All Posts Tagged With: "Leonard Read"
Wanted: A Healthy Dose of Humility
An awful lot of people in this world are really puffed up about themselves. One of the character traits I wish were much more widely practiced these days is good old-fashioned humility. T. S. Eliot said, “Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well [...]
30Nov2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 5 comments | ContinuedSardines at Midnight
Sardines at midnight? If the mood should strike me, I can zip down to the local Safeway store here in Belmont, California, which is open 24/7, and be back with a can in 20 minutes. My biggest problem would be choosing from among Thai, Canadian, Polish, or Norwegian sardines packed in water, olive oil, tomato-basil, [...]
24Aug2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 3 comments | ContinuedOn That Day Began Lies
It is simply a matter of personal determination and a resolve to act and speak in strict accordance with one’s inner, personal dictate of what is right. And for each of us to see to it that no other man or set of men is given permission to represent us otherwise.
27Sep2010 | Leonard E. Read | 15 comments | Continued“I, Pencil” Quoted in LA Times
Defending the free economy in his Los Angeles Times column, Jonah Goldberg quotes FEE founder Leonard Read’s classic, “I, Pencil.” In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, “I, Pencil.” It begins, “I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and [...]
8Sep2010 | Tsvetelin M. Tsonevski | 3 comments | ContinuedMurray Rothbard
In 1946 the fledgling Foundation for Economic Education published a pamphlet titled “Roofs or Ceilings: The Current Housing Problem,” a brief against rent control written by two unknown young economists: Milton Friedman and George Stigler. They would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 and 1982, respectively. That’s a remarkable story. [...]
24Mar2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedUnsanctioned Voice: Garet Garrett, Journalist of the Old Right
This is a curious book about a curious man. It’s not a biography in a normal sense, but a biographical essay based on the limited material left behind by Garet Garrett, the journalist, novelist, and powerful voice speaking up for individualism and free markets as the New Deal eclipsed them. Bruce Ramsey, an editorial writer [...]
5Jan2010 | Brian Doherty | 4 comments | ContinuedHuman Action: The 60th Anniversary
We are celebrating the 60th anniversary of a great book, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, by a learned man and a clear thinker: the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. It presents Mises’s understanding–after long years of study and thought–of how the market economy functions. It is a major contribution to human knowledge. Interventionist ideas [...]
19Aug2009 | Bettina Bien Greaves | 2 comments | Continued“I, Pencil” Revisited
Leonard Read’s classic essay, “I, Pencil,” is justly celebrated as the best short introduction to the division of labor and undesigned order ever written. But it holds another, largely overlooked lesson as well: “I, Pencil” is an excellent primer in the Austrian approach to capital theory. Read’s pencil describes its family tree, beginning with the [...]
24Apr2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedProving Too Much?
“The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, by themselves.” –Barack Obama, quoting Abraham Lincoln “[N]ot a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make [a pencil].” –Leonard [...]
13Feb2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued“I, Pencil” Revisited
Leonard Read’s classic essay, “I, Pencil,” which is now 50 years old, is justly celebrated as the best short introduction to the division of labor and undesigned order ever written. Read saw an “extraordinary miracle … [in the] the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human [...]
16Jan2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Early History of FEE
Henry Hazlitt had a long and distinguished career as economist, journalist, author, editor, and literary critic. This article, first published in the March 1984 issue of The Freeman, is excerpted from his remarks at the Leonard E. Read Memorial Conference on Freedom, November 1983. I’ve been invited to share some recollections about the early days [...]
1May2006 | Henry Hazlitt | 1 comment | ContinuedFEE at 60: Self-Improvement and First Principles
March 7 marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) by the late Leonard
E. Read, with the assistance of a handful of businessmen, economists, and journalists who were all dedicated to the ideas of individual liberty and the free market. From its beginning FEE has been more than what nowadays is called a policy-oriented think tank. Its work is based on the understanding that right thinking on policy issues is impossible unless people have a clear appreciation of the principles of freedom, private property, free enterprise, the rule of law, and constitutionally limited government.
Still Neither Left Nor Right
We live in a time when virtually all political parties and candidates stand for the same fundamental ideological idea: state interventionism and compulsory redistribution.This also applies to the mainstream media. Even many who say they adhere to a pro-market view of things in fact turn out to be only more moderate advocates of government regulations and welfare-state programs.
1Jan2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedFifty Years Later
I saw my first copy of The Freeman sometime in 1967, most likely while I was still a senior in high school in Philadelphia. In those days, the magazine was almost pocket-size. A classmate showed me the issue and suggested I contact the Foundation for Economic Education for more. I had never heard that name [...]
1Jan2006 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Freeman: Through the Years
In an age when lots of think-tanks, foundations, organizations, and institutes publish magazines extolling the benefits of free markets, it is hard to imagine the early 1950s, when only a handful of pro-free-market publications existed, most notably The Freeman.
1Jan2006 | Jude Blanchette | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Freeman: Ideas on Liberty
Henry Hazlitt (18941993), on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, most deservedly was designated journalist of the century. He also was the last survivor of the founding trustees of the Foundation for Economic Education.
1Jan2006 | Paul L. Poirot | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Freeman: An Eyewitness View
The Freeman has a long and distinguished history
in the cause of liberty.
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