Freedom in One Lesson

2.

A Confession of Faith

Since all we can change by our actions are the present and the future, attention typically focuses there. But the understanding and insight needed for such choices often requires looking back as well. Many today, too full of hubris to learn from the principles and illustrations given by the past, lead us astray due to their lack of insight. What history can teach us about liberty in particular is often not only ignored but routinely violated.

An excellent example of insightful reflection on liberty can be found in Leonard Read’s “A Confession of Faith,” from his 1971 book Then Truth Will Out (Read 1971a), which he describes as “an assessment of position on the freedom road.” A half century later, when we are in many ways further from freedom, it is worth revisiting his thoughts.

Perhaps the clearest way to identify one’s politico-economic position—at least in broad outline—is to reveal his idea of the ideal, that is, what he means by civilization or by a civilized people. . . .

. . . Civilization can mean nothing less than a society of civilized people. So how is a civilized person to be identified?

A civilized person, according to my ideal, must recognize that man is at once a social and an individualistic being.

Thus, he must not only be self-responsible but, at the same time, understand that he owes to others no infringements on their rights.

In a word, the truly civilized person is a devotee of freedom; he opposes all man-concocted restraints against the release of creative human energy.

The civilized person realizes how incorrect it is to think of freedom as synonymous with unrestrained action.

Freedom does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the freedom of a single human being. To argue contrarily is to claim that freedom can be composed of freedom negations, patently absurd.

Unrestraint carried to the point of impairing the freedom of others is the exercise of license, not freedom. To minimize the exercise of license is to maximize the area of freedom.

In order to achieve this ideal, it is necessary that there be an agency of society—representative of the social side of man—which codifies the thou-shalt-nots, the taboos, the destructive actions and enforces their observation.

The fact that society’s agency—government—has a historical record of getting out of hand, of becoming destructive itself, only testifies to how far from civilized we are. It does not warrant discarding the idea of the ideal. . . .

Read’s confession of faith in this passage is remarkably in line with Jeffrey Tucker’s description of his work: “His one message: social and economic progress is only possible through freedom; all attempts to force change or progress through government are immoral and destined to fail” (Tucker 2013).

In his foreword to my book Apostle of Peace: The Radical Mind of Leonard Read, Jacob Huebert takes us back to Leonard Read’s creation of the Foundation for Economic Education to advance liberty as well as forward to future prospects for what only liberty can make possible: “ When Leonard Read created the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946, the prospects for liberty must have seemed bleak . . . there was no libertarian movement. . . . Read persevered, though, because he knew that libertarian ideas would only survive if the few principled people who believed in them deliberately kept them alive—and he knew that keeping them alive was the only hope for civilization” (Galles 2013).

I have heard friends in despair about the state’s immense footprint that threatens to flatten the liberty that would represent civilization. And I sometimes feel the same way. But Read’s faith in liberty and the hope it made possible for him can provide the same sustenance for us in similarly trying times. Liberty is the only hope for true civilization. Advancing it remains the best way to avert the tragedy that would accompany its disappearance.