Changes often induce fear--including the fear that some aspect of our current well-being will be eroded due to changes that could take place in markets. For instance, the invention of a lower cost way of providing a service I now offer could lower what I now earn. The potential that we might be harmed by such changes can make us very risk averse.
However, without change, there can be no new ideas, no innovations, no improvement, no growth. So trying to stop threatening changes to lock in our well-being in our current circumstances can turn us into modern day Luddites. But that undermines the process that has provided most of the benefits we have come to enjoy--all of which required improvements in our options--and which will benefit us in the future as well, providing that all arrangements are voluntary, increasing our economic security.
Such fear is a major motive force behind all forms of protectionism--against domestic rivals, international rivals, potential entrants to our industry, potential new ways of doing things, new techniques, new products, etc. We are all subject to the lure of limiting others’ rights and freedoms to lock in our current advantages.
However, that would be unjust. Allowing some to pre-empt others’ rights would also make every one of us who would ever be such an “other” worse off, since it would undermine the crucial protections offered by property rights--when property rights are enforced, exchanges must be voluntary to all those whose rights are involved.
Leonard Read compared the results of freeing people to seek out and offer every improvement they can in willing arrangements versus trying to freeze out such potential improvements, in his “Harmonizing to Each His Own,” in his 1972 To Free or Freeze: That is the Question. And unlike all the government favor seekers in the world, who as Henry Hazlitt put it, hire “the best buyable minds” to argue that those favors for them at others’ expense are good for all of us, Read laid out why freedom for all, subject to the need to respect others’ rights, is better than favor seeking by all, a melee for who can “win” the competition to restrict others more than they can restrict you. On the 50-year anniversary of Read’s book, consider some of the wisdom we can glean on the subject.
Man could not live, let alone improve his lot, were all static…Change releases the hidden strength of men. Out of change comes variation and in this diversity are unique potentialities realized. Creative dissimilarities emerge and account for our moral, spiritual, intellectual, and material wealth. Change is of the very essence of life, and freedom to change is both an economic and a biologic necessity.
[However] most persons tend to dislike it…inevitable and necessary but, nonetheless, much resented. This feature of human nature…substantially accounts for the continuing debate over freedom versus coercive collectivism.
The main reason for resenting change…originates in a misunderstanding of how security is best obtained.
Individuals, with rare exceptions, are interested first and foremost in securing life and livelihood. Security is indeed an objective but, contrary to general belief, it is never more than a dividend of natural change and variation--each pursuing his own uniqueness. There is no security to be found in bringing change and variation to a halt; nothing is so at odds with security as freezing…the status quo.
Seek first security and there will be neither security nor change. Seek first the dynamic, improving life and such security as is possible is thrown in as a rewarding outcome.
However, to many, allowing each of us the freedom to direct our own creative and value-creating efforts sounds like chaos, which requires someone to be in charge to prevent feared meltdown, when it is actually a means to mutually beneficial harmony.
[There have been] countless attempts at harmonizing our variations…Not only is there myself to cope with: to grow, emerge, evolve, to become what I am not yet; equally challenging, I must find out how to live in harmony with my fellowmen. My life and welfare depend not only on what I make of me but also on how I associate myself with others upon whom I am also rigorously dependent, a dependence from which there is no escape. Except in association, I perish!
There are, broadly, two opposed theories as to how the sociological maelstrom should be resolved. The first--authoritarian--is steeped in tradition, as aged as humanity, and presently gaining ground all over the world. It is the old, old master-slave arrangement that has always stifled human progress and diverted man’s efforts to fighting, either to force his will on others or to combat the tyrant’s army. The second--freedom--is brand new as history goes, all too seldom understood or accepted.
The authoritarian vision is limited and blurred at best.
What then must be the outcome of the authoritarian’s solution to social problems, assuming that his will is invoked? Simple: all of us compelled to abide by what he sees…which, of course, is next to nothing. All of us, if his will prevails, restricted by his oblique view of reality.
Here, Read makes sure we realize the cost of authoritarian “solutions,” is far greater than any imagined benefit.
All that is good--no exception--springs from creative human energy obeying its nature, that is, freely flowing when not squelched.
Only a person deficient in reasoning powers…could possibly believe that any scheme can “bring us out where we want to be.” This is an I posing as we--absurd! The flowering society, the only kind that merits our interest, is one that will not stand in the way of bringing you out where you want to be, while permitting the same opportunities for everyone else. And this is definitely a prospect when millions--yes, trillions--of decisions are made independently of each other, that is, a situation in which freedom of choice prevails.
Instead of chaos there is order and stability--an incomprehensible harmony.
What at first blush appears as utter chaos…turns out to be precisely the opposite: a harmonic whole in the absence of I’s trying to play we. You to your knitting, me to mine, each pursuing his unique potential…For only in this manner am I able to draw on your and everyone else’s unique realizations, others possessing countless ideas, enlightenments, goods, services hardly any one of which is within my own potential. When freedom prevails, we can think of our situation as a vast human grid, supplies responding to demands in a perpetual willing exchange. A harmonizing of to each his own!
Finally, Leonard Read reminds us that understanding freedom provides cognitive therapy for the unfounded fear of change that leads to support for usurpers of freedom whose insufficient abilities (despite their delusions of competence) actually harm us all.
We need only know that freedom does work wonders--the evidence is commonplace and all about us--and that freedom exists in the absence of man-concocted restraints against the release of creative energy. And observe how simple--and realistic--this is: it does not presuppose a single know-it-all!
