others “as a life philosophy.” It’s a phrase we at FEE still use today, and every day. We’re able to preach it with conviction because we practice it with passion.

What does it mean to regard liberty as “a life philosophy”? First, allow me to offer a few words about what it doesn’t mean.

If liberty is your life philosophy, you’re not its fair-weather friend. You stick with it in good times and bad because its fundamental virtues are independent of what others think of it. Its truth rests on its inherent merit, not on shifting perceptions. Its immediate prospects for success may fluctuate, but your commitment to it shouldn’t.

You don’t apply a life philosophy to certain aspects of your life and not others, as did the soybean farmer who once told me with a straight face, “Larry, I’m for free markets and no subsidies for everything but soybeans.”

Furthermore, if your speech, tactics, or behavior conflict with liberty’s high standards—if you’re turning people off to it instead of winning them over—then you’re defeating one of the main purposes of possessing it as a life philosophy in the first place. It ought to be something so lofty and universal that you’re proud to live it and delighted when others choose to do so too.

A life philosophy is neither superficial nor fleeting. You don’t embrace it because it’s convenient or fashionable or even profitable. It’s deeper, more holistic and lasting than that. It ought to be rooted in ideas and conduct that are right, relevant, and uplifting. It should cause you to be remembered someday as a man or woman whose consistency and example gave the world a model worth emulating.

If you were to choose today the epitaph that will appear on your headstone after you’re gone, which one from these two lists would you pick? Or perhaps the better question is, which one most accurately describes you?

List A:

“He said it but rarely meant it.”

“No one ever knew what she stood for.”

“Left the world as if he was never in it.”

“Couldn’t see further than herself.”

“Subtracted more than he added.”

“Honest and upright, but only when others were watching.”

List B:

“He made bedrock principles soar.”

“What you saw was what she was, no pretense or prevarication.

“Devoted to all the right things, in word and deed.”

“Loved life and liberty, and others loved him for it.”

“She set standards to which every decent person aspires.”

“The Golden Rule was his life in three words.”

No good and self-respecting person would want to pick from List A, though the world is full of people who would have to if they were completely honest about it. What a dreadful shame to die never having lived a life that amounted to anything more!

You can certainly commit your life to many things—to God, to truth, to family, to the future, etc. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I just want to make the case here, building on the previous essay and the title of this book, Are We Good Enough for Liberty?, that liberty is right up there close to whatever the best thing is. That’s because, by definition, it makes it possible for you to fully commit to any or all of the other good things, and enjoy the benefits thereof without arbitrary hindrance.

A life philosophy is made up of two components: The first is how you see yourself. The second is how you see (or interact with) others in society. Though these two components are distinct on the surface, they should actually be seamless and integrated, one with the other. If they weren’t, then your so-called life philosophy would be contradictory and schizophrenic—as if you had two lives and two philosophies. It would be like a thief arguing that theft is a good thing if he’s stealing from you but bad if you’re stealing from him. Intellectual integrity demands a logical consistency, not selective and self-serving application. Let’s look more closely at those components from a liberty standpoint.

How You See Yourself
If I were a socialist or a communist, I’d probably see myself as someone else’s victim, or maybe as an insignificant piece of something more important—a mob, a group, a class, or whatever. I would likely subordinate myself to the collective will, as determined by some powerful, influential person with a megaphone. I would seek political power over others, as I convince myself of my own good intentions. I’d spend most of my time trying to reform the world and relatively little time attempting to improve myself.

But I’m a lover of liberty—a libertarian, if you will—so I see myself as one-of-a-kind. I’m not exactly like anybody else who has ever lived, and neither are you. To be fully human—to be fully me—I need things like choice and responsibility. I needed a mommy at age 5, but certainly not at 25 or 65.

Maybe on any given day I’m a victim of somebody, but I’m in charge of how I react to that. If I let it paralyze me, I’m simply solidifying and reinforcing my victimhood.

To be called “a common man” is no compliment because it’s not commonness that makes me who I am, but my uncommonness. I relish the best, the heroic, the man or woman who carves himself out of the rock of commonality.

No matter how many times other people may tell me how or what I should think, I will think for myself. If that means coming to conclusions no one else agrees with, so be it. I’m especially eager to stand apart from the crowd when the crowd is wrong.

I’m not so full of myself that I think I know enough or am sufficiently fit to manipulate others like pieces on a chessboard. I want to learn and grow, from now until I breathe my last.

I happen to be a Christian, incidentally, so I believe God made me for a purpose. With His help, I will carry it out to the best of my ability. It may not be your purpose, but you didn’t make me and you can’t live my life for me—not peacefully, anyway. I will leave you alone if you leave me alone, and we’ll celebrate our differences in peace and commerce.

All this is empowering—extraordinarily so! I can employ my uniqueness to make a difference in the world! I might even be able to change it profoundly, perhaps as much as those who led the fight to end the age-old institution of slavery! I’m not just another drone in the ant hill, after all!

I can be a superb parent, a fantastic teacher, a remarkable influencer, a great friend. I can invent, produce, and innovate. I can be a risk-taking entrepreneur, adding value to society. I can do things others won’t or can’t and in so doing, I might stimulate and embolden them, too. The sky is the limit, and I respectfully decline to live down to somebody else’s low expectations for me.

Take charge of your life and even if it’s hard to be optimistic for society as a whole, you can still be optimistic for yourself and those you love and affect.

This is how I think each lover of liberty should see himself. It’s certainly how I see me. And guess what? I would like nothing better than for you to believe the same about yourself. Freedom is what I want for me, and it’s precisely what I want for you (unless by your actions you forfeit the right).

I embrace the Golden Rule. I do my level best to treat others the way I would want them to treat me, which leads me to the second component of liberty as a life philosophy.

How You See Others
If I didn’t believe in liberty, I might trust nobody but myself. I might see you as an obstacle to be ruled or overcome rather than as a partner I can associate with for mutual benefit. Taken to an extreme that really isn’t all that infrequent, historically, my hostility to your liberty could devolve into tyranny—whereby you’ll do as I tell you because I think your purpose in life is to serve mine.

But I’m a lover of liberty—a libertarian, if you will—so it would be an affront to my principles to do to you what I would never countenance you doing to me.

I have enough respect for you that when we differ, my first resort will be to employ persuasion. Compulsion is always my last resort, if I use it at all. In any event, I will never initiate force. I will use it only in retaliation once you’ve proven yourself a threat by either using it against me or credibly threatening to do so.

I believe it is a measure of my character that I deal with you from the loftiest of standards—with honesty, intellectual humility, patience, responsibility, mutual respect, courage, and self-discipline. Until you prove otherwise by your behavior, you are as entitled to those things from me as I am from you. I believe so strongly in those virtues of character, in fact, that I’m not going to let anybody’s lack of them be an excuse to let mine slip.

As a lover of liberty, I respect your right to think otherwise and do otherwise. I respect your right to be different, to be more successful than me, to be better than me at anything and everything, for that matter, and to gain the rewards that others offer you in return. I will not resent you, envy you, drag you down, or try to forcibly make you what you’re not. And I will not hire politicians to do these things to you under the mistaken assumption that doing so absolves me of some or all of the guilt.

I will never succumb to that most intoxicating of evil motives—power over others. I’m better than that, and you should be too.

To Leonard Read, the means had to be just as good as the ends. If you want to influence others on behalf of liberty, he argued, you’ve first got to be committed to self-improvement and then adopt a tolerant, inviting, and hospitable stance toward others, whenever possible. He wrote,

Calling Joe Doakes a fool or stupid harms him little if at all. The damage is to me in that I gain his enmity. He will no longer hear me, whatever wisdom I have to offer. This is to sink one’s own ship. But this is not the half of it!…

In a word, the contemptuous subordination of another person—the entertainment of such a thought, even when silent—spells self-destruction.

The better world begins with that man who attends to his inner freedom. Would you have your counsel more widely sought? Emulate that man. To find the way, ask yourself this question: With whom would I rather dine tonight, that man or an angry, know-it-all person?

Embracing liberty as a life philosophy requires that you get your own affairs in order, be a burden to no one, seek nothing from others through the political process except that they leave you alone, and be a model in everything you do so that others will be inspired by your example.

Take charge of your life, accept all your responsibilities at home and elsewhere without hesitation. Get your mental attitude in shape: Have a healthy sense of humor, a good feel for both your strengths and weaknesses, a bubbly optimism and exuberance about making a difference in the world.

Be a good citizen who respects the lives and property of others. You can’t expect to be free if you support making others less so. Make your life a nonstop learning journey—read and become as informed about freedom in all its aspects as you can possibly be.

How we make our case is almost as important as the case itself. Rarely is it appropriate to come across in a hostile, confrontational, or condescending manner. It’s never fitting to be arrogant, shrill, or self-righteous. We should convey our ideas in the most judicious, inviting, helpful, and persuasive fashion possible. We should be magnets for every open minded person willing to learn. We can have all the facts and passion in the world but if we lack people skills, we’ll just be talking to ourselves.

As indispensable as liberty is to the progress of humanity, its future is never assured. Indeed, on most fronts, it has been in retreat for years—its light flickering against the winds of ignorance, irresponsibility, short-term gratification, and power-lust. That’s why it’s all the more important that those of us who believe in liberty become more effective spokespersons.

Toward that end, I offer here the well-worn “top ten” list. These rules of thumb do not appear in any particular order. So I leave it to you, Dear Reader, to decide which ones are more important. I am convinced that liberty as a life philosophy offers so much that makes life fulfilling that we owe it to ourselves to be effective exemplars and spokespersons for it.

1. Get motivated. Liberty is more than a happy circumstance. It’s a moral imperative, worthy of every ounce of passion that good people can muster. It’s not just about getting keyed up in an election year or responding to some issue of the day. It’s always the difference between choice and coercion, between living your life or others living it for you (and at your expense). If liberty is lost, it may never be restored in your time or in that of your children and grandchildren. For solving problems, avoiding conflict, and bringing people together, there’s no worse course than politics and force, and no better path than liberty for peaceful exchange and cooperation to flourish.

2. Learn. More precisely, never stop learning! To be an effective persuader, there’s no good substitute for commanding the facts and the foundations. Know our ideas backwards and forwards. You can never read or listen to too much economics, history, or philosophy to be the best persuader in your neighborhood. Let the other side talk in bumper stickers. Come armed with substance as opposed to slogans.

3. Be optimistic. It’s tiring and disheartening to hear the defeatists talk like this: “It’s over. The Republic is lost. There’s no turning back. Our goose is cooked.I’m leaving the country.” What’s the point of such talk? It certainly can’t be to inspire. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimists only disarm themselves and dispirit others; there’s nothing to be won by it. If you truly believe all is lost, the best thing to do is defer to the possibility that you may be wrong and let the optimists lead the way. (That means leaving pessimism at the door.)

4. Use humor. Even serious business needs moments of levity. Seasoning your case with humor can make it more appealing, more human. If you can’t smile when you’re making the case for liberty—if you can’t evoke a smile or a chuckle from the person you’re talking to—then you’re on the way to losing the battle. Humor breaks the ice.

5. Raise questions. You don’t have to lecture every potential convert. Learn to deploy the Socratic method, especially when you’re conversing with a rigid statist ideologue. Most of the time, such people hold the views they do not because they’re well acquainted with libertarian thought and have rejected it, but because they just don’t know our side. A skilled line of questioning can often prompt a person to think about their premises in ways they never have before.

6. Show you care. It’s been said that people don’t care what you know if they don’t know that you care. Focus on real people when you argue for liberty. Laws and policies inimical to liberty produce so much more than bad numbers; they crush the dreams of real people who want to improve their lives and the lives of those they love. Cite examples of people and what happened to them when government got in the way of their progress. That said, don’t dwell on the negative. Be just as generous in citing examples of what specific people have accomplished when they’ve been given the freedom to try.

7. Seize the moral high ground. Liberty is the one socioeconomic arrangement that demands high standards of moral character. It cannot survive if people are widely dishonest, impatient, arrogant, irresponsible, short-term focused, and disrespectful of the lives, rights, and property of others. This truth speaks volumes about the moral superiority of liberty over all other “systems.” Humanity is composed of unique individuals; it is not an amorphous, collective lump to be pushed around by elitists who fancy themselves our masters and planners. Any arrangement that purées our distinct lives in a collectivist blender is a moral offense. Use this argument to strike at the very heart of any opponent’s case.

8. Develop an appealing persona. A lover of liberty who knows all the facts and theories can still be repulsive and ineffective if he’s condescending, vengeful, coarse or crude, self-righteous, or often in “attack” mode. This is why Dale Carnegie’s classic, How To Win Friends And Influence People, should be on every libertarian’s “must-read” list. So should be Olivia Cabane’s excellent volume, The Charisma Myth. Do you want to change the world or just beat your breast? Talk to others or talk to yourself? And slow down on the negativity! Some of us only talk about bad news. These are the folks who see nothing good happening anywhere. This attitude comes across as if they’re telling you, “Stop having fun. The only good news is that there isn’t any. If you think there is good news, we’ll tell you why it isn’t.” This attitude wears badly and rarely wins converts. Heroes and heroic stories are all around us; don’t ignore them by dwelling on the scoundrels and the disappointments.

9. Don’t demand total and immediate acceptance. Have you ever run into a libertarian who lets you know that unless you fully confess all your intellectual sins and repent on the spot, you’re a pariah? The history of progress in ideas provides few examples of wrong-on-everything transforming into right-on-everything in a momentary leap. We must be patient,inviting, and understanding. Know when the cracks are appearing in an opponent’s wall and give him room to tear it down himself. Remember that all of us hold views today that we didn’t accept in our past. None of us came out of the womb with a copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in our hands.

10. Make allies, not enemies. A handful of cloistered, ineffective—but noisy—libertarians fancy themselves arbiters of the faith. They behave as though the greater enemy is not those who embrace no libertarian precepts at all, but rather those who embrace many, but not all, libertarian precepts. So when they find a fellow libertarian who once held different views, or departs from orthodoxy on an issue or two, they start to vilify him. It makes them feel good, but works against the larger cause. If we say we want to make the world a better, more liberty-loving place, we can’t make it painful for anyone to move in the right direction.

So, are we in fact good enough for liberty? That question is best answered not in a collective fashion, but in a profoundly personal way—one man or woman at a
Lawrence W. Reed
Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Ambassador for Global Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also author of Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism.

How ideas influence the economy; The Economy in Mind, by Warren T. Brookes. New York: Universe Books. 240 pp. $15 .95.
December 22, 1982

By David R. Francis
To oversimplify drastically, there are two types of conservatives. The first group are ideologues who do little fresh thinking, merely spouting conservative or even reactionary doctrine. They’re often called ”troglodytes” or are dismissed with some similar put-down by their critics.

The second group can be equally conservative, but they do their homework. They back up their views with research and thoughtful analysis. This second group is more numerous today. Its members can be found working for such institutions as the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation. Their research and publications have dramatically elevated the level of public debate between liberals and conservatives.

Warren T. Brookes, an economics columnist for the Boston Herald American, is definitely a member of the second group. His book, commissioned by another conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, does argue for many of the traditional conservative positions. Mr. Brookes attacks the progressive income tax. He laments much of government regulation. He criticizes large government deficits and the creation of too much money. He supports some supply-side economics. He backs a gold or commodity-backed monetary system. He urges a drastic tax reform called the flat-rate tax. He even defends ”trickle-down economics,” the view that if the well-to-do are prospering, some of their money will trickle down to benefit the poor also. All these Mr. Brookes does well, because he backs his views with arguments, studies, facts, tables, and charts.

Like many writers on economics, however, Mr. Brookes often makes his case too strongly, ignoring or underplaying the usual trade-offs in economics. Middle-ground economists, as well as liberals, could have a lively time taking pokes at the support behind many of Mr. Brookes’s positions, coming up with counterarguments or even counterfacts.

Nevertheless, Mr. Brookes’s book is most notable for something that sets it apart from other books on the subject: its attempt to tackle economics from a ”metaphysical” basis. ”. . . wealth is at its root metaphysical (the product of ideas and the promotion of useful qualities and values),” he writes; ”purification and spiritualization of thought are not merely Christian ideals, they are at once the keys to human prosperity and economic progress, and the disciplines that make human freedom possible and capitalism compassionate.”

Fewer jobs at City Hall – one way Flynn can begin to arrest the deficit
He goes on: ”In other words, goodness and purity of thought are not merely the stuff of Pollyanna religion or of positive thinking, they are substantial economic assets, the most fundamental components of our real GNP (gross national product – the total value of goods and services produced in a nation); and they will grow even more important as this nation moves progressively into an economy based on the components of mind more than on the elements of matter.”

A number of economists have noted the importance of mental factors to the economy. Education is usually regarded as the most important element in increasing productivity. Wise decisions by policymakers promote national economic welfare. Poor morals could be regarded as a cost burden on the economy in several ways. Business and home must ”waste” money on protecting themselves from crime. The abuse of alcohol or drugs saps the productivity of workers. Homes broken by immoral behavior or loose marriage standards add to the nation’s welfare burden, as single mothers try to cope with poverty.

But Mr. Brookes goes beyond that. He is saying that, under a God who is Love, human prosperity is the ”inevitable result” of high moral and spiritual standards, understanding, and progress. As evidence, he cites biblical incidents – manna from heaven sustaining the Jews in the wilderness, oil continually flowing from a container (cruse) providing for a widow and her sons, Christ Jesus feeding the multitudes with five loaves and two fishes, and so on.

The prosperity of today’s capitalist economies, such as that of the United States, arises from the freedom their economic systems give individuals to be innovative and to take constructive risks. This national wealth hangs on faith in the future – the ”substance of things hoped for,” he writes, again quoting the Bible. ”Without faith, without confidence, wealth is not generated, risky investments are not made, crops are not planted, businesses are not founded, and poverty ensues.”

It is when he applies this basic faith in God’s provision for His children to current affairs that Mr. Brookes becomes both fascinating and controversial. In fact, some of those also with strong convictions of God’s love for man may regard some of Mr. Brookes’s positions as unwise or just plain wrong. When an individual with firm religious views applies his theology to human affairs, there is a danger he will equate his political or economic views with the divine will. He may decide, say, that ”God is a Republican and a capitalist to boot.” Mr. Brookes doesn’t go that far, but he goes in that direction sometimes.

For example, because of his faith in the power of ideas to generate wealth, Mr. Brookes attacks the popular view that there are material limits to growth, such as those limits expounded in the much-touted Global 2000 report that came out during President Carter’s presidency or those limits that are the subject of concern in some ”liberal” Christian churches.

”Our economic future,” Mr. Brookes writes, ”is not now and never has been tied to the physical assets we now see, but to the vast untapped potential of creative thinking – the metaphysical process which can show us entirely new reserves and new and easier ways of doing things, extending value and increasing wealth without depleting our planet. The only impediment to this is a fearful or limited concept of the real source of our wealth, a lack of faith in our ability as free individuals and institutions to generate whatever we need and to allow new ideas to unfold and new processes and resources to develop – in short, to continue to explore the unlimited economy that exists in mind.”

OK, but could it not be that the right ”new ideas” may be ones about greater conservation or changed life styles that are less ”materialistic.” Or maybe the right idea is a mixture of conservation and the discovery of new resources or techniques. Or it could be that the world has not yet advanced mentally to the point at which it, figuratively, can always find coins in the mouths of fish. There remain dangers of food and resource shortages. The point is, there is room here for widely varying human opinions.

Similarly, Mr. Brookes backs great enlargement of immigration into the United States. ”Our national economic growth will indeed be limited if we fear and so deliberately limit population growth, or in other ways hinder the freedom of our ‘individual capital’ to develop itself. We cannot protect our own economic position by limiting the access of others.” Undoubtedly, immigrants have brought great wealth in the form of ideas and hard work to this country. Nonetheless, it could still be the lesser evil to halt the ”brain or brawn drain” from other nations.

In many areas of public policy, the choices are not often as clear-cut as Mr. Brookes paints them.

Nonetheless, this book is so bubbling with ideas (many of them good ones), with challenges to standard liberalism (which may be as doctrinaire as standard conservatism), with citations of fresh research, and with a moral vibrancy badly needed today, that it is stimulating and important.