Freedom in One Lesson

Foreword

The best introductory economics book ever written is Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, which was first published in 1946 and is still as popular as ever. Although the title refers to “one lesson,” Hazlitt disproves myriad economic superstitions and educates readers about the superiority of economic freedom to socialist “planning.”

But there is much more to freedom than economics. Freedom is a philosophy of which economics is but one part. For this reason I, along with many others, have long seen the need for a companion to Hazlitt’s economic primer that would explain the dangers of unrestricted government power to a popular audience—a book that could explain freedom in one lesson.

Thanks to Gary Galles, we now have the perfect companion to Economics in One Lesson, based on the writings of Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education. Like his contemporary Hazlitt, Read had a golden literary touch that produced hundreds of articles and numerous books championing the cause of a free society over governmental tyranny and control. Gary Galles’s commentary throughout the ninety-seven short chapters of this book elucidates the essence of Leonard Read’s lifelong work of educating the world in plain English about the virtues of freedom, something that was urgently needed in the dark days of the postwar era and is even more desperately needed today.

Near the end of my forty-one years as an economics professor I started to ask my undergraduate students (junior and senior economics majors) if they had ever had an opportunity to read and discuss the US Constitution in a classroom. In all those semesters, not a single student answered positively. When I sponsored a campus lecture by Professor Walter Williams titled “The Legitimate Role of Government in a Free Society,” dozens of students thanked me for sponsoring a lecture on a subject they were totally unaware of. When I sponsored another campus lecture, this time by Congressman Ron Paul, several students approached me again to thank me and said they’d never heard a speech by a Republican member of Congress before. That’s how censored the ideas of freedom are in today’s university world and why books like this one by Gary Galles are so urgently needed.

A few topics that the typical college student is unfamiliar with, and which Leonard Read explains so eloquently yet clearly in this volume, are the morality of free markets; the immorality of government coercion; the difference between real justice and phony “social justice”; the deceptive language of government tyranny; why more-complex societies require less government control than less developed ones; why the poor need free markets more than anyone else; how millions of people all across the world routinely collaborate voluntarily to produce just about everything, from pizza and pencils to the most sophisticated technological gadgets and machines; and why socialism harms everyone (Bernie Sanders, call your office!).

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 a generous donor. 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.

Thomas DiLorenzo

Auburn, Alabama