In my research into Leonard Read’s writing, I recently came across his “Look to the Miracle!” in the May 1963 Notes from FEE. It struck me that what he had to say almost half a century ago about how his Foundation for Economic Education worked to advance liberty and how it resisted pigeon-holing in traditional ways is at least as relevant today.
Read first pinpoints the source of the pigeon-holing problem.
Having grown used to master plans, political and economic blueprints, and collective cure-alls, many persons can no longer conceive of a philosophy broader than any one of man’s handmade panaceas.
That aspect of the intellectual world seems far truer today, in a world increasing viewed as a bi-polar battle between the left and the right. But advancing liberty is not part of that dynamic that threatens to tear America apart.
Students of Liberty
We are as far from social, economic, and political authoritarianism as anyone can get! …Individuals who set out diligently in pursuit of what’s right…[with] no label more descriptive than “students of liberty.”
The answers…fit no preconceived pattern simply because our arsenal includes no panacea or blueprint or plan or man-concocted gimmick.
Deflating Caesars
The thoughts…run along two lines. Some people might think of the first as negative. But is it really “negative” to call something black when blackness is, in some quarters, represented as white? Is it negative to expose fallacies?...deflating the claims, promises, and pontifications of little Caesars who strut across the American stage; perhaps “debunking” better describes this phase of what we do.
Our nation’s would-be rulers, in and out of the political arena, haven’t the slightest doubt about their ability to improve our lot--if only we’d turn our lives over to their management!...These would-be masters are from all walks of life but they tend to concentrate in the federal bureaucracy.
Collectivists would extend the dependencies of the parent-child relationship to society at large. It is our view, on the contrary, that no person or group, regardless of how organized--as government or otherwise--has any competency whatsoever forcibly to control the creative energies of any person or persons. Those who presume almightiness are no more than destructive pretenders--fallacy mongers--and we try continually to expose, not the pretenders themselves, but the shallowness of their pretensions…criticism--necessary, yet useless by itself.
Restoring Faith in Free Men
The other phase of thought…is of a positive, probing nature and outranks the former in importance, interest, and difficulty. Its goal is to discover how to restore a faith in free men.
Why the need for a faith in free men?...such faith, today, is at low ebb…more and more of our citizens are losing faith in themselves to achieve, through voluntary action, the good ends they have in view.
Reliance on people voluntarily and cooperatively organized is being replaced by a growing reliance on the arbitrary management of human affairs by government. With increasing faith in coercion as a means of creative achievement, faith that free men can do things by their own efforts correspondingly diminishes…It follows that there can be no reversal of the trend away from freedom except as faith in free men is restored.
Must not [one’s] attitude call for a planned economy of the statist variety? No other conclusion is possible…there is no remedy for this kind of thinking except as we restore faith in what men can accomplish when free to act creatively as they please and on their own responsibility.
The Miracle
Now, this is where the miracle comes in...which transcends man’s know-how… am I not warranted in believing I live by phenomena far beyond my ken? There is, indeed, justification for my faith.
The Problem with the Miracle
Yet, this is the point where difficulty begins. Blest with Nature’s miraculous outpourings--an infinite abundance our finite minds can but dimly grasp--we live our lives more or less unconscious of the elements on which our existence depends. We tend to become aware of these blessings only as they are restricted or taken from us.
We tend to be ignorant of what we are and what sustains us. The same blindness afflicts us as we look toward our economic world. We tend to ignore or be skeptical of that which transcends our know-how.
Almost everyone will concede that only God can make a tree, but most of us will not as readily concede the miraculousness resulting from “millions of private economic decisions being made independently of each other”…The evidence of the miraculousness in the economic sphere, as in Nature, is so profuse, so omnipresent, that we lose sight of it. In this unaware state, we let ourselves be taken in by the little Caesars.
The Miracle’s Secret
[None can] explain the miracle of the market, but we do know its secret: freedom in exchange.
As molecules miraculously configurate in Nature to form…the infinite variety of her manifestations, so do varied creative human energies automatically, spontaneously, miraculously configurate to form the goods and services we live by. There is one necessary condition: that these creative energies be unfettered.
Those who can see the freedom miracle at work have faith in the countless wonders it will accomplish…help others see this phenomenon by which we live.
“Following the Science” on Freedom
Fortunately, all the evidence is on the side of freedom in exchange; all is against the pretenders and their schemes of dictated or administered or authoritarian exchange. We repeat, look to the miracle! Meanwhile…post direction signs for all who are anxious to behold this wonder of wonders.
