Both Social Security and unemployment compensation were proposed in large part on the argument of Franklin D. Roosevelt and others in 1935 that they would enable the government to “quit this business of relief.”

Though all the social “insurance” programs he asked for were enacted, together with a score of others, and though all of these supplementary or “substitute” programs have been constantly enlarged, direct relief, instead of showing any tendency to diminish, has increased beyond anything dreamed of in 1935.

If there were a Nobel prize for the most extreme or worst example of the welfare state (and if such outright communist states as Russia and China were made ineligible), which country has done most to earn it?

The decision would be a hard one. Among the outstanding candidates would be Britain, France, Sweden, and India. But the British case, though the most familiar, is certainly not the worst; it is the most discussed and most deplored because of the former eminence of Britain in the world.

At the beginning of Chapter III of his History of England, Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote:

OF TRUTH AND VIGILANCE

A correspondent who describes himself as “a 26-year old college graduate who strongly supports a system of free enterprise,” recently wrote me to say that he is “continuously confronted with questions that are most difficult to answer.” He appended a list of 10 of them, and asked for my comments.

I offer my answer here. To save space, I have not repeated his questions, assuming they can be clearly guessed from my replies.

*     *    *

Nine-tenths of what is written today on economic questions is either an implied or explicit attack on capitalism. The attacks are occasionally answered. But none of the answers, even when they are heard, are ever accepted as conclusive. The attacks keep coming, keep multiplying. You cannot pick up your daily newspaper without encountering half a dozen. The sporadic answers are lost in the torrent of accusation. The charges or implied charges outnumber the rebuttals ten to one.

From time to time over the last thirty years, after I have talked or written about some new restriction on human liberty in the economic field, some new attack on private enterprise, I have been asked in person or received a letter asking, “What can I do”—to fight the inflationist or socialist trend? Other writers or lecturers, I find, are often asked the same question.

The Free Man’s Library is a descriptive and critical bibliography of works on the philosophy of individualism—“individualism” in a broad sense. The bibliography includes works which explain the workings and advantages of free trade, free enterprise, and free markets; which recognize the evils of excessive state power; and which champion the cause of individual freedom of worship, speech, and thought.

A

aggression, 114–115

agriculture, 132, 133

Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 291, 293–294

aid, foreign, 304–319

American Charities (Warner), 219–220

American Mercury, 23, 32, 42

anarchy, 99, 107

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick), 99–100

anatomy, 53

Anatomy of Criticism, The (Hazlitt), 16, 26

Anderson, Benjamin M., 15, 20, 23, 41

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is a “home” for the friends of freedom everywhere. Its spirit is uplifting, reassuring, contagious: FEE has inspired the creation of numerous similar organizations at home and abroad.