- Downloads:
- Liberty Legacy of Truth_2.pdf
Wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “Despotism may govern without faith, but Liberty cannot.”
The millions of despots, now in the driver’s seat, are swayed not by faith but by that type of ignorance displayed by witch doctors or medicine men and their patients. They, who do not know how to run their own lives, do not know that they know not how to run the lives of others.
There are countless forms of ignorance which no individual-past or present-has overcome. But there is no form more disharmonious or destructive than despotism. Can despots govern without faith? Affirmative! For confirmation, have a look at history and today’s world-here and elsewhere.
Is faith, really, the leaven of liberty?
Leonard E. Read was the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education — the first modern libertarian think tank in the United States — and was largely responsible for the revival of the liberal tradition in post–World War II America.
The Foundation for Economic Education, New York, 1978
