Freedom in One Lesson

96.

Ends, Means, and Leonard Read

Ovid, in Heroides, writes that “the result justifies the deed” (Ovid, Heroides, II.85). Machiavelli echoes this idea in The Prince. But do the ends really justify the means?

Those who believe so have rampaged through human history—particularly when they have exercised real political power. This belief has motivated all manner of tyrants and would-be social reformers who have treated those living under their power as mere means. Immanuel Kant set out history’s most famous answer to Ovid, but no one has offered a better, modern rebuttal to this view than Leonard Read.

Time and again, Read returns to the idea that each person has sovereignty over himself—that is, the power to choose, which is indispensable to that ultimate human end, one’s own happiness and flourishing. Read constantly emphasizes the importance of individual growth, emergence, and personal blooming. He reminds us that you are not free to the extent that others control you. The potential to morally improve is stunted by those who use you to create their own utopia.

Read’s approach reflects a widely ignored aspect of the issue of ends and means: individuals and their development are both ultimate ends in themselves, but their services can be the means to others’ ends. This is the essence of voluntary cooperation. Policy should adhere to the principle that no use of individuals as means to others’ ends should violate their potential for growth.

When our ultimate end is the greatest development of individual human potential, then any means that undermines that development is inconsistent with society’s only purpose, which is to ensure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whenever violent aggression is used as an instrument of social design or control, human potential is diminished.

Read uses the redistributive state, grown gargantuan, to illustrate his view. The state benefits recipients, ennobles those who design and enact the transfers, and supposedly does no harm to those from whom it takes since they are only paying their “fair share” to society. But the coercive process degrades everyone involved.

A mere slogan about paying a “fair share”—meaning that others want your resources for their purposes—cannot negate the harm inflicted on those involuntarily expropriated. Coercive funding deprives individuals of honestly acquired income derived from self-ownership and preempts the individual growth that occurs from acts of kindness and charity.

Recipients of state transfers live on confiscated resources and become nonproducers wholly dependent on others for their survival. Their moral, intellectual, and social maturation is short-circuited, their self-responsibility withers and sometimes dies, and their integrity and the virtues it makes possible are put at grave risk. “Unless an individual is self-controlling, his life is not truly his own” (Read 1964a).

Along the way, those who direct the process become dictators over others’ actions and undergo the moral corrosion and corruption that come with power. As Lord Acton reminds us, such power corrupts (Acton 1862). No one ever became a better person from acquiring power over others.

Read also illustrates his view on ends and means with the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote he cites more often than any other: “Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed” (Emerson 1841).

If individuals are ends in themselves and potential collaborators, then no social goal justifies treating them as cogs in a political apparatus. When the individual “is assigned that niche or role which the political priests believe will best serve whatever societal pattern they have formulated,” damage to the core of an individual’s humanity is assured. “However lofty the goals, if the means be depraved, the result must reflect that depravity” (Read 1969b).

Read argues that when individuals and their development are recognized as the ends that matter, the morality of the real consequences of policies and programs—as opposed to the imagined utopian results—is implied in the means employed. “Examine carefully the means employed, judging them in terms of right and wrong, and the end will take care of itself.”