Think of That

Somewhere in the works of George Santayana there is a pas­sage about the inherent expan­siveness of the universe if only things will get out of the way of each other. "Things," of course, are recalcitrant. But man, the self-starter, is natively endowed with some faculties that enable him to get around things. The problem is to let the kinetic energy released by the self-starters flow into all those interacting creativities that make human society different from the beehive or the anthill, where all things go by rote.

The justification of the free market is that it lets things get out of the way of each other. I don’t know whether Santayana ever knew Leonard E. Read, but he could have had him in mind when he was speculating upon the pos­sible expandability of the universe. Leonard Read, as every Founda­tion for Economic Education afi­cionado knows, takes economics in his stride as a subdivision in the larger study of the individual lib­erty that enables man to fulfill his supreme purpose in life, which, in Readian terms, is " ‘to hatch,’ to emerge, to evolve." His latest book, The Free Market and Its Enemy (Foundation for Economic Educa­tion, $1.00 paper, $1.75 cloth), is not economics as our Galbraiths and Hellers know it, a deduction from the manipulation of what might be called macro-statistics. Instead, it is a philosophical in­quiry into the nature of the mira­cle that can bring a Brahms con­certo to your bedside by the flick of a switch at three in the morning of a sleepless night. The devotees of macro-economics, or macro-sta­tistics, might be able to tell you how many men are employed by Zenith Radio or whatever in manu­facturing the gadgets that bring Brahms to you across ether or at­mosphere. But this sort of econom­ist is forever being deflected from a contemplation of the prime source of the Brahms-plus-Zenith‑Radio phenomenon: the intermesh­ing of what Leonard Read calls the thousand-and-one individual "think-of-thats" that bring the original composition of a concerto, the original inventions of electron­ics, the original creation of a man­ufacturing and marketing organi­zation, and the original predilec­tions and training of a potential customer’s taste together to help a sleepless man invite his soul at three o’clock in the morning.

Who Could Have Planned It?

The freedom to be a self-starter had to exist in a bewilderingly complex number of cases to enable a sleepless Leonard Read to sub­stitute Brahms for a nembutal tab­let. Who, by whatever magic of "planned parenthood," could have matched the genes to make a Johannes Brahms? Who could have planned the potential genius’s mu­sical education? What government bureau could have supplied Edison and Marconi and the early hams of radio, the proprietors of KDKA in Pittsburgh or whoever, with the clues and incentives and materials that have resulted in making Brahms available to anybody for no more than the flick of a switch? The answer is that nobody could have thought all of this out in ad­vance, or even a tenth part of it. It had just to "happen."

Leonard Read’s conception of "economic education" is to per­suade men to have the courage to say "I don’t know." Only the "know-it-all" would presume to "plan" musical satisfaction for all tastes at all times. The "know-it-all" psychosis is what nourishes the socialism which, in Read’s definition, "amounts to the frus­tration of willing exchange by people who are unaware of how little they know."

True enough, the "know-it-all" can get away with his presump­tiveness for a while. He can extort billions by taxation to pay for the moon machinery, foreign aid, so­cial security, the razing and re­building of defunct downtown areas, the establishment of busi­nesses in the mountain coves of Appalachia. Scientists can be hired to make moon machinery, for, as Mr. Read puts it, "people will as readily sell their ingenuity for a coercively collected dollar as for a voluntarily subscribed dollar."

But there is a hidden toll in all this. When big money is only available for moon machinery, the "think-of-thats" that might have gone into a thousand other lines of endeavor are necessarily aborted. Professors of science who go to Washington become unavail­able to their students in Cam­bridge, Massachusetts, or Berke­ley, California. We get an ele­phantiasis in one direction, a condition of multiple sclerosis in another. Potential Edisons are, so to speak, lured into spending their lifetimes on electric power when they might be going on into mo­tion pictures. The "think-of-thats" don’t ramify: moon machinery precludes terrestrial or undersea machinery to the extent that dol­lars and time and energy are de­flected by force into a single-minded crash program established by the "know-it-all" psychosis.

The Theory to Fit the Practice

We have always, of course, had our "know-it-alls." The desirabil­ity of a free market has always been a matter of common-sense observation, but it wasn’t until the late eighteenth and the nine­teenth centuries that systematic thinkers had the temerity to go up against the "planning" mind in providing a theoretical under­pinning for the common sense of the man in the street. Mr. Read honors three men in particular for contributing to his own "economic education." He cites Adam Smith for his "development of the spe­cialization thesis" in 1776, Fred­eric Bastiat for his "description of what he termed ‘an absolute principle’: freedom in transac­tions" in 1840, and Carl Menger for his discovery in 1870 that "the value of a good or service is de­termined not objectively by cost of production, but subjectively by what others will give in willing exchange." Mr. Read would, pre­sumably, be willing to admit that Jevons in England and John Bates Clark in the United States were codiscoverers with Menger in value theory; he cites Menger much in the way that evolution­ists cite Darwin, not the codis­coverer Wallace, when they are passing out the credit for the the­ory of natural selection in biology. We need symbols when we talk about credits for "think-of-thats," and Mr. Read’s symbols are as good as yours or mine just so long as the principles are clear.

No One Knows the Future

The student of liberty, says Mr. Read, must not be trapped by the type of "know-it-all" who demands an "absolute" projection of what might happen if the government, say, were to get out of the post office business. Nobody knows what might happen, for competi­tion in the private mail-carrying business would be open to a myr­iad of "think-of-thats." All we know for certain is that "voice delivery," by private companies, has improved to the point where it is delivered at the speed of light at any distance on earth, and all at a steadily decreasing cost to the customer. The socialized de­livery of the written word, on the other hand, is not as good as it used to be, and since 1932 the Post Office has accumulated "an ac­knowledged deficit of $10 billion." Mr. Read can’t guarantee that pri­vate delivery of the mail would take any specific turn, but the pre­sumption is that what has been done for voice delivery could also be done for delivery of the written or printed word.

Freedom, in sum, promotes an incomprehensible order—incom­prehensible, that is, to those who demand that all things be known in advance. On the other hand, the "planner" actually produces a condition under which the Cuban in Havana is starved for meat and the Chinese in Red China must escape to Hong Kong if he is to hope for his own betterment. They call this state of affairs "order" in Havana and in Peking, but to Leonard Read it is an apt descrip­tion of chaos.

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Leonard E. Read

The aspiring libertarian, if he has made the first important step in progress, understands that he does not know how to mastermind the life of a single human being. He concedes that there is an order of Creation over and beyond his own mind, that this order works in diverse and wondrous ways through billions of minds and that he should not in any way abort these miracles. This, however, does not make him a know-nothing. Even though, from his experience, he does not know what will happen, he gains a faith that miracles will happen if creative energies be free to flow.