QUESTION: We have lust moved onto a small farm and need advice as to the proper conduct for a libertarian farmer in relation to the many and varied governmental farm programs.

If I let my conscience be my guide I would ignore all except those required by law. This would set me back financially not only to the extent of any subsidy or conservation payments but also the “fringe benefits” of government bulletins, county agricultural agents’ advice, farm plans, maps, and such.

Dear Mr. R:

The question you raise has troubled many libertarians. My own answer to this perplexing problem falls into three parts.

First: One of the prime duties of man is to live out his earthly destiny. If one chooses to live—a choice I recommend—then one must live today. A free market, which libertarians prefer, does not exist in the U.S.A. or elsewhere. We are living in a partially rigged or controlled market. Therefore, we are compelled—if we would live—to accommodate ourselves to the situation to which social forces have committed us, our preferences notwithstanding.

We must trade in the market that exists if we are to trade at all. We should not refuse to produce and trade simply because governmental intervention has been introduced into the economic system at numerous points. I hold, therefore, that it is no offense to libertarianism for you to accept a subsidy or some other government “benefit,” though such programs certainly violate libertarian principles. If I were to take a position contrary to this, and remain thoroughly consistent, I would not entrust the delivery of this letter to the socialistic, subsidized government post office. Further, we would have to return your generous contribution to this Foundation and accept not a penny from anyone. For our money—the economic bloodstream—has been inflated to finance government welfare programs such as the subsidy offered in partial payment for some of your production. Our money is infected with socialism, just as is TVA or a government golf course.

Second: Having conceded that it is no offense against libertarianism for you to accept a subsidy, I would urge you and all libertarians to partake of government pap as little as possible. The purpose of life on this earth, as I see it, is self-development: individualization, emergence, continuance of the evolutionary process, rising to higher stages of consciousness, realization of those creative potentials peculiar to one’s person, self-responsibility.

To have another take over the responsibility for self—whether the caretaker be the government or whatever or whomever—is to invite atrophy; it is to negate life’s purpose. A libertarian resents the assumption by another of the responsibility for his welfare more keenly than he would resent the denial of any other cherished right. I would much rather have the authoritarians take away my right to vote than to relieve me of the opportunity to look out for myself[

Third: Good libertarianism requires primarily that we sponsor no socialism, for we must be intimately acquainted with its economic and moral fallacies; that we understand and can explain the free market, private property, limited government concepts so competently, persuasively, and attractively that anyone who listens will be drawn away from socialism and toward libertarianism.

Anyone, like you, whose conscience is bothered by government “benefits” has the basic ingredient for becoming a skilled, accomplished libertarian.

Leonard E. Read

Dear Professor G:

I fully agree with you that it is a good thing to bring people more enlightenment and more knowledge and to fight the sinister forces of ignorance, obscurantism, and superstition. As this is what you have in mind when asking for more education, I am delighted to establish the fact that we do not differ in our opinions concerning the benefits derived from the spread of knowledge.

Where we disagree is this: You infer that because education is good, it ought to be an objective of government action. Your conclusion implies that everything that is good is to be done by the government, i.e., the social apparatus of coercion and compulsion that by the employment of constables, prison guards, and executioners forces people to comply with the laws. This is a non sequitur.

In arguing as you do, you do not leave any sphere open to the spontaneous action of the individual citizens. If the mere fact that something is good is a sufficient reason to assign its execution to the government, only the performance of what is bad is left to the individuals. But bad actions have to be prevented by the government anyway. Thus your philosophy leads to the conclusion that the individuals ought to be deprived of the freedom of choosing between various modes of action. They ought in every regard to be subject to orders issued from and enforced by the authorities. This is the creed of the total State, of totalitarianism.

Now, you go on saying, it is not true that the taxes required to finance government expenditure are collected by the threatening cooperation of the “hangman.” This is a superficial way to look upon affairs. Many people, perhaps most people, comply with the laws, e.g., the laws concerning taxation, only because they want to avoid the unpleasant consequences of disobedience. A man who does not behave as the law orders him to behave would be beaten into submission by the police, would be sentenced by the penal courts and imprisoned. If he tries to resist effectively the armed officers of the government and succeeds in this effort by killing one of them, he would be sentenced to capital punishment and die in the electric chair. This is how the hangman comes into the picture.

There are, as is reported by reliable people, in the big country Atlantis some counties in which it is generally assumed that a man guilty of having killed a “revenuer” will not run any serious danger. In these districts, it is assumed that the District Attorney will not be in a position to find in cases of such murders witnesses for the prosecution and that the juries will always render a verdict of not guilty. The result is that the “revenuers” are rather cautious in their attempts to collect the tax on liquor and that the price of whiskey is lower than in other parts of Atlantis. This example shows clearly how essential in the collection of taxes is the alertness of policemen, prison guards, and also of hangmen to interfere if need be.

Society cannot exist without a social apparatus that by violence or the threat of violence prevents domestic gangsters and external enemies from actions detrimental to the peaceful conduct of the citizens’ lives. This social apparatus of compulsion and coercion, the State or the government, is not an evil, but an indispensable human device. It is the most beneficial institution of civilized nations as long as it does not overstep the sphere in which its activity is necessary and salutary. It turns into the worst of all evils if it becomes totalitarian and aims at subjecting every aspect of human endeavors to the discretion of the rulers.

You want to nationalize education. I suppose that you do not believe that government education should be limited to the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic. But as soon as you go beyond these narrow limits, you enter fields in which there prevails fundamental dissent among scholars as well as among laymen. There is, e.g., the conflict between the Bible and basic theories of geology and biology. There is the conflict between the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, on the one hand, and those of the Communist Manifesto, on the other hand. There is the conflict between those for whom private property is the primary foundation of civilization and those for whom it is the most abominable of all frauds. What should government education’s stand on all these and many other issues be? You cannot reconcile Milton’s and Jefferson’s ideas on liberty with those of Lenin in whose eyes liberty was “a bourgeois prejudice.” You cannot teach history without choosing between the interpretation of the libertarians and that of the communists.

Government education necessarily involves the power of the government to determine what should be taught. It is the negation of all those ideals that from time immemorial have guided the intellectual and moral effort of mankind. It means the substitution of a rigid dogmatism for the unobstructed search for truth.

This is what I referred to in saying that government interference means ultimately more compulsion and less freedom.

Ludwig von Mises
Visiting Professor of Economics, New York University

No Doubt all the trees in the forest fundamentally have equal rights and privileges. But they don’t all grow to the same height, and it would seem rather foolish to cut the tall trees down to the level of the lesser ones to satisfy the theoretical demands of an unnatural formula. And it would seem just as preposterous ruthlessly to pull the short trees up to the height of the tall ones. If we did, it would mean their uprooting—they would wither and die, as all things do unless they grow up by themselves from their own roots. And so, to those who would like to eliminate differences among men, it should be said that if it were possible to do so, progress would cease. Equality cannot therefore mean to bring all men low. It must mean opportunity for each man to rise to those heights to which his energies and abilities will take him—“and allow all men the same privilege”—to the end that progress may continue, and that thereby all will find benefit. Equality which means less than this is not equality at all—it is slavery.

From an article by Richard L. Evans in Essays on Liberty, Vol. 11. Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, N. Y. 442 pp. 50¢ paper, $2.50 cloth