Freedom in One Lesson: The Best of Leonard Read
Edited with commentary by Gary Galles
Mises Institute, 2025; xii + 422 pp.
We owe a great debt to Gary Galles, a distinguished free market economist who teaches at Pepperdine University, for collecting no less than 97 of Leonard Read’s articles, accompanied by a commentary of his own in which he shows their relevance to contemporary issues.
Although Read wrote an enormous amount, mostly in short articles that were sometimes collected into books, his real specialty was oral communication. He traveled the country, speaking mostly to small groups, to spread the freedom philosophy. He did so by dialogue; he was a master of Socratic dialectic, by which laypeople can be drawn to realize that the freedom philosophy is what they believed all along.
What is the freedom philosophy that Read defended throughout many decades? In essence it is simple: Anything that’s peaceful is morally legitimate. “If . . . people are allowed to do ‘anything that’s peaceful,’ while government is limited to ensuring that things are peaceful— that is, voluntary—then people can focus on what they really know and, through creative and cooperative efforts, accomplish as much as possible for one another.”
As you would expect, Read thought that almost all wars are bad. War interferes with the international division of labor, impeding the free flow of goods by which civilization spreads. If we ask what the difference is between ourselves and people who lived in the Stone Age, the answer does not lie in our superior strength but rather in the buildup of capital over centuries and millennia that war blocks through its destruction.
Read explained this with characteristic eloquence: “War [is] the most brutal of man’s activities, [so] anyone who even presumes an interest in economic affairs cannot let the subject of war, or the moral breakdown which underlies it, go untouched. To do so would be as absurd—indeed, as dishonest—as for a cleric to avoid the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’ simply because his parishioners had legalized and were practicing theft. . . . War is liberty’s greatest enemy, and the deadly foe of economic progress. If war is evil there must be a way to avoid it; there must be a rationale, a type of thinking, patterns for living, that lead to peace. These ways cannot be simple, or we would invoke them. They must be difficult to practice, or we would employ them. They are not easily explained, or we would know them.”
Read maintained that soldiers must take individual responsibility for their actions, and in his most controversial essay, “Conscience on the Battlefield,” he called on soldiers to do so: “The collective! Government and its over-extension! The process of de-personalization! The method that divorces action from conscience! Action and conscience together tend to virtue—apart, action has no anchor! Action and conscience together lead to justice—apart, action becomes indiscriminate! Action and conscience together, and I would not kill—but divorce them, and I become a party to mass killing. Why did I not think of these ideas and their meaning?”
Some people condescendingly think of Read as a mere popularizer, because he was largely self-educated and never studied at a university. But he was in fact a brilliant philosopher who could express profound ideas with great simplicity. As Wittgenstein says twice in the Tractatus, “Whatever can be said can be said clearly,” a maxim he often failed to observe in his own often-enigmatic though carefully crafted prose.
Friedrich Hayek, surely a competent judge in such matters, deemed Read a major thinker in What’s Past Is Prologue, a collection of essays honoring Read’s 70th birthday: “I believe that what the Foundation for Economic Education, with Leonard Read at its head, and all his co-fighters and friends are committed to is nothing more nor less than the defense of our civilization against intellectual error. . . . There is hardly anyone who at the same time sees the great issues of our time as intellectual problems and also is so familiar with the thinking of the practical man that he can put the crucial arguments in a language which is meaningful to the man of the world. If Leonard Read’s position is probably unique today, it is precisely because he possesses both faculties. . . . I found not only that he knew much more than most of the rest of us about the opinions governing current policies and was therefore much more effective in meeting the errors in them. . . . But I found also that he was a profound and original thinker who disguised the profundity of his conclusions by putting them into homely everyday language.”
As I read through Read’s essays, I was again and again struck by his ability to come up with new insights. One of these was what he called Read’s law: A politician who has been elected to office will never reduce the size of government to a greater extent than he has promised in his campaign: “‘No politician can fly higher in office than he flew while getting there.’ . . . The height to which I aspire is freedom; that is, no restraint against any creative action. In other words, freedom is my idea of high; socialism, statism—call it what you will—is my idea of low. . . . My ‘law’ [could] be stated something like this: ‘No politician, after getting into office, can remove any more restraints against freedom than he promised to remove in his campaign speeches.’ . . . Over the years, I have known numerous aspirants for high office who, in private, endorse the freedom philosophy all the way. . . . Later, as I hear or read his campaign speeches, I find nary a word about the socialism he intends to repeal if elected. . . . Then, friends of mine hopefully ask ‘What achievements for freedom are you looking forward to from so-and-so?’ I respond by repeating Read’s Law. . . . My questioners chuckle, reflect on the campaign speeches, and draw their own conclusions. . . . Bear in mind that my claim has to do only with an inability to fly higher, not lower. An officeholder’s ‘ceiling’ is set by his campaign speeches; he can descend to any level.”
I could go on and on discussing gems by Read, but I’d like to conclude with my favorite: an example of his Socratic dialectic in action. In it, he gets people to accept a key libertarian argument that thinkers from Frédéric Bastiat to the contemporary analytic philosopher Michael Huemer have used: How can it be right for the government to do something that it would be wrong for individuals to do? If, for example, you cannot seize someone’s property because you think other people are more deserving, how does it become all right for the government to do so?
Here is Read’s Socratic dialogue: “Q—Joe Doakes was lynched. Who did it? A—A mob. Q—Mob is but a label. Of what is it composed? A— Individuals. Q—Then did not each individual in the mob lynch Joe Doakes? A—That would seem to be the case. Q—Very well. Can any individual gain absolution by committing murder in the name of a label, the mob, a collective? A—I guess not. Q—Now that we have established that point, let me pose another question. Do you believe in thievery? A—Of course not. Q—Logically, then, you do not believe that you should use force to take my income to feather your own nest. True or false? A—True. Q—Is the principle changed if two of you gang up on me? A—Not at all. Q—One million? Even a majority? A—Well, perhaps O.K. if a majority does it. Q—Do you mean that might makes right? A—Oh, no. Q—That is what you have just said. Would you care to retract that? A—To be logical, I must. Q—You have now agreed that not even 200 million people or any agency thereof—government, labor unions, educational institutions, business firms, or whatever—have a moral right to feather their nests at the expense of others, that is, to advance their own special interests at taxpayers’ expense. You have also admitted that no one gains absolution by acting in the name of a collective. Therefore, is not every member who supports or even condones a wrong collective action just as guilty as if he personally committed the act? A—I have never thought of it that way before, but I now believe you are right.”
After reading this book, one can only concur with Mises Institute President Thomas J. DiLorenzo, who says in his foreword, “We finally have the perfect twenty-first-century companion book to Economics in One Lesson, written in clear language that Hazlitt himself would admire. In 2023 the Mises Institute gave away one hundred thousand copies of Hazlitt’s classic economic primer thanks to our generous donors. Perhaps someday soon a donor will help the Mises Institute give away one hundred thousand copies of Freedom in One Lesson: The Best of Leonard Read, a much-needed primer on the philosophy of freedom.” I urge everybody who cares about freedom and the free market to read Read.
