Love and Liberty

No more running down the wrong road
Dancing to a different drum
Can't you see what's going on
Deep inside your heart?
--Michael McDonald

Leonard Read's Students of Liberty is a thoughtful compilation of remarks made to students at Pitt in 1950. I found several points particularly interesting.

Read proposes that the history of the world is largely a history of violence. These pages have proposed similarly. Some violence is direct, such as war, while other violence is indirect, such as the violence that manifests under the guise of democracy. For example, when people vote to raise taxes to pay for a particular program, those voters are principals of violence. They contract with the strong arm of government to shake down others for resources to fund their pet projects.

The alternative to violence, Read suggests, is love. Love refers to the kindly virtues in human relations such as charity, integrity, and not doing unto others what you would not have them do unto you. This is, of course, Christ's central message. 

If we are to trends of violence toward love, then Read asserts that liberty is required. Love "generates and grows among free men; only with great difficulty among men ruled by the principles of violence. As violence begets violence so does one personal act of kindness beget another." (28) 

How does liberty grow? Read dismisses approaches such as marketing campaigns, subsidized instruction, and fear mongering programs. Instead, he advocates for self-motivated learning and improvement. Only through personal search for truth and leading by example will liberty grow.

Read admits that his 'one-individual-at-a-time' notion lacks the speed of other, more aggressive proposals, but he argues that the Students of Liberty approach is the only one that will produce durable and lasting change.

Here we are 70+ years later, and most of the approaches that Read downplayed have been tried with marginal success. Perhaps it is time to put Read's proposal to work.

I personally plan to.