• CHAPTER 2 •

THE AMERICAN SETTING:
PAST AND PRESENT

SOMEONE ONCE SAID: It isn’t that Christianity has been tried and found wanting; it has been tried and found difficult—and abandoned. Perhaps the same running away from righteousness is responsible for freedom’s plight for, plainly, the American people are becoming more and more afraid of and are running away from—abandoning—their very own freedom revolution.

• CHAPTER 3 •

STRIFE AS A WAY
OF LIFE

BROADLY SPEAKING, there are two opposing philosophies of human relationships. One commends that these relationships be in terms of peace and harmony. The other, while never overtly commended, operates by way of strife and violence. One is peaceful; the other unpeaceful.

• CHAPTER 4 •

SOCIALISM
IS NONCREATIVE

Socialism depends upon and presupposes material achievements which socialism itself can never create. Socialism is operative only in wealth situations brought about by modes of production other than its own. Socialism takes and redistributes wealth, but it is utterly incapable of creating wealth.1

• CHAPTER 5 •

HOW SOCIALISM HARMS
THE INDIVIDUAL

THE PROGRESSIVE income tax, federal urban renewal, federal aid to education, and a host of other welfare and unemployment measures are precisely what Karl Marx had in mind with his ideal for the Communist Party, “… from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

• CHAPTER 6 •

HOW SOCIALISM HARMS
THE ECONOMY

OUR COUNTRY has stumbled into socialism during the past half century; by now—1964—we have adopted nearly all the things socialists have long urged upon us. A reading of the ten points in the Communist Manifesto confirms this. We who are aware of socialism’s built-in destructiveness have watched this trend with apprehension. Foreseeing the end result, we are forever predicting, or warning against, the impending catastrophe which we think hangs over our economy.

• CHAPTER 7 •

HOW PRESSURE GROUPS

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• CHAPTER 8 •

APPOINT A COMMITTEE!

THE PRACTICE of committees, boards, or councils presuming to represent the views of vast constituencies occurs in educational and religious associations, in trade and commercial organizations, indeed in any segment of society where there is the propensity to organize.

• CHAPTER 9 •

REGARDLESS OF CHOICE, VOTE!

IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER I vowed never to support any organization which would take positions representing me, which positions I would not willingly (peacefully) stand personally responsible for. In short, I object to organizations that claim a consensus that does not exist—a false reporting of agreement growing out of committee action.

• CHAPTER 10 •

ON KEEPING THE PEACE

MY THESIS, in simplest terms, is: Let anyone do anything he pleases, so long as it is peaceful; the role of government, then, is to keep the peace.

In suggesting that the function of government is only to keep the peace, I raise the whole issue between statists or socialists, on the one hand, and the devotees of the free market, private property, limited government philosophy on the other.

• CHAPTER 11 •

ONLY GOD CAN MAKE A TREE—OR A PENCIL

As I sat contemplating the miraculous make-up of an ordinary lead pencil, the thought flashed in mind: I’ll bet there isn’t a person on earth who knows how to make even so simple a thing as a pencil. If this could be demonstrated, it would dramatically portray the miracle of the market and would help to make clear that all manufactured things are but manifestations of creative energy exchanges; that these are, in fact, spiritual phenomena. The lessons in political economy this could teach!