Any economic system, so Adam Smith said, can stand a certain amount of "ruin." Essays on Lib­erty. Volume X, consisting of es­says from THE FREEMAN and other publications of the Foundation for Economic Education (Irvington­-on-Hudson, New York, 448 pp. $3.00 cloth, $2.00 paper), is both a measure of the "ruin" we now have, and a warning that, unless there is a cut-off point somewhere down the line in the near future, the possibility of "standing" the ruin will have been irretrievably lost.

These essays chronicle the prog­ress of a battle on a darkling plain. But one of the clashing arm­ies on that plain is developing in­telligent leadership. Picking about among the essays, one comes upon many hopeful evidences of respon­sibility in the fight against the en­croaching welfare state. John C. Sparks, in his surgical piece on "Urban Renewal—Opportunity for Land Piracy ?," laments the su­pineness of citizens who fail to protest the seizure of private property for redistribution to fa­vored groups in fantastic and ill-advised slum clearance schemes. What Mr. Sparks has to say would seem to be generally true of most communities: They do not seem to grasp the immorality of compel­ling people in other cities, some­times a thousand or more miles away, to pay for buildings that should be voluntarily financed by those who want them or need them.

But the "ruin" of morals that Mr. Sparks has set forth cannot be complete, for, a few pages later, the reader comes upon Ralph Na­der’s "How Winstedites Kept Their Integrity." This is a fine account of how a Connecticut mill town of 10,000 people rose up to reject a federal public housing project. The Winstedites were gal­vanized into action by a young housewife’s letter in the local pa­per. When the revolutionists against the morally ruinous pub­lic housing scheme had finished probing the plans that had already been set afoot by the housing au­thority, they discovered that the need for the proposed new units was purely imaginary. New dwell­ings in Winsted were being built under private auspices at a rate commensurate with the annual growth in population. The housing authority had acted to start the public program going without really taking thought, attempting to grow, as all imperialisms do, simply because that is the nature of any state-endowed beast.

Socialized Medicine

In "The British Nationalized Health Service," George Winder carefully explores the "ruin" of British medicine that is being wrought by making the doctor the servant of the state, not the ser­vant of the patient. The "ruin" is not yet complete, for even four­teen years of socialization hasn’t been sufficient to kill off a fine tra­dition. But the handwriting is on the wall, for in the twelve months of 1960 more doctors trained in England and Ireland emigrated to the United States than in the en­tire period from 1930 to 1939.

But if the battle on the darkling plain in England is being lost, it is being won in Australia. There, as Mr. Winder tells us, the social­ist government of 1946 adopted the same British system of putting doctors in panels and giving them tax-supported "capitation" pay­ments for the number of patients assigned to them. But in 1952 a conservative government abolished the system, replacing it by insur­ance against sickness through pri­vate companies. If intelligent lib­ertarian leadership can make a come-back in Australia, there is still hope for England itself.

Self-Reliance

Emerson and Thoreau, the great apostles of American individual­ism, are not much heeded these days. Indeed, the essay in this vol­ume called "Emerson in Suburbia," by Samuel Withers, leads one to believe that the students of today don’t "get" the old Concord preacher of the virtues of self-reliance at all. When Mr. Withers, in one of his suburban classes, brought up Emerson’s statement, "Society everywhere is in con­spiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," a stu­dent asked: "What was the matter with Emerson ? Was he angry at society ?" The rest of the class echoed the same incomprehension of Emerson’s philosophy.

If this particular volume of Es­says on Liberty had limited itself to a single pessimistic report on the modern influence of the Con­cord school, we might have con­sidered that the individualist jig is up. But, a few pages on, we en­counter Frances West Brown’s "Thoreau and the Modern Ameri­can Housewife." Mrs. Brown first met "Henry" in a college litera­ture class. She wasn’t enthralled by his Walden immediately. But at crucial stages of her life she found herself murmuring "Hen­ry’s" admonitions to herself. Working at a job that bored her, she thought of Henry’s question, "What is this spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable lib­erty?" The next day she quit the job. During her early years of marriage, "Henry" kept visiting her at odd moments. When she and her husband were not making much money, there was Henry to console them with his "My great­est skill has been to want but lit­tle." When washing and ironing seemed unbearable, Henry would say, "You are the slave driver of yourself."

The most heartening thing about Mrs. Brown’s lifelong collo­quy with Thoreau is that the wis­dom of "Henry" rubbed off on the Brown children. If they had gone to the suburban classes taught by

Mr. Withers, they would have turned them upside down, making Emerson as well as Thoreau into heroes for modern suburbia.

Government and Business

The battle on the darkling plain continues in Melvin D. Barger’s "Could A.T. & T. Run the Post Office?" In other countries, so Mr. Barger tells us, the government has a monopoly of all communica­tion service, whether postal, elec­tric, or electronic. The result: deficits and poor service all around. In the United States the govern­ment maintains the post office at an annual deficit. But the pri­vately owned and operated Ameri­can Telephone and Telegraph Company is both efficient and pros­perous, even though it has to sub­mit to regulated rates. The com­parison of post office and A.T. & T. speaks volumes for the prin­ciples of voluntarism that are so clearly set forth in the more ab­stract essays in this book—Dean Russell’s "Freedom Follows the Free Market," for one example, or Leonard Read’s "Can Opera Be Grand If Socialized?" for another, or Henry Hazlitt’s " ‘Planning’ Versus the Free Market" for still another.

The contrapuntal quality, weav­ing between pessimism and opti­mism, of this Volume X of Essays on Liberty would seem to be prime evidence that Leonard E. Read and his mates at the Foundation for Economic Education have no call to despair. The society that can pile up monstrous supplies of but­ter by deserting the principles of the free market (see Jess Raley’s "I Like Butter") can also insti­gate a Wisconsin "Trees-for-To­morrow" program to encourage free farmers to grow trees as an added cash crop (see the excellent "Who Conserves Our Resources?" by Ruth Shallcross Maynard). If we are sick in some places, we are healthy in others. The over-all les­son of Volume X of Essays on Lib­erty is that the battle on the dark­ling plain can go either way. But

the libertarians are developing good captains, while the collecti­vists are failing to bring up young replacements for a leadership that is now growing old and cynical.

Who knows, maybe a majority will some day be capable of acting on the values of Edmund Opitz’s "The American System and Ma­jority Rule." Mr. Opitz thinks we will be back on the right track when people are capable of asking themselves, "Majority rule for what?" No doubt a majority should elect the President. But no majority should ever try to de­prive a minority of inalienable rights.