Heroes of Liberty
from Around the Globe

Edited by
Lawrence W. Reed

FEE’s mission is to inspire, educate, and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society.

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Foundation for Economic Education

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ISBN (ebook): 978-157246-559-6

2018
Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Table of Contents

Introduction

Americas

The Guatemalan Economic Miracle and the Man Who Helped It Happen by Alfonso Abril (Guatemala)

Brazil’s First Congresswoman Was a Leader of Principle by Lisiane Gomes (Brazil)

This Brazilian Economist Once Marched for Socialism, But Became a Free-Market Hero by Rafael Ribeiro (Brazil)

Real Heroes in Venezuela Fight for Liberty by Jorge A. Jraissati (Venezuela)

How Ben Franklin Invented the American Dream by Jim Powell (USA)

William Penn Was America’s First Great Champion for Liberty and Peace by Jim Powell (USA)

Asia

A Chinese Gentleman and the Conscience of a Generation by Ma Junjie (China)

Even in Prison, This Professor Never Stopped Teaching Liberty and Love by Phan Anh Hong (Vietnam)

Europe

Mises Never Gave In to Evil by Dan Sanchez (Austria)

Georgi Markov Refused to Be Silent About Communism and Paid With His Life by Krassen Stanchev (Bulgaria)

This Thinker Was the “Czech Bastiat” by Tomáš Nikodym and Lukáš Nikodym (Czech Republic)

Vilmos Apor, a Man Who Chose the Harder Road by Máté Hajba (Hungary)

This Priest Didn’t Back Down from the Nazis or the Communists by Zoltán Kész (Hungary)

Adam Heydel, A Mises Student From Poland by Marcin Chmielowski (Poland)

The Epic Life of Lenin’s Personal Enemy and One of Tolstoy’s Favorite Authors by Mikołaj Pisarski (Poland)

The Man Who Saved Russia from the Soviet Union by Yuri N. Maltsev (Russia)

Archbishop Damaskinos, the Greek Clergyman Who Stared Down the Nazis by Michael Iakovidis (Greece)

Meet the Wealth-Creating Brothers Who Helped Build Modern Greece by Michael Iakovidis and Thomas Gazis (Greece)

This Italian Catholic Priest Was a Great Scholar of Liberty by Alberto Mingardi (Italy)

My Father’s Role in the Fall of Fascism: The True Story behind the 2017 Bestseller ‘Beneath a Scarlet Sky’ by Michael Lella (Italy)

Meet the Italian Scholar Who Influenced Hayek and Became a Founding Father of the Libertarian Movement by Alberto Mingardi (Italy)

Turgot: The Man Who First Put Laissez-Faire Into Action by Jim Powell (France)

John Bright Was the Voice of Victorian Liberalism by Nicholas Elliott (United Kingdom)

Australia

The Farmer Who Freed Australia’s Economy by Andrew Pickford

Introduction

If men and women were robots, “liberty” would be meaningless. The only question would be who (or what) should be the programmer.

Humans are emphatically not robots. Not in the slightest. Each of us is a unique, one-of-a-kind, non-repeatable person. That’s why the would-be social programmers in our midst fail. Their attempts to push you around according to their agendas—even when they claim it’s for your own good—inevitably produce conflict, chaos, and tyranny.

Enter heroes for liberty, that indispensable minority willing to take on the programmers. They are not peculiar to any region of the world or to a particular time period or to one sex. They hail from all nationalities, races, faiths, and creeds. They inspire others to a noble and universal cause—that all people should be free to live their lives in peace so long as they do no harm to the equal rights of others. They are passionate not solely for their own liberty, but for that of others as well.

In my last book, Real Heroes: Inspiring True Stories of Courage, Character and Conviction, I wrote about 40 individuals whose views, decisions, and actions served this cause in various ways. That book planted the seed for a weekly series published on FEE.org from December 2017 to May 2018. I was the editor and not the author for the essays in that series, and I was content to keep the edits to a minimum to preserve the author’s voice. Each author wrote about heroes for liberty who are (or were) citizens of his or her own country. Those essays now comprise the chapters in this eBook.

The lives of the men and women profiled here are testimonies to the best qualities of humanity. You’ll read stories of courage, of creativity, of great intellect, and of the immense power that emanates from principled character.

The world has always been full of people who seek to do harm. Thank God the world is also a place liberally sprinkled with the uncommonly good, the heroes who by their ideas, their work and their examples have left that world a far better place than it could ever be in their absence.

—Lawrence W. Reed

Americas

The Guatemalan Economic Miracle and the Man Who Helped It Happen

Alfonso Abril

This chapter’s hero is a man whom both the author and I knew well and deeply admired, Manuel Ayau of Guatemala. I am especially pleased that in the years since he passed away in 2010, the relationship between FEE and the university he founded has flourished. The author of this essay, Alfonso Abril, was Ayau’s personal assistant for four years.

—Lawrence W. Reed

Unfortunately, Guatemala is a poor country, but we were richly blessed by the late Manuel “Muso” Ayau, who was born here in 1925.

Though he passed away in 2010 at the age of 84, his name is familiar to long-time followers of FEE. He wrote many articles that are still searchable on the FEE website. Former FEE president Donald Boudreaux wrote about him and current FEE president Lawrence Reed interviewed his grandson Pedro. The Boudreaux article explains how he got his unusual nickname.

What can an honest citizen do to change a poor country for the better? Muso knew the recipe. Let me tell you how I interpret this Guatemalan hero’s vision and how his legacy contributes toward building a prosperous Guatemala.

Our country is full of smart and passionate people. We have splendid weather, bountiful natural resources, and a strategic location with access to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. So why is Guatemala poor? The reason lies in our weak institutions and flawed ideas, not in a lack of resources. Changing ideas so people support institutional reform, and then making those institutions work in people’s favor to create a prosperous society were the challenges that Muso tackled.

Muso’s Passion for Education

But first, Donald Boudreaux explains some background:

Following the wishes of his late father, Ayau studied in the United States. He attended high school in California and earned his degree in mechanical engineering from Louisiana State University. During this time, in the midst of World War II, he also volunteered for a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Muso then returned to his native Guatemala to manage a family firm that produced industrial gases.

Soon encountering burdensome regulations, corrupt bureaucrats, and absurd taxes, he joined with other Guatemalan businessmen seeking to free consumers and producers from the then-dominant command-and-control regulatory regime that was suffocating commerce. But as Muso once recalled to me, “I quickly became disillusioned. Even when we won a battle now and then, we continued to lose the war against statism. I realized that we would make no real progress unless we changed the underlying ideas of the people. We had to take a long-run perspective. I learned that freedom must triumph in people’s minds and hearts before it can make any headway in politics.”

Muso believed in education, especially the education of intellectuals and other influencers to ensure a proper understanding of economic principles and the philosophy of freedom. Then, when these thinkers actually run public institutions someday, they would be well-prepared to succeed.

In 1958, he co-founded the Center for Economic–Social Studies (CEES), which began publishing and disseminating its own analyses of Guatemalan issues and also translating and distributing classic works in freedom literature such as Frederic Bastiat’s The Law.

Muso was convinced that a small group of people could change a whole country for good. He had heard FEE’s founder and personal friend Leonard Read say on many occasions that “every great movement has been led originally by an infinitesimal minority.” He was also inspired by the small elite of profound thinkers we call America’s Founders.

Founding a University

Once he set his mind on fostering a free and prosperous Guatemala, it wasn’t a deterrent to him that only a few shared his perspective. Undaunted by obstacles and skepticism, he founded Universidad Francisco Marroquín (UFM) in 1971, now a leading private university in Guatemala City, one of the finest in Latin America, and a beacon of freedom ideas. UFM, where academic excellence is a passion, is where I studied business.

Muso established a rule at the founding of the University: Every student, no matter what his or her major field of study, must enroll and pass the “Economic Process and Philosophy” courses. Those courses acquaint students with the “Austrian School” of Economics, particularly the insights of two giants among 20th Century economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek. With that policy in practice at the university now for more than 40 years, solid free-market economic ideas have been spreading, slowly but surely, across the country.

A businessman and engineer by formal training, Muso learned economics on his own. He was an autodidact. A key influence on him was his friendship with Nobel laureate Hayek, who convinced him to start a university. Hayek had observed with dismay how the London School of Economics had inculcated Britain’s intellectual elite for decades with socialist ideas which then became the platform of the Labour Party. He thought Muso could do just the opposite with a university in Guatemala that focused on freedom and free markets.

UFM is without a doubt the most important and enduring achievement of Manuel Ayau. His energy and his spirit endow every building and room on a stunning campus—in particular, the Mises Library, the Hayek Auditorium, the Atlas Libertas Sculpture, and the Liberty Plaza.

The University teaches free-market economics and the philosophy of freedom to influential leaders of the future. The budget of UFM amounts to more than $30 million per year, a very significant figure for Guatemala. Visiting intellectuals from all over the world ensure lively discussions that keep the professors experts on the most innovative trends and ideas.

Political Activism

But Muso also knew that political activism is necessary sooner or later. Education is not enough. We need to get out of the comfort zone inside the academic world and fight for freedom in the political arena. This is where I personally became involved.

I worked as Muso’s personal assistant for four interesting years (2005–2009) while he was leading the civic movement called ProReforma. Our mission was to propose an amendment to the Guatemalan Constitution. The Constitution has 281 articles. We proposed reform to 72 of them.

Hayek’s 1973 book called Law, Legislation and Liberty had a great effect on Muso and his reform ideas. In that book, Hayek presented the idea of separating the law from legislation (nomos and thesis). It inspired Muso to propose splitting Congress into two chambers, one responsible for the law and the other for legislation. The former would focus on the great codes of private rights that give society long-term rules and stability. F. A. Hayek called them “universal rules of just conduct.” The other chamber would be responsible for legislation governing the operations and budget of the government.

To have a vibrant economy, Muso knew the rule of law was fundamentally necessary. Therefore, a deep understanding of the law followed his studies in economics. He arrived at the conclusion that the economy depended on the respect of the rules of just conduct. He used to affirm: “The market economy is not a model, it is what happens when the individual rights are respected.”

We worked hard on this reform process. We collected more than 73,000 supportive signatures. We defended our proposals in Congress before open hearings. We went to public debates. Practically every day, we appeared in the media and lobbied congressional representatives, politicians, and journalists. By this time, Muso was 80 years old but still possessed the energy of a 30-year-old man. Tragically, amidst all this activity he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Enduring physical pain, he demonstrated incredible passion and perseverance, explaining the project sometimes to audiences six or eight times a day.

He knew the project faced serious obstacles for its ratification by Congress, mainly because the President of the country was a far-left ideologue who did not sympathize with the reforms. To Muso, the main purpose was to educate the public by demonstrating new ways of organizing and preserving representative democracy.

ProReforma included a specific amendment to the Constitution that instructed judges to give priority to individual rights when so-called “social rights” violated them. One example is freedom of association, meaning that every citizen would have the option of not being forced to associate with particular institutions. Social Security, for instance, forces workers and their families to be associated with it whether they like it or not and whether or not they could do better with a voluntary alternative.

Hope for the Future

The reform project was the culmination of Muso’s intellectual journey. He prepared all his life for it and served it in Herculean fashion. Though it did not ultimately become a part of the Constitution, he planted many seeds that may yet sprout another day.

In addition to being a university founder and an important activist for reforms to strengthen freedom, Muso wrote a weekly column in the largest newspaper of Guatemala for more than 50 years. He never missed a single week in that half-century. He also wrote more than eight books, meticulously edited and double-checked by his patient and honorable wife, Olga. He served for many years on the FEE board of trustees, including during the period that current president Lawrence Reed chaired the board.

“I cherished every minute I spent with Muso in conversation,” Reed recalls. “He was forever kind, gentle, persuasive, professional, insightful, and fun to be around—a role model for liberty in every way.”

With more than half of Guatemalans still living in poverty and freedom not yet universally understood and embraced, Manuel Ayau’s mission is not complete. It falls to the present and future generations of UFM students to influence the country in the right direction. Muso did his part. Now we who were inspired by him must do ours.

One day in the near future, when you hear of the “Guatemalan economic miracle,” you will know that the good work of our hero Muso Ayau has finally come to fruition as an example for the world.

Alfonso Abril, a graduate of Universidad Francisco Marroquín and former personal assistant to Manuel Ayau, is the author of two books, Del Monopolio a la Libertad and El Fin de la Democracia Representativa. He is also a member of Mont Pelerin Society and an entrepreneur in the tourism industry.

Originally published at FEE.org on March 15, 2018.

Brazil’s First Congresswoman Was a Leader of Principle

Lisiane Gomes

This chapter’s heroine’s name is Carlota Pereira de Queiroz, Brazil’s first elected female member of the federal Congress and one who worked for the restoration of limited, constitutional government and protection of the rights of all people. The author is COO of the Atlantos Institute, Lisiane Gomes.

—Lawrence W. Reed

Studying Brazil’s history is like entering an Egyptian pyramid: one can find secrets, mysteries, and some treasures. Renowned for Carnival, soccer, and beautiful women, the country also has a political past full of great events and some heroes. Many of those remarkable men and women, unfortunately, have ended up anonymous, unknown even by most Brazilians.

History classes are deficient in teaching about our history. They often leave many truths to be discovered on our own by intellectually curious people, like me. Some of the sadly forgotten characters in our history deserve to be remembered for their bravery and their will to fight for freedom. I’m writing about one of them.

A Life of Service

Carlota Pereira de Queiroz was born on February 13, 1892, in São Paulo. Her father was from a wealthy farming family, and her mother Maria’s family was known for their involvement in Brazilian politics.

Carlota began her professional life in 1912 as a kindergarten teacher, a post in which she remained for ten years.

“I deluded myself with my career as a teacher,” she wrote. “The environment was unpromising, without much future. The best positions were for males. I aspired for more. So I left public teaching, but kept giving private classes to have a certain economic independence.”

In 1920, at age 28, Carlota began studying at the University of São Paulo’s Medicine and Surgery School. In 1923, she transferred to Rio de Janeiro’s Medicine College, where she wrote her thesis, “Studies on Cancer,” and graduated in 1926. She became a specialist in Hematology, and her work was awarded the Miguel Couto Prize from the National Academy of Medicine, the highest award in her field. In 1928, she became the director of the University of São Paulo’s Laboratory of Clinical Pediatrics. For a woman in a discipline overwhelmingly dominated by men, this was a notable achievement.

It is still unknown precisely what her political influences were, although her father and grandfather were members of Brazil’s Republican Party. Her grandfather, Manuel Elpídio Pereira de Queiroz, was one of the founders of the periodical A Província de São Paulo, today called Estado de São Paulo, one of the country’s largest journals and regarded as “conservative” in its perspective.

Brazil’s Political Upheaval

In 1930, Getulio Vargas led a military coup d’etat against Brazil’s president Washington Luis, installing what he called a “provisional government.” In practice, it was a fascist dictatorship. He effectively repealed the Constitution in 1931, removing rights from Brazil’s states, concentrating power in the central government, and becoming a man with nearly-absolute power.

A year later, in 1932, the pro-liberty opposition started an armed movement to depose Vargas and called for a new Constituent Assembly. This episode, known as the Constitutionalist Revolution, marked the beginning of Carlota’s political engagement. During the Revolution, she created and led a group of 700 women to help and provide medical assistance to the injured.

Carlota declared at the time that “the Revolution’s unpredictable duration, where the Paulistas (people born in the State of São Paulo) are fighting alone against the federal government, improvising forces and ammunition, opens to the women of the elite a unique chance for an intensive exercise of citizenship.”

At least a thousand Brazilians died in three months of civil war.

Even though Vargas’s federal government won the war militarily, some of the constitutionalists’ demands were approved afterward. The State of São Paulo was allowed to elect representatives for a new Constituent Assembly, for example. The Republican and Democratic parties—previously rivals—united and formed a coalition platform for a “United São Paulo.” Among the 22 names chosen to lead the coalition was Carlota’s, who stood out for being one of the few female physicians of her time.

Life in Politics and After

Although women’s suffrage was only established in 1932, a year before the elections, Carlota attracted strong support with her “Message of the Paulista Women.” She won 5,311 votes in the first round and an incredible 176,916 votes in the second round. She was elected the Chamber of Deputies (equivalent to the House of Representatives in the U.S.) as the only woman among the 253 members.

As a deputy, she became involved primarily with subjects regarding her areas of expertise, education and healthcare. She was re-elected to Congress and remained in the Chamber of Deputies until September of 1937, when Getulio Vargas, again, dissolved the Congress in another coup d’etat.

Carlota defended the inclusion of women in the country’s professional ranks and in politics, but she did not consider herself a feminist. She opposed the creation of the National Women’s Department, a governmental body for women-specific policies, which left many feminists irritated. She argued that the department’s proposed model was bureaucratic and would needlessly overlap three existing Ministries of the federal government.

She was also against affirmative action policies for women, considering them to be sexist rather than helpful. She was much more interested in helping the country as a whole than in promoting the causes of certain interest groups, including those who professed to be “pro-women.”

“Not in a single moment [in Congress] did I feel myself in the presence of enemies,” she said. “Women always need to keep in mind that it was due to a decision of men that we were allowed to vote. Brazilian women have already shown how much we are worth and how much we are capable of doing for people. In a moment such as this, in which we are trying to remake the framework of our laws, it is fair that we are called to collaborate.” She held her seat until Vargas suspended the Congress in 1937.

After her time in politics, Carlota kept fighting for the restoration of the country’s democracy, and also published several essays and books on education, literature, and health, from 1937 to 1969. She died in 1982 at the age of 90 and is respected today as the first female Brazilian to serve in the federal Congress; a principled defender of limited, constitutional government; and a champion of equal rights for all.

Carlota Pereira de Queiroz was one of the most important female characters in Brazil’s history, a perfect example of a woman who promoted great change in politics through her actions and ideals. Carlota was a pioneer of her time. She showed that one’s intellect, courage, and character are effective weapons with which to fight for freedom.

Lisiane Gomes is a Brazilian business student, COO of the Atlantos Institute and a columnist for Objectivism Brazil.

Originally published at FEE.org on February 15, 2018.

This Brazilian Economist Once Marched for Socialism, But Became a Free-Market Hero

Rafael Ribeiro

This chapter’s hero is Roberto Campos, a Brazilian economist, diplomat, and congressman. The author is Rafael Ribeiro, a Brazilian Fulbright scholar acting as a cultural ambassador at the University of Georgia. He holds a Masters in International Affairs and is closely involved in initiatives that foster the ideas of liberty in his home country.

—Lawrence W. Reed

If he were still alive, Roberto Campos would turn 101 next week on April 17. He was a Brazilian hero whose timeless ideas are still shining a light in the darkness.

A common complaint in my country, Brazil, is that our heroes are not given due recognition or that their achievements are only realized and appreciated post-mortem. Aside from that belated acknowledgment, another factor is also in play: an unfair and biased selection of notorious figures who are put forth and glorified by the same Marxist historians who largely dictate how our history is taught.

Nonetheless, thanks to a recent enlightenment of ideas going on in Brazil over the last couple of years, some forgotten political and academic names who dedicated their lives to promote and defend liberty are becoming better known. This is a short biography of one of them.

A Multi-Talented Brazilian

Born on April 17, 1917, in Cuiabá, capital of the state of Mato Grosso, Roberto de Oliveira Campos, commonly referred to as Roberto Campos, was a Brazilian economist, writer, diplomat, politician, and also a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. In the late 1930s, he started his career at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That position sent him to the United States where he studied Economics at George Washington University and Columbia University. A few years later, he represented the Brazilian government at the post-war Bretton Woods Conference.

From 1951 to 1953, Campos served in President Getúlio Vargas’ administration as an economic advisor. Not yet very enthusiastic about classical liberal ideas, Roberto Campos helped promote nationalist policies for the industrialization of Brazil. He continued working in the government for successive Presidents Juscelino Kubitschek, João Goulart, and Castelo Branco. Though he was still a self-proclaimed “pragmatic democratic nationalist,” he was a critical thinker who learned from experience and reality. His views matured in the direction of an ever-greater appreciation of freedom and free markets. In fact, he eventually resigned because of increasing government intervention in the economy and then served as Brazilian ambassador to the United States and the United Kingdom.

Later, in the mid-1980s, as Brazil was transitioning from a military regime to a multi-party democracy, Campos joined a newly-formed party and ran successfully for Senate from his native state of Mato Grosso. He served an eight-year term, and then, in 1991, he was elected as Congressman for the state of Rio de Janeiro, serving for two legislative sessions.

In Congress, Campos fought against the nationalization of companies and often reminded his fellow Congressmen of what the role of government should be. He declared, “We will only be saved when we cease to have a state-run capitalism and have, at last, free-market capitalism.”

From a Socialist Youngster to a Contemporary Freedom Icon

As suggested above, Roberto Campos had not always been an advocate for the ideas of liberty. During his youth, he marched as a socialist supporter and believed that the government should have the power to shape society under the guidance of an elite leader. It was while serving as a diplomat in the United States that he realized the government is usually only able to change things for the worse. “I saw, however, that it is an illusion to think that socialism reforms the world. Socialism only makes the world totalitarian,” he once said.

He also became very critical of artists and intellectuals who enjoy all the advantages that only free markets can offer but whose advocacy is predominantly socialist-leaning. Campos stressed once that “Few things are more paradoxical than the leftism found among Brazilian artists. They are socialists through their fingers and their voices, but invariably capitalists in their pockets.”

Campos used to say that he saw no nobility in poverty. Unlike his fellow compatriots from the world of arts and literature, he argued that we should support the generation of wealth through a free-market society over the redistribution of beggary that ultimately comes along with socialist policies. For years before his death in 2001 at the age of 84, he was considered the most outspoken and articulate opponent of socialism in the country.

Another remarkable episode of his life was when Campos participated in a debate with long-time Brazilian communist leader and politician Luís Carlos Prestes. The debate was aired nationwide on television in 1985. Campos brilliantly exposed the tyranny inherent in communism. For a nationwide audience, he taught a magnificent lesson about the unprecedented contributions made by free markets in overcoming poverty around the world. He cited the example of Hong Kong and South Korea to prove that even small countries with scarce natural resources can become developed nations and efficiently address social problems through economic freedom and international trade.

Campos knew how to highlight the positive outcomes of adopting free-market policies. He liked to bust myths related to capitalism. He proposed a small-government agenda not only to boost the economy but also to avoid political corruption and arbitrary intervention in people’s lives. If Brazil had fully embraced his views two or three decades ago, we could have avoided the scandalous and poverty-creating policies we are finally now beginning to reject.

Roberto Campos can be considered a hero because he was a man of principle who embraced the good ideas when he realized what the bad ones were. He did not cling to failed notions. He had the intellectual courage to stand out from the crowd and defend ideas that were inconvenient to the bureaucratic and politically-correct status quo.

Presently, a new generation of young Brazilian activists is giving well-deserved and long overdue credit to Campos. They are citing both his name and his wisdom when they talk about the dire need for economic deregulation and the encouragement of an entrepreneurship culture in Brazil. Those people were lucky to have been born in the information era where content can be spread on the Internet and can thereby rescue young people from the indoctrination of failed and outdated statist ideas.

It is an encouraging sign for Brazil that what Roberto Campos stood for is gaining ground today among Brazilians who are searching for solutions to our economic problems!

Rafael Ribeiro is a Brazilian Fulbright scholar acting as a cultural ambassador at the University of Georgia. He holds a Masters in International Affairs and is closely involved in initiatives that foster the ideas of liberty in his home country.

Originally published at FEE.org on April 12, 2018.

Real Heroes in Venezuela Fight for Liberty

Jorge A. Jraissati

This chapter’s hero is an unusual one. It’s a group of people, not a particular individual. The author is Venezuelan Jorge Jraissati, a FEE campus ambassador. In association with this essay, FEE produced a powerful video about Venezuela, featuring by Mr. Jraissati.

—Lawrence W. Reed

Time has a wonderful way of showing us what really matters. It doesn’t discriminate, and it affects us all equally. In life, we turn around and years have passed. Time is that possession that fades away from us slowly, subtly, and even imperceptibly, and then at some point, it seems to pass so fast that it kidnaps our life without asking for forgiveness.

The voices of experience are represented in our ancestors who lived so much that they were able to see their lives in retrospect. Those voices alert future generations not only to the significance of time but also to the meaning of its erosion. They remember their experiences with loved ones and the dreams they had in their years of idealism and youth. The meaning of these experiences is vast and immeasurable. They are the moments we create out of our freedom and are the gifts of life itself.

Freedom is the inalienable right that allows each one of us to be the unique individual we are; in other words, to be human. Freedom is a blessing that leads us to keep fighting for our dreams, loving the people we love, and believe in the world we live in. Freedom is what gives our lives purpose, along with the opportunity to discover, to create, and to make a difference for those around us, for our countries and for all humanity. Family, culture, beliefs, and economic life—all are nothing more than the manifestations of freedom itself. The less freedom there is, the less we flourish in any of those spheres.

Freedom is the reason the world enjoys the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, the reason Michelangelo Buonarroti painted The Last Judgment, or Shakespeare wrote Macbeth. It’s what makes it possible for people to study and grow, to live in a comfortable home, and to enjoy hope, peace, and love. Take it away, and life can be unbearable.

There are still places in the world where families are living in the darkness of communism and its ideological brother, socialism. In the most extreme of such places, dreaming of a better future is illegal and the promise of eating three meals per day is a delusion. And I’m not just talking about distant North Korea.

Tragically, a world without freedom—one of misery, censorship, and repression—is the one in which we are living now in my native Venezuela. Especially as this important year in our history comes to a close and people the world over are thinking of the blessings associated with Christmas, I want to recognize certain heroes of my country. They are the brave students who were killed in 2017 by the dictatorship that haunts our land, and they were taken from us for no better reason than they stood for justice and human rights. When the regime declared war on freedom, these heroes were among the many who pushed back. That was their crime.

Please note that as reported last week in the Wall Street Journal, the country’s former attorney general, Luisa Ortega, believes that Venezuelan security forces have taken the lives of nearly 8,300 of my fellow countrymen in the last 30 months. I diminish the sacrifice of no one, but nearest to my heart are the lives of my fellow students.

This year, the youth of my country defied the regime, inspired by the millions of Venezuelans who dream to be free. Yes, there are still people in my country who support the dictatorship and its socialist agenda, but the future belongs to the young, and it’s among the young that the fires of freedom burn the strongest.

This year, day by day for months, the streets of Venezuela witnessed the biggest manifestations of courage in the country’s history. Students were in the forefront of them all. Those impressive national protests were repressed by the regime and its military with massive brutality and with the complicity and weapons of Castro’s Cuba. Thousands of young Venezuelans were (and still are) incarcerated; thousands more were injured. At least 157 students were killed in 2017, and they, in particular, are the heroes I wish to honor and remember, and to which this essay is dedicated.

Those brave and inspiring Venezuelans of my generation gave everything for the future of their families. They died because they preferred to die fighting than to live as slaves. Abandoning their families to tyranny was not an option. They found the strength to fight because they wanted to see the families they love to be free and to prosper. They wanted to see their fathers proud to work with dignity, not depressed for being no longer able to work and pay the bills. They wanted to wipe the tears of their mothers when they had no food in the fridge.

Their deaths, however, were not in vain. The same way they always fought, we will keep fighting. They are our inspiration, and a major reason to keep fighting. I ask God to give me half of the strength they had, as they possessed courage I can only imagine. Because of Venezuelans like them, I have no doubts my country will be free, though I do not know when or what trials must yet be endured before that happens. I have no doubt our fallen heroes watch us from Heaven and guide our fight. We owe them the free Venezuela they never saw, the joy of living in a country they only could dream about.

I am 21 years old, a college student in Florida and recent exile from my own country. When Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, I was only two years old. Like my young compatriots to whom I pay tribute here, I’ve known only repression in Venezuela. And like those 157 youthful dreamers who died on the front lines in 2017, I understand that if we don’t fight today, there is no tomorrow. If we want to see Venezuela as a home of the free, we need Venezuelans to be brave. The heroes who fell this year and before, and those who remain to fight, are the ones to whom we will owe our liberty the day my country is free again.

Personally, expressing how painful is to live under socialism is difficult. It suffocates you. It works every day to snatch from you all hope, faith, and courage. You can’t dream, you can’t create, you can’t breathe. It takes away your life, destroys your family, silences your voice, and murders those who are fighting to give you back everything you lost.

Socialism is a disease that permeates everything you love and destroys it from the inside. In my country, family reunions are extinct, as more than three million Venezuelans (12 percent of the country) have emigrated and many thousands more die each year from rising crime and hunger. A dinner with friends is virtually impossible, as hyperinflation puts a good meal beyond the reach of most. This is but a small portion of the collective agony that my country experiences every day under a regime that promised it would care for “the people.” What we got was Hell on earth.

My friend Lawrence Reed, president of FEE and a staunch friend of Venezuelans who love freedom, once told me of something his Scottish ancestors wrote nearly 700 years ago. It’s a message that applies as well to my country today: “It is not for honors or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.”

I promise to the extent I have the power to do so that in Venezuela, we who love freedom will fight to end the intolerable situation in which the country finds itself. And we will never, ever, surrender until that freedom is ours.

Jorge Jraissati is one of the most impactful influencers and leaders of the student movement in Venezuela. He is an important voice for students and millions of Venezuelans who are fighting for their future, their country and their freedom. Jorge has been an advocate for freedom since the age of 16. Among the most followed and recognized young political figures of his country, Jorge writes about the human rights violations of the current Venezuelan regime, the results of socialist economic policies, necessary reforms and, most importantly, the ongoing fight for liberty in Venezuela.

Originally published at FEE.org on December 28, 2017.

How Ben Franklin Invented the American Dream

Jim Powell

This chapter’s hero is a man whose name is well-known the world over, more than two centuries since his passing. He was the 18th Century’s Renaissance Man, Benjamin Franklin. From our extensive FEE archives, I’ve culled this timeless essay from 1997 by prolific historian and Cato Institute scholar Jim Powell.

—Lawrence W. Reed

Benjamin Franklin pioneered the spirit of self-help in America. With less than three years of formal schooling, he taught himself almost everything he knew. He took the initiative of learning French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. He taught himself how to play the guitar, violin, and harp. He made himself an influential author and editor. He started a successful printing business, newspaper, and magazine. He developed a network of printing partnerships throughout the American colonies.

When Franklin saw that something needed doing, he did it. In Philadelphia, he helped launch the city’s first police force, the first volunteer fire company, the first fire insurance firm, the first hospital, the first public library, and the academy that became the first institution of higher learning (the University of Pennsylvania). As postmaster, he doubled and tripled the frequency of mail deliveries.

Franklin, who reportedly amassed early America’s largest private library, helped expand the frontiers of science and invention. He started the American Philosophical Society, which was this country’s first scientific society, and maintained the first science library, first museum, and first patent office; more than 90 members of this society went on to win Nobel Prizes. On his eight trans-Atlantic crossings, Franklin made measurements that helped chart the Gulf Stream. He pioneered the study of water flowing around a hull—hydrodynamics. He investigated meteorology. He invented bifocal spectacles. He was most famous, of course, for his experiments with electricity, especially lightning. His lightning rod helped banish the terror of thunderstorms.

Franklin had more to do with founding the American republic than anyone else. As American representative in London, he helped persuade Parliament to repeal the despised Stamp Act taxes, giving America an additional decade to prepare for armed conflict with Britain. He was on the committee that named Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence. He went to France and secured military help as well as a formal alliance, without which America probably wouldn’t have won the Revolutionary War. He helped negotiate the peace with Britain. He crafted a compromise that helped prevent the collapse of the Constitutional Convention, and he was the one who moved that the Constitution be adopted.

Franklin, more than anybody, linked the emerging international movements for liberty. James Madison recalled that he never passed half an hour in his company without hearing some observation or anecdote worth remembering. Franklin dined with Wealth of Nations author Adam Smith. The Scottish philosopher David Hume told Franklin:

America has sent us many good things, Gold, Silver, Sugar, Tobacco, Indigo. . . But you are the first Philosopher, and indeed the first Great Man of Letters for whom we are beholden.

Edmund Burke, who had opposed Britain’s war against America, called Franklin the friend of mankind. When the French wit Voltaire met William Temple Franklin, he quipped: “God and Liberty! It is the only benediction which can be given to the grandson of Franklin.” Laissez-faire economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot remarked that Franklin snatched the lightning from heaven and the scepter from tyrants.

Franklin was a late-blooming radical. During his 30s, he brokered the sale of some slaves as a sideline for his general store. He and his wife owned two slaves. In 1758, when he was 52, he suggested establishing Philadelphia’s first school for blacks. He abandoned his support for the British Empire and committed himself to the American Revolution when he was 70. Philadelphia Quakers had launched the abolitionist movement by organizing the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (1775), but its activities ceased during the Revolution; this pioneering society revived in 1787 when Franklin became its president, at 81. Two years later he voiced his support for the ideals of the French Revolution.

Franklin was famous for his charm and tact, which enabled him to get the most out of people, but he had detractors. For instance, John Adams complained,

I could never obtain the favour of his Company in a Morning before Breakfast which would have been the most convenient time to read over the Letters and papers. . . Mr. Franklin kept a horn book always in his Pockett in which he minuted all his invitations to dinner, and Mr. [Arthur] Lee said it was the only thing in which he was punctual . . . and after that went sometimes to the Play, sometimes to the Philosophers but most commonly to visit those Ladies. . .

John Dickinson, head of Pennsylvania’s delegation to Congress, hated Franklin so much that he refused to install a lightning rod on his Philadelphia mansion—and it was struck by lightning.

While Franklin was generous with his friends and adopted families, he could be insensitive with his own. He disregarded pleas from his dying wife, Deborah, whom he hadn’t seen in almost a dozen years, to return home from Britain where he represented American colonial interests. He refused to approve his daughter’s proposed marriage to the man she loved. His son’s decision to side with Britain during the American Revolution provoked a bitter break that never healed.

As biographer Ronald W. Clark noted,

Franklin was only an inch or two less than six feet in height, thickset and muscular, with dark brown hair above friendly hazel eyes. He was obviously able to look after himself, a distinct advantage in the rougher eighteenth century. . . These physical attributes were compounded by a nimbleness of mind, so that in argument as well as in action he tended to be off the mark quicker than most men. Above all, and largely concealed by his instinctive hail-fellow-well-met nature, there was a steely determination to succeed and some impatience with those who got in his way.

Childhood and Youth

Benjamin Franklin was born in a Milk Street, Boston, house January 17, 1706, the tenth son of Abia Folger, daughter of an indentured servant. His father Josiah Franklin was a candlemaker.

At eight, he was sent to Boston’s Latin school with the idea of entering Harvard, which would prepare him for the ministry. But Harvard required unquestioning devotion, and Franklin exhibited some religious skepticism. At one point, for instance, he suggested that his father shorten his lengthy mealtime prayers and say Grace over the whole cask—it would be a vast saving of time. Within two years, Franklin was transferred to a more practical Boston school for writing and arithmetic. He apprenticed in his father’s candlemaking shop.

But by age 12, he had become restless. Apparently, because he began to enjoy books, his father arranged for him to apprentice with his 21-year-old brother James, who had set himself up as a Boston printer. “I was fond of reading,” Franklin recalled, “and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.” Among other titles, he read Plutarch’s Lives, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Franklin gained experience writing when his brother began publishing a newspaper, the New-England Courant. At 16, he anonymously wrote 14 articles known as the Dogood Papers, satirizing religious dogmas and government officials, and his brother published them apparently without ever knowing the identity of the author. As a consequence, the Massachusetts Governor’s Council sentenced James Franklin to a month in jail, and it ordered him to stop publishing the New-England Courant. The paper continued to appear, however—under Benjamin Franklin’s name. But the brothers began squabbling, apparently over control. Impatient to become his own man, he ran away from home in September 1723.

Somewhere along the line, Franklin learned how to be more tactful and persuasive. He expressed himself in

Terms of modest Diffidence, never using when I advance any thing that may possibly be disputed, the Words Certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the Air of Positiveness to an Opinion; but rather say, I conceive, or I apprehend a Thing to be so and so, It appears to me, or I should think it so or so for such & such Reasons, or I imagine it to be so, or it is so if I am not mistaken.

Franklin went to Philadelphia, where he heard a printer was looking for help.

I was dirty from my Journey, he wrote about his arrival at the Market Street Wharf, my Pockets were stuff’d out with Shirts & Stockings; I knew no Soul, or where to look for Lodging. I was fatigued with Travelling, Rowing & Want of Rest. I was very hungry, and my whole Stock of Cash consisted of a Dutch Dollar and about a Shilling in Copper.

Yet as biographer Ronald Clark noted, Franklin was distinctly presentable, a well-set-up young man in his early twenties, lacking the plumpness of his later years and radiating an apparently inexhaustible energy.

Young Ben Franklin in London

Franklin got a job and somehow met Pennsylvania’s governor William Keith, who needed a good printer. Although Franklin was just 18, his evident intelligence made him a standout. The governor offered to provide financing so Franklin could establish his own print shop. Accordingly, in November 1724 he sailed for England to buy printing equipment, but the governor’s promise turned out to be worthless.

During the next 20 months, Franklin worked for a couple of big London printers. He wrote a pamphlet which, questioning certain religious doctrines, served as a calling card. Franklin met Bernard Mandeville, the Dutch doctor who wrote The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits, anticipating Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand.

London, an intellectual capital of Europe, had expanded Franklin’s vision. He had become a first-class printer and met many sophisticated people. During the tedious 79-day voyage home, he wrote down some principles for success. His original draft was lost, but the main points were probably similar to what he remembered later:

1. It is necessary for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe. 2. To endeavor to speak truth in every instance, to give nobody expectations that are not likely to be answered, but aim at sincerity in every word and action; the most amiable excellence in a rational being. 3. To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty. 4. I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and, upon proper occasions, speak all the good I know of everybody.

Within months after his return in late 1726, he was in business for himself. He landed a contract to print Pennsylvania’s currency—and, alas, promoter that he was, he touted it in a pamphlet, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency. Franklin printed a wide range of things, including the first novel published in America (Samuel Richardson’s Pamela), and sold material printed by others, including Bibles and all kinds of legal forms. Moreover, Franklin served as a moneylender for the poor, providing as little as two shillings.

The Pennsylvania Gazette and “Poor Richard”

Franklin bought a failing newspaper, changed its name to The Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote many of the articles himself and made money. The December 28, 1732, issue announced that he would be offering Poor Richard: an Almanack. It was published annually until 1758, offering memorable aphorisms about success. For instance:

God helps them that helps themselves. . . Diligence is the Mother of Good-Luck. . . Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. . . Well done is better than well said. . . He that has a Trade, has an Office of Profit and Honour. . . Life with Fools consists in Drinking; With the wise Man Living’s Thinking. . . Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure. . . As Pride increases, Fortune declines. . . Be always asham’d to catch thy self idle. . . Wink at small faults; remember thou hast great ones. . . Folly and Wickedness shortens Life. . . Drive thy business; let not that drive thee. . . When you’re good to others, you are best to yourself. . . Love, and be lov’d.

Poor Richard’s Almanack sold some 10,000 copies a year—a big number in those days—and helped make Franklin a household name.

Meanwhile, in 1727, Franklin started a group called the Junto, which he described as a Club for mutual Improvement. Participants—many of whom were young apprentices—suggested one or more “Queries on any Point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the Company, and once in three Months produce & read an Essay of his own Writing on any Subject he pleased.”

They met weekly on Friday evenings, initially at a tavern and later in a rented room. When the Junto reached what Franklin considered an optimum size (12), he encouraged interested people to form their own groups, and they sprouted all around Philadelphia.

During the next three decades, Franklin’s Junto helped pioneer many of Philadelphia’s institutions, starting with the city’s first public library. After members discussed the idea, it was considered by people in the other groups. Then Franklin talked about it in the columns of The Pennsylvania Gazette. The library began by charging an entrance fee and an annual subscription fee.

Next, to provide greater security against crime, Franklin started City Watch, which organized teams of constables patrolling neighborhoods at night. Through the Junto, Franklin promoted the paving, cleaning, and lighting of streets.

Reflecting his cosmopolitan view, Franklin decided that “The first drudgery of settling new colonies, which confines the attention of people to mere necessaries, is now pretty well over. . .” He believed it was time to cultivate the finer arts and improve the common stock of knowledge. In 1744, he and fellow Junto members helped organize the American Philosophical Society; he served as its first secretary.

Franklin thought college education should be available to people in Pennsylvania—as it was available in Connecticut (Yale), Massachusetts (Harvard), and Virginia (William and Mary). He discussed his idea with members of the Junto and wrote a pamphlet, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania. He recommended that the curriculum focus on basic skills like writing and speaking. His proposed reading list included works by the seventeenth-century radical author Algernon Sidney and Cato’s Letters, the influential early eighteenth-century case for natural rights.

In 1749, Franklin was elected the first president of this new Academy, helping to recruit trustees, raise money, rent a house, and hire teachers. The Academy prospered and went on to become the University of Pennsylvania.

A doctor named Thomas Bond tried to establish Philadelphia’s first hospital, but he couldn’t get support. People assumed that if the project were worthwhile, Franklin would be involved. So Bond approached Franklin, who became a subscriber and enthusiastically solicited support from others. This was the beginning of Pennsylvania Hospital.

Franklin was becoming a successful self-made man, but his life wasn’t complete. He had some romantic adventures, one of which brought a son, William. On September 1, 1730, he began a common-law marriage with Deborah Read, a carpenter’s daughter. They had a son, Francis, who died four years later from smallpox, and a daughter, Sally (Sarah), who was born in 1743. Franklin’s first son, William, lived with them. Deborah seems to have been a barely literate homebody, and she couldn’t begin to keep up with her husband. During the next 45 years, she displayed phenomenal patience as he spent decades away on business throughout the colonies and Europe.

By 1748, Franklin turned over management of his printing business to a partner and retired from it while continuing to receive half the profits. He still edited The Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard.

With his buoyant curiosity, Franklin pursued myriad scientific interests. He investigated weather patterns. Before geology was a science, Franklin speculated about the origin of mountains. He invented a more efficient wood-burning stove, connected to a radiator. In 1744, he started popularizing this stove as the Pennsylvania Fire Place.

Experiments with Electricity

Franklin began to experiment with electricity. He determined that there were two kinds of charges, which he called positive and negative. In June 1752, he climbed a Philadelphia hill, flew a silk kite during a thunderstorm, touched one knuckle to a key on the wet string—and felt an electrical shock. Franklin published Experiments and Observations on Electricity, and it was translated into French, German, Italian, and Latin.

The English editor and statesman Lord Brougham marveled, years later, that “Franklin could make an experiment with less apparatus and conduct his experimental inquiry to a discovery with more ordinary materials than any other philosopher we ever saw. With an old key, a silk thread, some sealing-wax, and a sheet of paper, he discovered the identity of lightning and electricity.”

Franklin developed lightning rods that could draw lightning away from a house and protect it from fire. Lightning rods earned Franklin the gratitude of people throughout America and Europe. Harvard and Yale universities awarded him honorary degrees. He was elected a Fellow of the English Royal Society and the French Académie des Sciences.

By the time Franklin had become famous for his experiments on electricity, he was in the thick of Pennsylvania politics. He was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly in August 1751. As Britain and France struggled for control of North America, the French won over many Indian tribes as allies, and people in Pennsylvania were vulnerable to attack. The Penn family, known as the Proprietors because they owned the colony, refused to mount a defense. Franklin helped organize a people’s militia.

In 1754, the British Board of Trade and Plantations asked nine colonies north of the Potomac River to participate in a Congress aimed at preventing the Iroquois Indians from becoming allies of the French. Pennsylvania’s governor appointed Franklin as a representative, and the conference took place in Albany, New York, the gateway to French Canada, as historian Catherine Drinker Bowen called it. A peace treaty was signed. Franklin proposed the Albany Plan of Union, which would have established a federal union of the colonies under the British crown. Although the plan wasn’t adopted, Franklin had emerged as a person whose vision and capabilities could take him far beyond Pennsylvania.

He prepared the 1758 Poor Richard and turned it into a pamphlet. Lacking fresh material, he rewrote some of his aphorisms. For instance:

I will tell thee, my friend, what Poor Richard says, Employ thy time well if thou meanest to gain leisure; and, since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour. Leisure is time for doing something useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never; so that, as poor Richard says A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. No, for as poor Richard says, Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease. Many without labour, would live by their wits only, but they break for want of stock. Whereas industry gives comfort, and plenty, and respect.

This little work was issued as The Way to Wealth, which went into nine Spanish printings, 11 German printings, 56 French printings, and 70 English printings. Moreover, it also appeared in Bohemian, Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Gaelic, Greek, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Welsh.

Pennsylvania politics intensified. Many people resented the Penns because their vast landholdings were tax-exempt. Since Franklin had been to England, was well known in Europe, and had proven himself as a negotiator, the Assembly sent him to London where, it was hoped, he could secure their interests against the Penns.

After a fruitless discussion with Thomas Penn, William Penn’s son, it was clear that Franklin was in for a long stay. He learned the fine art of British-style lobbying. He brought to it his skill of writing letters and essays—he contributed 32 articles to the London Chronicle, 33 articles to the Public Advertiser, and additional articles in The Citizen and The Gentleman’s Magazine. He anonymously collaborated with fellow Pennsylvania agent Richard Jackson to produce An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania(1758), a polemic against the Penns; and The Interest of Great Britain Considered, With Regard to her Colonies, And the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadeloupe (1760), a pamphlet supporting the expansion of the British Empire.

Franklin dined out six days a week, developing relationships with influential people. In April 1759, the Pennsylvania Assembly had passed a bill which aimed to raise £100,000 for defense against the French—by taxing all land. It specified that the long tax-exempt Penn properties would be taxed, at a rate no higher than any other property. The bill was upheld in London.

Soon after Franklin returned on November 1, 1759, battles resumed with the Penns. He was convinced Pennsylvania would be better run as a royal colony. The Pennsylvania Assembly agreed and sent him back to London the following October. He was appointed by assemblies in Massachusetts and Georgia to represent their interests, too.

The Stamp Act Crisis

Asking George III to take over Pennsylvania turned out to mean support for British taxation. Britain and France had concluded their costly Seven Years’ War, and Britain wanted the Colonies to help pay for it. Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which became law November 1, 1765. It called for taxes on legal documents, newspapers, and playing cards in the colonies, and Franklin accepted it as a fait accompli. He did speak out against “the mistaken Notion . . . that the Colonies were planted at the Expense of Parliament, and that therefore the Parliament has a Right to tax them. . .”

“America,” he emphasized, “had not been conquer’d by either King or Parliament, but was possess’d by a free People.”

Franklin was startled by the intensity of colonial resistance to the Stamp Act. He feared the Stamp Act could provoke a break with Britain. Accordingly, he launched one of his trademark propaganda campaigns against it. Writing under such pseudonyms as Homespun and Traveler, he presented a case that it was in Britain’s interest to repeal the Stamp Act.

When Parliament held hearings on repeal, Franklin was among the 30 witnesses who testified. Asked if Americans would accept a more moderate tax, Franklin declared: No, never unless compelled by force of arms. The Stamp Act was repealed.

Parliament tried again to assert its supremacy over the colonies. It passed a Quartering Act that empowered the British commander in America to demand lodgings for his soldiers. In June 1767, Parliament enacted new colonial taxes on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. Franklin urged some kind of conciliation, but back in the colonies Boston patriots Samuel Adams and James Otis spurred the Massachusetts Assembly to call for renewed resistance against British policies. Public opinion radicalized after the Boston Massacre, in which British soldiers killed five Boston patriots.

In 1771, Franklin visited his friend Jonathan Shipley, bishop of St. Asaph, at his Twyford home, near Winchester. There he started work on his autobiography. Franklin, reported Yale University scholars, wrote the autobiography on large folio sheets, two leaves or four pages to a sheet. In initial composition he used only one vertical half of each page, leaving the other temporarily blank. As he later reviewed what he had written, he canceled words or phrases in the first draft, inserted between the lines new or revised phraseology, or, if more room was necessary, used the space in the adjoining blank column.

In Britain, Franklin met Anthony Benezet, the Philadelphia Quaker teacher who was probably the earliest abolitionist and an advocate of educating blacks and women. He encouraged Quaker merchants to get out of the slave trade. He introduced Franklin to leading abolitionists and prodded him to join the opposition to the slave trade.

In 1772 Franklin wrote “The Somerset Case and the Slave Trade,” an unsigned article for the London Chronicle. He asked:

Can sweetening our tea with sugar be a circumstance of such absolute necessity? Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential, detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men?

Franklin agreed to serve on the board of Bray Associates, an organization that established schools for black boys and girls in Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg. In 1774, Franklin wrote the Marquis de Condorcet: “Negroes . . . are not deficient in natural Understanding, but they have not the Advantage of Education.”

Somehow, Franklin got his hands on six explosive letters by Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson. In one, drafted after the Stamp Act crisis, Hutchinson had written: “There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties . . . there must be a great restraint of natural liberty.”

On December 2, 1772, Franklin secretly sent them to Thomas Cushing, Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly, asking that they be kept confidential. But Samuel Adams broke the news, and the letters were published. The Massachusetts Assembly petitioned George III to remove Hutchinson as governor.

In London, Franklin became an outcast. Perhaps attempting to redeem himself, he publicly criticized the Boston Tea Party (in which Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty dumped 342 chests of British tea into Boston Harbor) and offered to pay for the lost tea.

Franklin was summoned to a hearing before the British Privy Council. It cleared Hutchinson of any wrongdoing, and Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn denounced Franklin. Maverick member of Parliament Charles James Fox warned that “all men tossed up their hats, and clapped their hands in boundless delight, at Mr. Wedderburn’s speech against Dr. Franklin, without reckoning the cost it was to entail upon them.” As Fox anticipated, this experience irrevocably turned Franklin against Britain.

The “Shot Heard Round the World”

Before he sailed for America on March 21, 1775, he learned that his wife, Deborah, had died of paralysis. He hadn’t seen her in 11 years, and little is known about his feelings toward her. Whatever they were, Franklin became swept up with fast-breaking events. While he was at sea, Paul Revere warned his compatriots that British soldiers were preparing for action in Lexington, Massachusetts, and then came the shot heard round the world, as Ralph Waldo Emerson later immortalized it.

Edmund Burke wrote a friend in the French army:

What say you to your friend and brother Philosopher Franklin, who at upwards of seventy years of age, quits the Study of the Laws of Nature, in order to give Laws to new Commonwealth; and has crossed the Atlantick ocean at that time of Life, not to seek repose but to lunge into the midst of the most laborious and most arduous affairs that ever were.

On May 6, 1775, the day after Franklin reached Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Assembly made him a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, and a week later the British government issued an order for his arrest.

“My time was never more fully employed,” Franklin wrote.

In the morning, at six, I am at the Committee of Safety, appointed by the Assembly to put the province in a state of defense, which Committee holds till nine, when I am at the Congress, and that sits till after four in the afternoon.

Franklin was named to the Secret Committee of Congress, responsible for acquiring war supplies; and the Committee of Secret Correspondence, the fledgling State Department, whose aim was corresponding with our friends in Great Britain, Ireland, and other parts of the world. Franklin met George Washington to learn what was needed, and since the government didn’t have any credit, Franklin advanced another American commander £353 in gold from his personal funds.

In October 1775, Franklin talked with an impassioned English immigrant whom he had met in London, suggesting the Englishman write a history of the present transactions. Indeed, the young man was already at work on such a project. He seems to have shown Franklin a draft in December. It was published as a 47-page pamphlet on January 10, 1776, and the author reportedly gave Franklin the first copy.

The young man was Thomas Paine, and the pamphlet was Common Sense, whose eloquent call for independence electrified people throughout the colonies. In just a few months, Common Sense sold some 120,000 copies. With this single mighty blow, Paine banished efforts to achieve a reconciliation with Britain.

The Declaration of Independence

On June 21, 1776, Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston (New York), and Roger Sherman (Connecticut) were appointed to a committee for producing a declaration which would announce American independence. The committee asked Jefferson to draft it. Adams and Franklin read at least one version.

Handwritten revisions suggest it was Franklin’s idea to change Jefferson’s description of “sacred and undeniable” truths to “self-evident.” Jefferson had written “reduce them to arbitrary power,” which Franklin changed to “reduce them under absolute despotism.” Franklin changed Jefferson’s phrase “deluge us in blood” to “destroy us.” And he had a number of other changes that tightened up Jefferson’s magnificent draft.

Jefferson later remembered that, “I was sitting by Dr. Franklin, who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations. ‘I have made it a rule,’ said he, ‘whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draftsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.’”

When time came to sign the Declaration on August 2, John Hancock, President of Congress reportedly remarked: “We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling different ways; we must all hang together.”

According to legend—not any contemporary accounts—Franklin urged that the Declaration be adopted unanimously, saying, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

With war underway, the best bet for help was France, which, having lost a war with Britain, would surely have wanted the British Empire to come apart. But the French were circumspect. They were at peace with Britain. The Americans were the underdogs, and nobody, including the French, wanted to publicly back a loser.

King Louis XVI saw danger in supporting revolution against another monarchy. The Americans, for their part, felt some uneasiness seeking help from a king who claimed absolute power, and they didn’t want the French to know how desperate they were. In addition, the British had spies everywhere, so it was likely that whatever the Americans did would soon be known in London.

In Paris, a private outfit, Rodrique Hortalez and Company, was set up to acquire and ship war supplies. The Secret Committee of Congress thought they should have one of their own on the spot, so they dispatched Connecticut Congressman Silas Deane. But he wasn’t able to move things along. Unknown and unconnected in Europe, he acknowledged, “I was without personal credit, and the accounts of our misfortunes in America, with the confident assurances of the British Ministry by their ambassadors and partisans in Paris, that everything would be finished.”

When Franklin was asked if he would go to France, he noted his gout and other infirmities and reportedly replied, “I am old and good for nothing.” But he agreed, then withdrew more than £3,000 from his bank and lent it to Congress. French intellectuals respected him for his pioneering experiments with electricity, and ordinary people knew that his lightning rods saved homes from fire. As John Adams put it:

There was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with [Benjamin Franklin], and who did not consider him as a friend to human kind.

Franklin in Paris

On October 26, 1776, Franklin secretly left Philadelphia with his grandsons William Temple Franklin and Benjamin Franklin Bache. They reached Paris on December 22. Franklin established his headquarters at Passy, a chateau in the town of Chaillot which was about one mile from Paris and seven miles from Versailles. The chateau belonged to Jacques Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, an entrepreneur who had made money supplying uniforms to the French army.

It was at Passy that Franklin gave dinner parties and cultivated business relationships. Among other things, he learned how to deal effectively with the French, telling them,

Their commerce will be advantaged by our success, and that it is in their interest to help us, seems as much as to say, help us, and we shall not be obliged to you. Such indiscreet and improper language has been sometimes held here by some of our people, and produced no good effects.

Franklin discovered how to make an appealing impression. He described himself as “very plainly dressed, wearing my thin, gray straight hair, that peeps out under my only coiffure, a fine fur cap, which comes down my forehead almost to my spectacles. Think how this must appear among the powdered heads of Paris!”

Pictures of Franklin seemed to appear everywhere. Fashionable artists like Jean Honoré Fragonard did paintings of Franklin. His portrait was reproduced as engravings and aquatints. His likeness was on medallions, wall plaques, rings, bracelets, snuffboxes, and hats. He wrote his daughter, Sally, “These, with pictures, busts and prints (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere), have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.”

On one occasion, Franklin was dining at a Paris restaurant and learned that Edward Gibbon, the British historian who chronicled ancient Rome’s decline and fall, was there, too. Franklin invited Gibbon to his table, but Gibbon declined, saying that since he was loyal to George III, he wouldn’t speak with a rebel. Franklin replied that if Gibbon ever wanted to write a history of Britain’s decline and fall, he would provide ample materials.

Despite all Franklin’s savvy, he might not have accomplished much without evidence that the Americans could win. Washington provided that when he crossed the Delaware River on Christmas Day 1776 and won the Battle of Trenton, capturing over 900 fierce Hessian soldiers, mercenaries for the British. Franklin negotiated two treaties (Alliance and Commerce) with France, giving important diplomatic recognition to the American republic.

Franklin arranged a succession of shipments to America. That they included the most basic goods suggests how vulnerable America was. In one shipment, for instance: 164 brass cannon, 3,600 blankets, 4,000 tents, 4,000 dozen pairs of stockings, 8,750 pairs of shoes, 11,000 grenades, 20,000 pounds of lead, 161,000 pounds of gunpowder, 373,000 flints, and 514,000 musket balls. Altogether, Franklin secured some 26 million francs of military supplies.

Franklin handled many more tasks. For example, he met the Scottish-born naval captain John Paul Jones and encouraged his bold raids along Britain’s coast, undermining British morale. Jones’s flagship, the Bon Homme Richard, honored the Poor Richard of Franklin’s Almanack.

Franklin’s phenomenal diplomacy clinched victory. In 1781, the British General Charles Cornwallis retreated from advancing forces led by George Washington and the French Marquis de Lafayette. Cornwallis brought his 8,000-man army to Yorktown, a Virginia coastal town where he expected relief from the mighty British navy. But the ships off Yorktown were commanded by the French Admiral Francois Joseph Paul de Grasse, and Cornwallis was cornered. He surrendered on October 19, 1781, essentially ending the Revolutionary War.

Franklin had worked wonders even though London learned about practically every move. His chief assistant at Passy was his friend Dr. Edward Bancroft, an American who worked as a British spy. Jonathan Dull, author of Franklin the Diplomat, remarked,

The American mission was so full of people stealing information it is surprising they did not trip over each other. British spies routinely opened Franklin’s letters, and sometimes the spies were able to alert British ships which captured war materials bound for America.

Despite his hard work and health complaints, Franklin seems to have enjoyed himself. “You mention the Kindness of the French Ladies,” he remarked to a friend.

This is the civilest Nation upon Earth. Your first Acquaintances endeavour to find out what you like, and they tell others. . . Somebody, it seems, gave it out that I lov’d Ladies; and then every body presented me their Ladies . . . as to the kissing of Lips or Cheeks it is not the Mode here, the first, is reckon’d rude, & the other may rub off the Paint.

Franklin’s work still wasn’t done. Congress named him to a committee which would negotiate peace terms with Britain. Negotiations dragged on because the British refused to acknowledge American independence and sovereignty.

Finally, after eight and a half years, missions accomplished, Franklin left Paris on July 12, 1785. He took five days to go the 146 miles to Le Havre, and he bid farewell to friends and well-wishers all along the way. He sailed for America with Jean-Antoine Houdon, the sculptor who had done a noble bust of Franklin and would help immortalize Jefferson, Lafayette, and Washington.

Soon after arriving, Franklin declared, “I shall now be free of Politicks for the Rest of my Life.” He spent time with his daughter and grandchildren. He planned an expansion of his house. His most recent inventions, at age 80, included an eight-foot-long gadget with a wooden thumb and finger at the end, to help a reader retrieve a book from a high shelf; a chair which, turned upside down, could serve as a step-stool; and a bathtub with a book rest.

The Constitutional Convention

Franklin’s last great opportunity came as the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia, in the spring of 1787. He was elected to the Philadelphia delegation. When Washington arrived on May 13, he stopped first at Franklin’s Market Street house. The Convention met in the State House where the Second Continental Congress had met and where the Declaration of Independence had been signed.

When it looked like the Convention might collapse because of conflict between small states and big states (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) over how they would be represented, Franklin suggested that subsequent sessions begin with a prayer. Although the proposal was rejected, it seemed to help calm down the participants.

Congress named a Grand Committee in hopes of proposing a solution. Franklin, a member of it, recommended there be two legislative bodies—an idea which others had suggested—because this made possible a compromise: states would have equal representation in one legislative body (the Senate) and representation according to population in the other legislative body (the House of Representatives), with the House having the power to originate money bills. This Great Compromise assured the small states that their interests would be protected, and they were more willing to compromise on other issues, helping to move the proceedings forward.

Finally, Franklin made a motion that the Constitution be adopted.

When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, he reflected, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinions, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does. . . On the whole, Sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

In late 1787, Franklin had a bad fall going down steps to his garden, and he suffered excruciating pain from a kidney stone. He wrote his will and resumed work on his autobiography. He corresponded with friends. George Washington wrote, “As long as I retain my memory, you will be thought of with respect, veneration and affection.”

Franklin declared that the new Constitution looked like it might last, “but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

As the French Revolution exploded across the Atlantic, Franklin wrote his friend David Hartley:

God grant that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface, and say, ‘This is my country.’

In March 1790, Thomas Jefferson visited him and reported:

I found him in bed where he remains almost constantly. He had been clear of pain for some days and was cheerful & in good spirits. . . He is much emaciated. I pressed him to continue the narration of his life, & perhaps he will.

Franklin entrusted Jefferson—the only one outside his family—with a copy of some chapters from his Autobiography. The last letter Franklin ever wrote, nine days before his death, was to Jefferson.

Franklin developed a fever and complained about pain on the left side of his chest. His daughter expressed the hope that he would live for quite a while, but he replied, “I hope not. A dying man can do nothing easy.”

Then a lung abscess burst and breathing became ever more difficult. He died on April 17, 1790, at about 11:00 at night. He was 84. Four days later, a funeral procession began at the State House, and he was buried at Christ Church cemetery. Some 20,000 people paid their respects, including officials, militia men, scientists, merchants, bankers, teachers, printers, apprentices, and others whose lives were touched by the extraordinary enterprising spirit of Benjamin Franklin.

He had written his wry epitaph long ago:

B. Franklin, Printer; like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost, For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended By the Author.

John Adams, though a Franklin critic, acknowledged his reputation was “more universal than that of Leibnitz and Newton, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them.” In Paris, Comte de Mirabeau, the orator and revolutionary leader, told the French National Assembly, “Franklin is dead—he has returned to the bosom of God—the genius who has liberated America, and shed over Europe the torrents of his light.”

Franklin’s Autobiography

Part One of Franklin’s Autobiography —a pirated French edition—was published in 1791. Then came two English editions. There were 14 reprintings before 1800. Franklin’s selected works, including the Autobiography, weren’t published until 1817 because of delays by the aimless William Temple Franklin, who had inherited his grandfather’s manuscripts. The rest of Franklin’s manuscripts were stored in a stable and eventually recovered by the American Philosophical Society. John Adams expressed appreciation for what was available because “there is scarce a scratch of his Pen that is not worth preserving.”

The Autobiography had many factual errors since Franklin recalled events years after they happened. The story only went up to 1760. Franklin revealed little about his feelings. But the book appealed to people because he chronicled his failures as well as his successes, and he identified principles for building strong character. He wrote in a refreshingly plainspoken manner.

American historian Carl Becker noted,

Franklin was a true child of the Enlightenment, not indeed of the school of Rousseau, but of Defoe and Pope and Swift, of Fontenelle and Montesquieu and Voltaire. He spoke their language, although with a homely accent, a tang of the soil, that bears witness to his lowly and provincial origin. . . He accepted without question and expressed without effort all the characteristic ideas and prepossessions of the century . . . its healthy, clarifying skepticism; its passion for freedom and its humane sympathies; its preoccupation with the world that is evident to the senses; its profound faith in common sense, in the efficacy of Reason for the solution of human problems and the advancement of human welfare.

The book had a significant impact around the world. Inspired by Franklin, the great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe organized a Friday Club whose aims and practices were similar to Franklin’s Junto. Franklin inspired Simón Bolivar and José de San Martin, who helped people in South America achieve independence. Franklin’s Autobiography was a hit in Japan, where Fukuzawa Yukichi and other thinkers promoted his principles, which inspired entrepreneurs. The Florentine painter Gaspero Barbera published an Italian translation, explaining:

At the age of 35 I was a lost man. . . I read again and again the Autobiography of Franklin, and became enamoured of his ideas and principles to such a degree that to them I ascribe my moral regeneration. . . Now, at the age of fifty-one, I am healthy, cheerful and rich.

During the heyday of American individualism, Franklin’s story was taken up by educators whose books sold in the tens of millions. For instance, drawing on the Autobiography, Noah Webster included an 11-page account of Franklin’s life in his Biography For the Use of Schools (1830). Peter Parley wrote a Life of Benjamin Franklin (1832). William Holmes McGuffey included selections from the Autobiography in his enormously popular Readers.

By the 1850s, the Autobiography had been reprinted almost 100 times. Between 1860 and 1890, Franklin was reportedly the most popular subject for American biographers. Many successful Americans testified about the impact Franklin had on their lives. The Autobiography inspired James Harper to leave his Long Island farm and launch what became one of America’s most venerable publishing houses (now HarperCollins).

“Yes, sir,” Harper told a friend, “the basis on which we commenced was character, not capital” —and he had an artist paint a profile of Franklin into his own portrait.

Horace Greeley, a poor boy who became the famous editor of the New York Tribune, declared in 1862:

Of the men whom the world currently terms Self-Made—that is, who severally fought their life-battles without the aid of inherited wealth, or family honors, or educational advantages, perhaps our American Franklin stands highest in the civilized world’s regard.

The Autobiography inspired Thomas Mellon to leave his farm for business; he became a banker and made his family fortune. “I regard the reading of Franklin’s Autobiography as the turning point of my life,” he wrote. “Here was Franklin, poorer than myself, who by industry, thrift and frugality had become learned and wise, and elevated to wealth and fame.”

The Autobiography inspired steel entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie. Harvard University President Jared Sparks told how the Autobiography “first roused my mental energies . . . prompted me to resolutions, and gave me strength to adhere to them. . . It taught me that circumstances have not a sovereign control over the mind.”

Mark Twain noted Franklin’s influence on millions. Savings banks across America were named after Franklin. “Altogether,” reported American historian Clinton Rossiter,

Franklin’s Autobiography has been translated and retranslated into a dozen languages, printed and reprinted in hundreds of editions, read and reread by millions of people, especially by young and impressionable Americans. The influence of these few hundred pages has been matched by that of no other American book.

But as individualism fell out of fashion, intellectuals belittled personal responsibility and self-help. For instance, novelist D.H. Lawrence in 1923:

The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off!. . . He made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a gray nag in a paddock. . . Middle-sized, sturdy, snuff-coloured Franklin. . . I do not like him.

In recent decades, some professors focused on his personality, claiming the Autobiography was an elaborate pose, covering up the allegedly hidden Franklin—complex, elusive, secretive, intriguing. One professor talked about Franklin’s dark side.

But none of the critics deny that Benjamin Franklin achieved stupendous things. He championed personal responsibility, intellectual curiosity, honesty, persistence, and thrift—principles that have helped people everywhere lift themselves up. He nurtured an entrepreneurial culture which creates opportunity and hope through peaceful cooperation. He affirmed that by improving yourself and helping your neighbors you can make a free society succeed. His most glorious invention was—and is—the American dream.

Jim Powell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is an expert in the history of liberty. He has lectured in England, Germany, Japan, Argentina and Brazil as well as at Harvard, Stanford and other universities across the United States. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Audacity/American Heritage and other publications, and is author of six books.

Originally published at FEE.org on February 22, 2018.

William Penn Was America’s First Great Champion for Liberty and Peace

Jim Powell

This chapter’s hero is a man whom every American reader should know whether or not you’ve ever been to my native state of Pennsylvania. William Penn was a giant of colonial America—politically and intellectually. This essay by the Cato Institute’s Jim Powell was first published by FEE in October 1995.

—Lawrence W. Reed

William Penn was the first great hero of American liberty. During the late 17th century, when Protestants persecuted Catholics, Catholics persecuted Protestants, and both persecuted Quakers and Jews, Penn established an American sanctuary which protected freedom of conscience. Almost everywhere else, colonists stole land from the Indians, but Penn traveled unarmed among the Indians and negotiated peaceful purchases. He insisted that women deserved equal rights with men. He gave Pennsylvania a written constitution which limited the power of government, provided a humane penal code, and guaranteed many fundamental liberties.

For the first time in modern history, a large society offered equal rights to people of different races and religions. Penn’s dramatic example caused quite a stir in Europe. The French philosopher Voltaire, a champion of religious toleration, offered lavish praise.

“William Penn might, with reason, boast of having brought down upon earth the Golden Age, which in all probability, never had any real existence but in his dominions.”

Penn was the only person who made major contributions to liberty in both the New World and the Old World. Before he conceived the idea of Pennsylvania, he became the leading defender of religious toleration in England. He was imprisoned six times for speaking out courageously. While in prison, he wrote one pamphlet after another, which gave Quakers a literature and attacked intolerance. He alone proved capable of challenging oppressive government policies in court—one of his cases helped secure the right to trial by jury. Penn used his diplomatic skills and family connections to get large numbers of Quakers out of jail. He saved many from the gallows.

Despite the remarkable clarity of Penn’s vision for liberty, he had a curious blind spot about slavery. He owned some slaves in America, as did many other Quakers. Anti-slavery didn’t become a widely shared Quaker position until 1758, 40 years after Penn’s death. Quakers were far ahead of most other Americans, but it’s surprising that people with their humanitarian views could have contemplated owning slaves at all.

Early Life

There were just two portraits of Penn painted during his lifetime, one depicting him as a handsome youth, the other as a stout old man. A biographer described young Penn’s

“oval face of almost girlish prettiness but with strong features, the brusqueness of the straight, short nose in counterpoint to the almost sensuous mouth. What gives the face its dominant character are the eyes, burning with a dark, luminous insistence . . . it is known from verbal descriptions that Penn was fairly tall and athletic. Altogether, the young man must have been both handsome and impressive.”

William Penn was born on October 14, 1644, in London. The most specific description of his mother, Margaret, came from a neighbor, the acid-tongued diarist Samuel Pepys who described her as a “well-looked, fat, short old Dutch woman, but one who hath been heretofore pretty handsome.” She did the child-rearing, since her husband, William Penn Sr., was seldom at home. He was a much sought-after naval commander because he knew the waters around England, could handle a ship in bad weather and get the most from his crew. Admiral Penn had a good personal relationship with the Stuart kings and for a while served their most famous adversary, the Puritan Oliver Cromwell.

Left mostly to himself, young William became interested in religion. He was thrilled to hear a talk by Thomas Loe, a missionary for the Society of Friends—derisively known as Quakers. Founded in 1647 by the English preacher George Fox, Quakers were a mystical Protestant sect emphasizing a direct relationship with God. An individual’s conscience, not the Bible, was the ultimate authority on morals. Quakers didn’t have a clergy or churches. Rather, they held meetings where participants meditated silently and spoke up when the Spirit moved them. They favored plain dress and a simple life rather than aristocratic affectation.

After acquiring a sturdy education in Greek and Roman classics, Penn emerged as a rebel when he entered Oxford University. He defied Anglican officials by visiting John Owen, a professor dismissed for advocating tolerant humanism. Penn further rebelled by protesting compulsory chapel attendance, for which he was expelled at age 17.

His parents sent him to France where he would be less likely to cause further embarrassment and he might acquire some manners. He enrolled at l’Académie Protestante, the most respected French Protestant university, located in Saumur. He studied with Christian humanist Mose Amyraut, who supported religious toleration.

Back in England by August 1664, Penn soon studied at Lincoln’s Inn, the most prestigious law school in London. He learned the common law basis for civil liberties and gained some experience with courtroom strategy, which was fortunate; he was going to need it.

Admiral Penn, assigned to rebuilding the British Navy for war with the Dutch, asked that his son serve as personal assistant. Young William must have gained a valuable inside view of high command. Admiral Penn also used his son as a courier delivering military messages to King Charles II. Young William developed a cordial relationship with the King and his brother, the Duke of York, the future King James II.

Penn’s quest for spiritual peace led him to attend Quaker meetings even though the government considered this a crime. In September 1667, police broke into a meeting and arrested everyone. Since Penn looked like a fashionable aristocrat rather than a plain Quaker, the police released him. He protested that he was indeed a Quaker and should be treated the same as the others.

Penn drew on his legal training to prepare a defense. Meanwhile, in jail, he began writing about freedom of conscience. His father disowned him, and young Penn lived in a succession of Quaker households. He learned that the movement was started by passionate preachers who had little education. There was hardly any Quaker literature. He resolved to help by applying his scholarly knowledge and legal training. He began writing pamphlets, which were distributed through the Quaker underground.

In 1668, one of his hosts was Isaac Penington, a wealthy man in Buckinghamshire. Penn met his stepdaughter Gulielma Springett, and it was practically love at first sight. Poet John Milton’s literary secretary Thomas Ellwood noted her “innocently open, free and familiar Conversation, springing from the abundant Affability, Courtesy and Sweetness of her natural Temper.” Penn married Gulielma on April 4, 1672. She was to bear seven children, four of whom died in infancy.

Meanwhile, Penn attacked the Catholic/Anglican doctrine of the Trinity, and the Anglican bishop had him imprisoned in the notorious Tower of London. Ordered to recant, Penn declared from his cold isolation cell: “My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.”

By the time he was released seven months later, he had written pamphlets defining the principal elements of Quakerism. His best-known work from this period: No Cross, No Crown, which presented a pioneering historical case for religious toleration.

The Conventicle Act

He wasn’t free for long. To curb the potential power of Catholics, notably the Stuarts, Parliament passed the Conventicle Act, which aimed to suppress religious dissent as sedition. But the law was applied mainly against Quakers, perhaps because few were politically connected. Thousands were imprisoned for their beliefs. The government seized their properties, including the estate of Penn’s wife’s family.

He decided to challenge the Conventicle Act by holding a public meeting on August 14, 1670. The Lord Mayor of London arrested him and his fellow Quakers as soon as he began expressing his nonconformist religious views. At the historic trial, Penn insisted that since the government refused to present a formal indictment—officials were concerned the Conventicle Act might be overturned—the jury could never reach a guilty verdict. He appealed to England’s common-law heritage:

If these ancient and fundamental laws, which relate to liberty and property, and which are not limited to particular persuasions in matters of religion, must not be indispensably maintained and observed, who then can say that he has a right to the coat on his back? Certainly our liberties are to be openly invaded, our wives to be ravished, our children slaved, our families ruined, and our estates led away in triumph by every sturdy beggar and malicious informer—as their trophies but our forfeits for conscience’s sake.”

The jury acquitted all defendants, but the Lord Mayor of London refused to accept this verdict. He hit the jury members with fines and ordered them held in brutal Newgate prison. Still, they affirmed their verdict. After the jury had been imprisoned for about two months, the Court of Common Pleas issued a writ of habeas corpus to set them free. Then they sued the Lord Mayor of London for false arrest. The Lord Chief Justice of England, together with his 11 associates, ruled unanimously that juries must not be coerced or punished for their verdicts. It was a key precedent protecting the right to trial by jury.

Penn had become a famous defender of liberty who could attract several thousand people for a public talk. He traveled in Germany and Holland to see how Quakers there were faring. Holland made a strong impression because it was substantially free. It was a commercial center where people cared mainly about peaceful cooperation. Persecuted Jews and Protestants flocked to Holland. Penn began to form a vision of a community based on liberty.

He resolved to tap his royal connections for his cause. With the blessing of King Charles II and the Duke of York, Penn presented his case for religious toleration before Parliament. They would have none of it because they were worried about the Stuarts imposing Catholic rule on England, especially since the Duke of York had converted to Roman Catholicism and married a staunch Catholic.

The Founding of Pennsylvania

Penn became convinced that religious toleration couldn’t be achieved in England. He went to the King and asked for a charter enabling him to establish an American colony. Perhaps the idea seemed like an easy way to get rid of troublesome Quakers. On March 4, 1681, Charles II signed a charter for territory west of the Delaware River and north of Maryland, approximately the present size of Pennsylvania, where about a thousand Germans, Dutch, and Indians lived without any particular government.

The King proposed the name “Pennsilvania” which meant “Forests of Penn”—honoring Penn’s late father, the Admiral. Penn would be proprietor owning all the land, accountable directly to the King. According to traditional accounts, Penn agreed to cancel the debt of 16,000 pounds which the government owed the Admiral for back pay, but there aren’t any documents about such a deal. At the beginning of each year, Penn had to give the King two beaver skins and a fifth of any gold and silver mined within the territory.

Penn sailed to America on the ship Welcome and arrived November 8, 1682. With assembled Friends, he founded Philadelphia—he chose the name, which means “city of brotherly love” in Greek. He approved the site between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. He envisioned a 10,000-acre city, but his more sober-minded Friends thought that was overly optimistic. They accepted a 1,200-acre plan. Penn named major streets including Broad, Chestnut, Pine, and Spruce.

Penn was most concerned about developing a legal basis for a free society. In his First Frame of Government, which Penn and initial land purchasers had adopted on April 25, 1682, he expressed ideals anticipating the Declaration of Independence:

“Men being born with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature . . . no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political view of another, without his consent.”

Penn provided that there would be a governor—initially, himself—whose powers were limited. He would work with a Council (72 members) which proposed legislation and a General Assembly (up to 500 members) which either approved or defeated it. Each year, about a third of members would be elected for three-year terms. As governor, Penn would retain a veto over proposed legislation.

His First Frame of Government provided for secure private property, virtually unlimited free enterprise, a free press, trial by jury and, of course, religious toleration. Whereas the English penal code specified the death penalty for some 200 offenses, Penn reserved it for just two—murder and treason. As a Quaker, Penn encouraged women to get an education and speak out as men did. He called Pennsylvania his “Holy Experiment.”

Penn insisted on low taxes. A 1683 law established a low tax on cider and liquor, a low tariff on imports and on exported hides and furs. To help promote settlement, Penn suspended all taxes for a year. When the time came to reimpose taxes he encountered fierce resistance and had to put it off.

Penn’s First Frame of Government was the first constitution to provide for peaceful change through amendments. A proposed amendment required the consent of the governor and 85 percent of the elected representatives. Benevolent though Penn was, people in Pennsylvania were disgruntled about his executive power as proprietor and governor. People pressed to make the limitations more specific and to provide stronger assurances about the prerogatives of the legislature. The constitution was amended several times. The version adopted on October 28, 1701, endured for three-quarters of a century and then became the basis for Pennsylvania’s state constitution, adopted in 1776.

Collecting rent due to Penn as proprietor was always a headache. He never earned enough from the colonies to offset the costs of administration which he paid out of his personal capital. Toward the end of his life, he complained that Pennsylvania was a net loss, costing him some 30,000 pounds.

Penn’s practices contrasted dramatically with other early colonies, especially Puritan New England which was a vicious theocracy. The Puritans despised liberty. They made political dissent a crime. They whipped, tarred, and hanged Quakers. The Puritans stole what they could from the Indians.

Penn achieved peaceful relations with the Indians—Susquehannocks, Shawnees, and Leni-Lenape. Indians respected his courage because he ventured among them without guards or personal weapons. He was a superior sprinter who could out-run Indian braves, and this helped win him respect. He took the trouble to learn Indian dialects, so he could conduct negotiations without interpreters.

From the very beginning, he acquired Indian land through peaceful, voluntary exchange. Reportedly, Penn concluded a “Great Treaty” with the Indians at Shackamaxon, near what is now the Kensington district of Philadelphia. Voltaire hailed this as “the only treaty between those people [Indians and Christians] that was not ratified by an oath, and that was never infringed.” His peaceful policies prevailed for about 70 years, which has to be some kind of record in American history.

Defending Pennsylvania

Penn faced tough challenges defending Pennsylvania back in England. There was a lot at stake because Pennsylvania had become the best hope for persecuted people in England, France, and Germany. Charles II tried to establish an intolerant absolutism modeled after that of the French King Louis XIV. Concerned that Pennsylvania’s charter might be revoked, Penn turned on his diplomatic charm.

Behind the scenes, Penn worked as a remarkable diplomat for religious toleration. Every day, as many as 200 petitioners waited outside Holland House, his London lodgings, hoping for an audience and help. He intervened personally with the King to save scores of Quakers from a death sentence. He got Society of Friends founder George Fox out of jail. He helped convince the King to proclaim the Acts of Indulgence which released more than a thousand Quakers—many of whom had been imprisoned for over a dozen years.

Penn’s fortunes collapsed after a son was born to James II in 1688. A Catholic succession was assured. The English rebelled and welcomed the Dutch King William of Orange as William III, who overthrew the Stuarts without having to fire a shot. Suddenly, Penn’s Stuart connections were a terrible liability.

He was arrested for treason. The government seized his estates. Though he was cleared by November 1690, he was marked as a traitor again. He became a fugitive for four years, hiding amidst London’s squalid slums. His friend John Locke helped restore his good name in time to see his wife, Guli, die on February 23, 1694. She was 48.

Harsh experience had taken its toll on Penn. As biographer Hans Fantel put it,

“he was getting sallow and paunchy. The years of hiding, with their enforced inactivity, had robbed him of his former physical strength and grace. His stance was now slightly bent, and his enduring grief over the death of Guli had cast an air of listless abstraction over his face.”

His spirits revived two years later when he married 30-year-old Hannah Callowhill, the plain and practical daughter of a Bristol linen draper.

But he faced serious problems because of his sloppy business practices. Apparently, he couldn’t be bothered with administrative details, and his business manager, fellow Quaker Philip Ford, embezzled substantial sums from Penn’s estates. Worse, Penn signed papers without reading them. One of the papers turned out to be a deed transferring Pennsylvania to Ford who demanded rent exceeding Penn’s ability to pay.

After Ford’s death in 1702, his wife, Bridget, had Penn thrown in debtor’s prison, but her cruelty backfired. It was unthinkable to have such a person govern a major colony, and in 1708 the Lord Chancellor ruled that “the equity of redemption still remained in William Penn and his heirs.”

In October 1712, Penn suffered a stroke while writing a letter about the future of Pennsylvania. Four months later, he suffered a second stroke.

While he had difficulty speaking and writing, he spent time catching up with his children whom he had missed during his missionary travels. He died on July 30, 1718. He was buried at Jordans, next to Guli.

Long before his death, Pennsylvania ceased to be a spiritual place dominated by Quakers. Penn’s policy of religious toleration and peace—no military conscription—attracted all kinds of war-weary European immigrants. There were English, Irish, and Germans, Catholics, Jews, and an assortment of Protestant sects including Dunkers, Huguenots, Lutherans, Mennonites, Moravians, Pietists, and Schwenkfelders. Liberty brought so many immigrants that by the American Revolution, Pennsylvania had grown to some 300,000 people and became one of the largest colonies. Pennsylvania was America’s first great melting pot.

Philadelphia was America’s largest city with almost 18,000 people. It was a major commercial center—sometimes more than a hundred trading ships anchored there during a single day. People in Philadelphia could enjoy any of the goods available in England. Merchant companies, shipyards, and banks flourished. Philadelphia thrived as an entrepôt between Europe and the American frontier.

With an atmosphere of liberty, Philadelphia emerged as an intellectual center. Between 1740 and 1776, Philadelphia presses issued an estimated 11,000 works including pamphlets, almanacs, and books. In 1776, there were seven newspapers reflecting a wide range of opinions. No wonder Penn’s “city of brotherly love” became the most sacred site for American liberty, where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and delegates drafted the Constitution.

By creating Pennsylvania, Penn set an enormously important example for liberty. He showed that people who are courageous enough, persistent enough, and resourceful enough can live free. He went beyond the natural right theories of his friend John Locke and showed how a free society would actually work. He showed how individuals of different races and religions can live together peacefully when they mind their own business. He affirmed the resilient optimism of free people.

Jim Powell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is an expert in the history of liberty. He has lectured in England, Germany, Japan, Argentina and Brazil as well as at Harvard, Stanford and other universities across the United States. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Audacity/American Heritage and other publications, and is author of six books.

Originally published at FEE.org on March 29, 2018.

Asia

A Chinese Gentleman and the Conscience of a Generation

Ma Junjie

This chapter’s hero is Mao Yushi from China, whom I had the honor of meeting and interviewing in Beijing in 2004.

—Lawrence W. Reed

Mao Yushi (茅于轼) has been through a lot in nearly nine decades (he turns 89 on January 14, 2018). He is celebrated as a great mentor, a role model, a stand-up scholar, and a gentleman by many leading Chinese economists, most of whom belong to a younger generation. He has also been dismissed as a filthy traitor, a politically naive pseudo-expert, and a malevolent character by many common people, most of whom do not appreciate the basics of economics.

The Economist called him a “wise man;” The Prospect praised him as a “global thinker;” the Cato Institute awarded him for advancing liberty. He never takes a good reputation for granted, nor does he ever defend himself or argue with those who disagree. He is a man of controversies, a teacher, and a gentleman. But most importantly, he is a hero.

According to the ancient Greeks, a good tragedy requires a common man to fight for a doomed cause, a good cause, even though he knows he is predestined to fail. That’s what makes a classical tragic hero. Mao Yushi is such a hero. He has dedicated his whole life to teaching people of the importance and value of being economically productive, but he is never a selfish man. He speaks up for wealth-creators and solves concrete problems for the poor, but he has never held any office.

At the age of 88, he is banned from publishing, but he keeps writing and speaking about the urgency of eradicating all personal cults of power, restating the case for the market economy, abolishing public ownership, and restoring private property. His fight at the moment may be failing, but hope for the future is what animates him.

Early Life

Born in Nanjing, China into a family with means, Mao Yushi led an easy life as the eldest son followed by two younger brothers and a sister. His father was an engineer and his mother was a scion of a prominent family. He was brought up with a good home education that he later recalled as “liberal, equal, open-minded, and science-loving.” He was exposed to music, arts, classical literature, and foreign language at an early age. He survived the Japanese invasion of the 1930s and got his education first from Nankai Middle School in Chongqing and later in Shanghai Jiaotong University.

The four years in college had the biggest influence on him. He developed his language skills, loved sports, and mastered engineering, mathematics, thermodynamics, and physics. A black-and-white photo features him, a tall and slim young man in white sporty shorts, running a torch relay in 1948, a year before a communist China emerged.

The humanistic environment also cultivated his independence, curiosity, and critical thinking. A story he likes to share to entertain younger listeners is about eating on airplanes. Yushi would always follow his daily routine and wait until it’s time to eat instead of having meals as they are served by the flight attendants. He attributes this to the early years of conscious nurturing of independent thinking. Another more elaborate story concerns his argument on the search for a thoroughbred horse that travels a thousand li a day (千里马) in Han Yu’s classic essay. His refusal of the herd mentality would lead to more unpleasant encounters than merry occasions.

After graduation, Yushi was assigned to coal locomotives in a war-destroyed Northeast China. Despite the harsh environment, he applied what he learned from college to work and attempted his first academic endeavor: to publish a paper on raising the energy efficiency of locomotives. This paper also marked the inception of his later landmark work in economics. In the meantime, muddling through hardships of reality, a fond appreciation from years before and a long-time correspondence blossomed into love and then a marriage that has lasted through thick and thin.

A typical Suzhou (苏州) lady, Zhao Yanling was elegant and charming. Her portraits were put on exhibition in the three most famous photo studios in Wangfujing, a shopping area that’s still popular today in Beijing. The young Yushi was joyous and mesmerized when Ms. Zhao showed up at the cold winter train station. He later thought of a line in Friedrich Schiller’s “Love and Intrigue,” that reads, “Wem der Teufel ein Ei in die Wirthschaft gelegt hat, dem wird eine hübsche Tochter geboren.” (There is an old saying that where the devil keeps a breeding-cage he is sure to hatch a handsome daughter.) Zhao Yanling’s family was in business, and she was never worried about material life. Yushi loved her not only for her charm but for her perseverance and tenacity through the Cultural Revolution when the whole family was victimized.

Academics and Ostracization

Never equivocating on his opinion, Mao Yushi was first purged as a “rightist” in 1958, expelled to Shandong Province where a near-starvation experience ensued, and later persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. What did he say that brought the authorities down on him? He merely proposed an increase in the pork price in order to solve a shortage of pork. Such disobedient thought could not be tolerated, but compared to the “unorthodox” thoughts he harbored later in his life, it amounted to nothing.

It was in 1976, when Mao Yushi was transferred to a research department of the railway system, that he started independent research in economics. Drawing from years of working experience and continuous thinking, he independently developed The Theory of Optimal Allocation in a closed country, an achievement that was overshadowed by his social activism and economic educational work.

As the mad years came to an end, Mao Yushi’s talent for economics was rediscovered and put to good use. He was transferred to the Institute of American Studies at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in 1984. He traveled abroad on business trips, lectured in Australia, and researched at Harvard University. For anyone with access to such privileges, these experiences can be easily shrugged off. But Mao Yushi was 53 years old when he made his first trip abroad to the UK in 1982. Eleven years later, he co-founded the most prominent independent and private think tank in China (Unirule Institute of Economics) upon his retirement from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Unirule is the brainchild of three economists: Zhang Shuguang, Sheng Hong, and Mao Yushi. From an early idea of capitalizing on their knowledge to a later commitment to serving Chinese society by providing good ideas to the public, Yushi articulated his belief in the rule of law, private property rights, human rights, the market economy, and the wealth-making mechanism which is commonly called “capitalism.”

This is where the controversies began. He defended the market mechanism, published research in food security and fertile soil preservation, persisted on exposing the Great Famine of 1958–1961, and stripped away the mythology surrounding the supreme leader Mao Zedong. Following his line of logic and relying on his critical and independent thinking, Mao Yushi is convinced of the importance of taking what really happened in history head-on, debunking a hidden crime with facts and records, and staying true to one’s conscience.

The reaction from the authorities and the innocent majority was furious and ferocious. When I joined Unirule in 2013, the think tank’s zenith seemed to have passed: the budget for research was low, its reputation was in jeopardy, and people were told not to attend its seminars. Yushi was harassed during lectures at auditoriums and by midnight hateful phone calls came to his home. However, he never backed down. To this day, he keeps sharing with us his observations, thoughts, and optimism at our Monday meetings.

Changes in China

Among the missions of Unirule, disseminating market economy ideas weighs the most. By the end of the 1970s, social unrest and top-down control finally proved unsustainable and led to China’s opening-up and many economic reforms. However, an iron-hard planned economy had taken deep root in the country and the people’s minds. A lively debate over the economic system took place in the 1980s and the decade that followed.

As a result, a Chinese Economic Miracle featuring a two-digit growth rate (which was widely recognized as a work of “the invisible hand”) is now considered more of a “Chinese Path” that somehow owes its success not to markets, but to top-down control and the wisdom of the political leaders. The power of the market is under-appreciated as the state re-emphasizes, once again, the dominance of the public sector. State intervention is a pandemic. Tax burdens for private enterprises are almost unbearable. Rent-seeking is everywhere. The public needs an economics toolkit to understand how their tax money is spent and how their well being is arbitrarily controlled by someone sitting at a desk behind a closed door.

Well into the 21st century, even with the accumulation of great wealth and a general rise of people’s livelihoods, a state-underpinned ideological fallacy is still haunting China. And the huge gap between the haves and the have-nots really begs the question: Is the wealth of the rich justifiable?

Yes and no. Those who made a fortune through hard work, entrepreneurship, and innovation certainly have proved they are the kind of elites that are leading others to prosperity. But those who accumulated money by imposing administrative monopolies and rent-seeking political favors are undermining the legitimacy of true markets and stealing from the taxpayers’ pockets. The former should be respected, celebrated, and protected, though in many cases they are overlooked, smeared, and even persecuted. The latter is an interest group, and there should be no place for them in a healthy and decent society.

Blessed Are the Entrepreneurs

Unirule is proving to be a sanctuary for Chinese entrepreneurs. Mao Yushi has always been concerned with how entrepreneurs are treated. He went through eras where there was only the state and no officially upheld market, no entrepreneurs. He understands the horror done in the name of keeping the people’s minds pure and the society in order. His stance towards entrepreneurs irritates many, especially those from the lower class which the state would gladly deny the existence of. He was accused of being a conscienceless man. This cannot be more wrong.

Three years before creating Unirule, Mao Yushi managed to save some money at his post as a lecturer at the University of Queensland. Raised to be a sympathetic soul, the first thing that came to his mind was to donate to a group called Project Hope to fund children from poor backgrounds to get a decent education. His donation led to a before-its-time, innovative venture. He discovered that funding was not going to solve poverty which was the root cause of the lack of access to education.

After brainstorming with his peers and admirers, most of whom have gained more prominence since then, he set up a small foundation that lent money (micro-loans) to local residents in rural areas. A social enterprise that bears the core of philanthropy and economic sustainability, it was the first private fund that serves the rural residents with very humble income.

Concerned with the opportunities of the poor, Yushi spotted another breakthrough to empower them by training jobless and less-educated rural women in domestic services. A “nanny school” called Fuping (which literally means to empower and enrich the common people) was set up in 2002. It has trained over 40,000 nannies, most of whom are from remote rural areas. “There are two purposes in life: to enjoy one’s own life, and to help others enjoy theirs.” He derives great joy in empowering less advantaged people.

His Continuing Legacy

On his 88th birthday, Mao Yushi posted on Microblog, a Twitter-type social media platform, “As elites are migrating overseas, I have done three things in the last three decades: establishing Unirule Institute of Economics in my 60s; creating Fuping Domestic Service School in my 70s; and assembling the Humanism Economics Society in my 80s. All of them are nonprofit, and all of them are successful. This is what a ‘traitor’ did.” (His Microblog account was blocked a day later.)

Established in 2012, the Humanism Economics Society is a budding alliance of top economists—basically the best minds. It has held seminars that draw an audience of hundreds. It is committed to spreading ideas, civil education of basic economics, and academic exchanges. The pro-market hue and personal color of Mao Yushi led to its cautious and slow development. As popular expression goes, “due to reasons that everyone knows,” the voice of a classical liberal/ libertarian alliance is considered troublesome, if not hostile, and therefore, should better be silenced. But he persists.

Mao Yushi has been through it all. He speaks highly of the general improvement of people’s lives through the promises of genuine rule of law, civil society, freedom of speech, etc. China cannot be a top-down centrally planned economy forever. There is a rudimentary fault in public ownership. As Yushi says, “Power cannot be private, and property cannot be public.”

John Locke’s wisdom is among Yushi’s favorites. He implores people to apply their reasoning, for as he sees it, “Logic is the only standard to contest truth, not experiences.” After successfully bringing Mao Zedong back to his human form from the former deity status, his academic take on the very foundation of China’s current system represents an intellectual challenge to the status quo.

In success or in failure, Mao Yushi lacks the interest to claim spoils or cry over spilled milk. He is that rare kind of true gentleman. Approaching 90 and with fewer public appearances, lecture tours, and publications, he finds peace in reading and thinking. He does not give up any opportunity to share his opinions, discuss, and debate. But he does it in such a modest way.

Manners, it’s been said, maketh the man. I always recall him fixing my tie or reminding me of carrying business cards before meeting some diplomat friends. His respect for others and self-composure are a heart-warming mix. I can understand why he gained so many friends among those who share his views as well as those who don’t; old friends and younger friends; rich and poor; friends from home and abroad. What they all share is an admiration for this great man, this conscience of a generation.

Ma Junjie is a project researcher at Unirule Institute of Economics, associate researcher of Centre International de Formation Européenne (CIFE). He is also a columnist for several newspapers and media outlets.

Originally published at FEE.org on December 7, 2017.

Even in Prison, This Professor Never Stopped Teaching Liberty and Love

Phan Anh Hong

This chapter’s hero is the Vietnamese human rights activist Dr. Doan Viet Hoat, who turned 75 on Christmas Eve last month. The author, Phan Anh Hong, was one of the many “boat people” who escaped Vietnam when the war ended in 1975. He lives in Dallas, Texas and is a state revenue tax specialist and blogger at nganlau.com. Here’s a 10-minute interview with me about Dr. Doan Viet Hoat on the Bob Harden radio show in Naples, Florida.

—Lawrence W. Reed

The man I am fortunate to tell you about as part of this “Heroes” series is alive and well at 75, and someone I know personally. Let me first offer some words about who he is and what he’s done. Then I’ll tell you why I admire and respect him immensely.

Working for a Freer Vietnam

Dr. Doan Viet Hoat was born on Christmas Eve in 1942 near Hanoi in what was then French Indochina, now Vietnam. After earning his Ph.D. in America (at Florida State University in 1971), he returned to South Vietnam and became a professor and later vice president of the first private Buddhist university in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City).

Just four years later, the communists from the North conquered the country, seized the university, and arrested Dr. Doan in a mass roundup of intellectuals with ties to the U.S. For no other reason than those ties, he was remanded without trial to a “re-education camp” for twelve years. He shared a prison room there with 40 other people.

When finally released, he might have fled the country to join friends and relatives in the U.S., but he chose instead to stay and work for change. He started an illegal, underground newsletter called “Freedom Forum” and declared in its first issue,

A new struggle has started . . . It is the war against poverty, backwardness and arbitrariness. It is the aspiration toward a rich, strong, progressive, free and democratic Vietnam. And in this new struggle, there can be only one winner, the nation and people of Vietnam; and only one loser, the forces of dogmatism, arbitrariness and backwardness.

A year later, police raided his home and arrested him. He was then convicted of conspiring to overthrow the communist regime and sentenced to another 15 years in prison. While incarcerated, he wrote pro-freedom essays and arranged for some of them to be smuggled out, for which he received increasingly harsh punishment, endured assignment to hard labor, and suffered degenerating health because of poor conditions and lack of medical treatment.

Thanks largely to pressure from foreign governments and international human rights organizations, Dr. Doan was released and expelled from Vietnam in 1998. He was granted citizenship by the U.S. where, in the last 20 years, he has continued to champion human rights and received numerous awards for his courage, including being named by the International Press Institute as one of its “50 World Press Freedom Heroes” of the 20th century. After two years as a scholar-in-residence at Catholic University of America, he retired and now resides in the Washington, D.C. area.

The Nature of Heroes

When FEE’s Lawrence Reed, the editor of this series, asked me to write about Dr. Doan Viet Hoat, my first thought was that I think of him more as a role model than a hero. I can certainly attest to having learned a great deal from Dr. Doan in all the times we’ve sat down for conversations about life, people, politics, and society in the U.S. as well as in Vietnam. But perhaps because of the culture and history of my native Vietnam, I confess to being a little allergic to the word “hero.”

The Vietnamese people have heard a lot of hero stories. Some were true, and many were simply made up by the government or some sympathetic group. Furthermore, I think that to be a hero requires extra effort and responsibility to save a country from an external force that wants to erase that country’s culture, economy, history, or race. This very high standard for hero status explains why many people in our society have helped in various ways to save lives but do not view those actions as necessarily rising to “heroic.” But certainly, this is a point over which good people can reasonably disagree.

This I know for sure: Dr. Doan is a well-known and much-appreciated advocate of freedom and democracy for Vietnam. It is my honor to know him as my role model.

Role models in our society come from many sectors such as business, entertainment, sports, religion, and politics. In my view, the best of them share this about their daily lives: Their actions make society better, more human, more loving, more caring, and more compassionate—by choice, actions, and habit; not by force.

Dr. Doan is a role model who came from an environment no one wants to be in. He was in prison twice for a quarter of his life, not because he violated the laws or hurt someone, but because he spoke for the truth. He expressed his opinion. He supported liberty and human rights. No one, even a dictator, can legitimately take away a person’s freedom of thought or his freedom of expression.

An Exemplar of Compassion

In Dr. Doan’s case, the prison cell did not prevent him from fighting for what he believes. In fact, prison only made him stronger. It made him resolve to commit his entire life to human rights and liberty—and not just for himself but for others, for the Vietnamese people, and for the oppressed anywhere.

Even in prison during those two decades, Dr. Doan taught fellow inmates to understand liberty, love, compassion, and responsibility. In spite of what he’s been through, he did not and does not express hate of any kind. His vision for society is about people respecting each other. To even the prison guards, who were duty-bound to harass him, he “turned the other cheek.”

This gentleness and desire to help others come naturally to him. It was on display for many to see as early as 1965 when he participated in student relief activities to help flood victims in Vietnam. Imprisonment simply focused his attention on the importance of liberty as the best way people can be helped. In the Buddhist view, this is his Karma.

The communist government of Vietnam thought that expelling Dr. Doan would stop his influence. Many Vietnamese who live overseas also thought when Dr. Doan was expelled that he would no longer be an effective fighter for liberty; some thought he might simply retire quietly. They all were wrong. With the support of his wife and his children, he continues to fight for what he believes. He works hard to help others continue to fight for liberty and human rights in Vietnam.

Dr. Doan’s treatment by the Vietnamese government did not prevent him from acknowledging its improvements in more recent years, nor have those improvements prompted him to give up on the hope to achieve so much more. In a 2005 speech at Johns Hopkins University, he made his views clear:

It is true that Vietnam has made some progress. . .What needs to be emphasized is another simple fact: Vietnam is better today because it is freer. Freedom is functional [i.e., essential] to progress and development. Vietnam will advance faster in a more balanced and sustainable manner if the people have freedom in all areas of social life, not just in the economy, and [if] the government is more accountable to the people.

Many Vietnamese have little hope for their future, but Dr. Doan works tirelessly to change that with his defense of liberty. For more than half a century, he has worked to make his native country a better, freer place. This is why for me, he is a role model and a very special one at that.

Phan Anh Hong lives in Dallas, Texas, and is a state revenue tax specialist and Vietnamese blogger at nganlau.com.

Originally published at FEE.org on January 18, 2018.

Europe

Mises Never Gave In to Evil

Dan Sanchez

This chapter’s hero is about the life of one of the greatest heroes of liberty, both in and out of this book, Austrian economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises, and it is written by FEE’s own Dan Sanchez.

—Lawrence W. Reed

106 years ago, Ludwig von Mises’s first great book, Theory of Money and Credit, was published. Mises wrote this treatise in the dark, foreboding days before World War I. This gave the project urgency and greatly affected its makeup. He would later write in his Notes and Recollections,

If I could have worked quietly and taken my time, I would have begun with a theory of direct exchange in the first volume; and then I could proceed to the theory of indirect exchange. But I actually began with indirect exchange, because I believed that I did not have much time; I knew that we were on the eve of a great war and I wanted to complete my book before the war’s outbreak. I thus decided that in a few points only I would go beyond the narrow field of strictly monetary theory, and would postpone my preparation of a more complete work.”

Although still young, the economist had already mastered his science. He probably could have written something like his later magnum opus Human Action—a systematic exposition of economics and the case for classical liberalism—right then in the second decade of the 20th century.

But as fate would have it, Mises—whose ideas represented the height of the classical-liberal tradition—came on the scene at the precise moment when the Western world completely foreswore that tradition, embraced the total state, and hurled itself headlong toward self-destruction. Peace and the market were abandoned for war and planning. Mises was the ultimate knight of liberalism in two senses: he was the greatest and the last.

Mises and the Great War

The death knell of the age of liberalism could be heard in the cannonades of the First World War. And Mises had barely enough time to finish, publish, and defend his treatise on money before he himself was sent to the eastern front as an artillery officer.

Other scholars of comparable qualifications were given safe roles in war-planning offices. But Mises, whose liberal ideas were out of step with the establishment in Austria, was put directly in harm’s way. One of history’s greatest geniuses was a single air burst away from having his career nipped in the bud.

How tragic that would have been! Mises had not yet even written his great 1920 essay Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, which contained the single most powerful argument against central planning that had ever been formulated. Imagine the mind of the greatest critic of central planning being snuffed out by the war that represented central planning’s apotheosis.

Put yourself in Mises’s shoes on the front line. You, better than anyone else in history, understand the workings of the peaceful market society. You understand the fatal flaws of socialism and interventionism and the futility of war. You have the answers! You know the societal code that would unlock and unleash humanity’s potential.

But nobody will listen to you, and you are surrounded by destruction and madness. Moreover, you yourself may, at any moment, be devoured by this war that rages around you, and all these unwritten ideas that are bubbling over in your mind will be lost to humanity forever.

Proceed Ever More Boldly

It would be enough to break almost any man. But, fortunately for us, Mises was not only a genius but also a paragon of moral courage. In this harrowing crisis, as in all his subsequent trials, Mises bolstered that courage with a scrap of Latin poetry he had learned as a schoolboy.

How one carries on in the face of unavoidable catastrophe is a matter of temperament. In high school, as was custom, I had chosen a verse by Virgil to be my motto: Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito. Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it. I recalled these words during the darkest hours of the war. Again and again I had met with situations from which rational deliberation found no means of escape; but then the unexpected intervened, and with it came salvation. I would not lose courage even now. I wanted to do everything an economist could do. I would not tire in saying what I knew to be true.”

And he was forever faithful to that resolution. Throughout his career, Mises was ever the picture of principled intransigence. An intellectual Leonidas, surrounded by hordes of socialists, fascists, and money cranks, he stood his ground. Even as old allies—like those swept up in the Keynesian Revolution—fell away, still he stood his ground. Still, he fought. And he fought not only for the sake of future generations but for the sake of his own.

For Mises, it was not enough to theoretically expose the folly of inflationism in The Theory of Money and Credit, a book for the ages. He also personally fought the inflationism present in interwar Austria, using his influence to save his homeland from the hyperinflation that would soon after befall Weimar Germany and contribute toward the rise of Nazism.

For Mises, it was not enough to theoretically prove the madness of socialism in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, another book for the ages. He also personally dissuaded the most powerful man in Vienna from imposing on that city the Bolshevism that would soon after lead to famine in Russia.

He also tried to save his civilization from the ravages of war. In his 1919 book Nation, State, and Economy, Mises presented a viable path forward for Europe. The idea of self-determination should be applied not just as a wartime slogan but as a political reality. Every group, no matter how small, should be free to declare independence from its ruling political entity. The principle of secession, combined with universal free trade, would bring peace. Mises even said that, if at all possible, this principle of secession should be extended all the way down to the level of the individual.

Mises offered an ominous prediction. No matter how wronged Germany feels about the terms of peace, it should pursue no acts of vengeance. Should Germany’s anger turn to revenge, the country would be destroyed, along with what remains of old-world civilization in Europe. In short, he warned of what would later become the mass slaughter of the Second World War.

Tragically, his anti-war efforts were not as impactful as his economic activism. Yet Mises’s efforts probably saved the lives of thousands—and the livelihoods of millions. And Mises’s impact was not limited to Austria. He was even able to gain ground in Germany, which was previously intellectually dominated by the “Socialists of the Chair” (Kathedersozialisten). He managed to turn the brightest young German scholars working in the social sciences toward liberalism and the free market.

Mises Versus Hitler

In his biography of Mises, Guido Hülsmann tells us of the tragic turn that followed.

Just as Mises was finally beginning to stir the spirit of liberty among the young generation of German economists, the old Kathedersozialisten had a final and devastating triumph. On January 30, 1933, their intellectual scion, Adolf Hitler, was appointed chancellor of the German Reich.”

As the Nazi threat grew, Mises, as a Jewish liberal, was impelled to leave his native Austria. Later, the German police would break into Mises’s Vienna apartment and confiscate his papers. The Nazis knew that an office full of the written ideas of Mises was more potentially dangerous to their kind than any Allied weapons cache.

In Switzerland, Mises finally found the repose necessary to write his systematic treatise: Nationaloekonomie, the German-language precursor to Human Action.

Here, finally, was the “more complete work” Mises envisioned in his 30s: a magisterial exposition of the social sciences and an irrefutable case for the liberal society.

The book fell, as David Hume said of his own great treatise, “stillborn from the press.” World War II was underway. The European mind was once again gripped with madness and bent on self-destruction. It had no time or attention to give to liberalism, even in such a refined and compelling form as this.

And once again, not only were Mises’s ideas endangered but his own person, as well. Mises came within a hair’s breadth of being kidnapped by German agents. The Swiss Alps were no longer enough to keep Mises safe from Hitler’s forces.

To escape the Continent, Mises and his new wife first had to travel by bus from Switzerland to Portugal, barely keeping one step ahead of the Nazis the whole way.

Mises and FEE

They finally found safe harbor in New York City. But financial security did not come with physical safety. Mises and his wife found themselves faced with austerity like they had never known before. Most of Mises’s savings had been confiscated by the Nazis. And, as accomplished as he was, Mises could not find any faculty positions because American universities had become almost as anti-capitalistic as European academia.

If he had sold out, as so many of his colleagues did, he might have easily secured a place in a prestigious university. But Mises was not about to back down now. As always, he found ways to get by without giving in. Tu ne cede.

In America, there was still a remnant of individualists. Many of these freedom-lovers found Mises’s ideas to be a revelation. From their ranks, several stepped forward to provide Mises with the financial and professional support he needed to stay productive in his later years. A great many of these supporters were associated with the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).

With this support, Mises was able to once again express, this time in English (which he had rapidly learned to write masterfully), his systematic social theory in his magnum opus, Human Action. FEE played a key role in making the publication of this timeless masterpiece possible.

For a young economist named Murray Rothbard, reading Human Action was a life-changing event. He was instantly converted into a hardcore Misesian. Rothbard immediately started building on Mises’s work, paving the way for the renaissance of Austrian economics that would occur in America years later. The influence of Human Action touched the lives of many other great thinkers from Ayn Rand to Gordon Tullock and continues to do so in our own time.

Mises fought for liberty until the very end, writing books into his 80s and giving speeches into his 90s. At one of his last speeches, in the year before he died, a young physician named Ron Paul was in attendance. Dr. Paul had driven 50 miles to see Mises and would later recollect that the event was “an inspiration.”

At the end of his life, Mises had only one regret: that his powers were then failing when he still had “so much to give to the people, to the world.” Mises died as he had lived: brimming with goodwill toward his fellow human beings and animated by an unrelenting drive to improve their lot in the world.

The impacts of Mises’s life and work have been resounding now for over a century. Yet, in the midst of the challenges we now face, his writings and his example are as timely now as they ever were. His writings show us how we may one day remedy our greatest afflictions. And his example can inspire in us the courage needed for the trials we must unavoidably face in the meantime.

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor of FEE.org.

Originally published at FEE.org on September 29, 2016.

Georgi Markov Refused to Be Silent About Communism and Paid With His Life

Krassen Stanchev

This chapter’s hero is Georgi Markov of Bulgaria. My friend Krassen Stanchev is the author. He teaches at Sofia University and is a former executive director of the Institute for Market Economics in the Bulgarian capital.

—Lawrence W. Reed

The Bulgarian novelist and playwright Georgi Markov was a Communist-era dissident best known outside Bulgaria for being assassinated with a ricin-poisoned device (believed to hidden at the tip of an umbrella). It happened in central London on September 7, 1978. He died four days later, age 49.

The murder was a textbook case of a KGB-style killing and was likely the work of the Bulgarian Communist regime’s secret police. One can read about it at The Forensic Library in books published by the Royal Society of Chemistry and on Wikipedia or watch movies about the case on YouTube here and here. It is known as the infamous “Umbrella Murder.”

To many of us in Bulgaria, Markov is a hero. His closest friend, Dimitar Bochev, aptly stated that it was his “talent” as a writer that got him killed. I’m proud to tell you why as part of this weekly series on FEE.org.

The Accidental Author

Markov did not set out in life to be a writer, a social critic, or a political commentator. Born in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, in 1929, he studied chemical engineering and worked in factories but retired young, after contracting tuberculosis. The illness gave him the time to develop his talent as a writer, which proved to be extraordinarily good.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Markov emerged as a prolific author of novels, short stories, and plays, for which he received numerous awards. As he became increasingly and devastatingly critical of communism and socialism, the regime of Todor Zhivkov (long-time Communist dictator of Bulgaria) began keeping an eye on him. The country’s censors blocked the printing of some of his works and banned others altogether, but that didn’t prevent him from becoming a well-known and admired author in his native land.

George Orwell was Markov’s favorite author, and Orwellian themes showed up in much of his writing. Markov’s novel, The Roof, for example, focused on the collapse of the roof of the Lenin Steel Mill and the comical efforts of central planners to rebuild it. It was banned by the government.

A popular Bulgarian literary fashion of the 1960s involved a small group of extraordinary and original authors, relatively carefree and nonchalant fellows of which Markov was one. For the most part, they were not overt rebels, but they did resent the daily lies imposed upon the Bulgarian people by communism. The characters of their novels were normal humans with doubts and weaknesses, regular people dealing with the challenges of life. Under communism, those challenges were ubiquitous. These writers fostered a quest for normalcy which, twenty years later, helped mightily to topple the regime.

“Not to Live by Lies” was Markov’s credo, as much as it was that of fellow writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Russia and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. In an essay he wrote comparing communism with the years before 1944, he explained that the most important change was that people were forced to live in fear and lies. Bulgaria, like the other East bloc communist nations, was an Orwellian nightmare come to life.

Targeted by the Government

In 1968, new leadership in nearby Czechoslovakia ushered in a brief period of liberalization known as the “Prague Spring.” Soviet forces led an invasion of the country to put a stop to it in August of that year. But even before the invasion, the Communist authorities in Sofia moved to prevent any repetition of the Prague Spring in Bulgaria. They stepped up their efforts to spy on intellectuals and curb their impact on public opinion by corrupting, harassing, and punishing them.

Markov was a prime target. He was deemed “too Czech-like.” Even his previously available books disappeared from public libraries and bookstores.

A café in downtown Sofia, five minutes’ walk from where I lived, became a prominent meeting-place of dissident artists and writers. Ever larger crowds would gather both inside and nearby when people knew that Markov was there. They could tell because his new BMW, one of only two in the city, was parked outside. He was the most colorful, bold, and freest-talking personality among Sofia’s bohemian set, and others were eager to catch a glimpse of the famous writer or even hear him speak.

Markov’s writings spoke truth to power in ways that resonated with Bulgarians. His depictions of life under totalitarianism earned him the wrath of the secret police and the dictator Zhivkov himself, but ordinary people appreciated his candid critiques. Here’s a sample from his book, The Truth That Killed:

Today, we Bulgarians present a fine example of what it is to exist under a lid which we cannot lift and which we no longer believe someone else can lift. . . And the unending slogan which millions of loudspeakers blare out is that everyone is fighting for the happiness of the others. Every word spoken under the lid constantly changes its meaning. Lies and truths swap their values with the frequency of an alternating current. . .We have seen how personality vanishes, how individuality is destroyed, how the spiritual life of a whole people is corrupted in order to turn them into a listless flock of sheep. We have seen so many of those demonstrations which humiliate human dignity, where normal people are expected to applaud some paltry mediocrity who has proclaimed himself a demi-god and condescendingly waves to them from the heights of his police inviolability.

In 1971, the Bulgarian KGB opened a dossier on Markov, titled poetically “The Wanderer” and identifying him as “a writer from an enemy family, politically unstable.” But Markov had left the country for Italy two years before. He might have returned, but when the authorities in Sofia refused to extend his passport in 1971, he decided it was not safe to go back to Bulgaria. He moved to London.

In Britain

In Britain, his friend Bechev recalls, Markov secured a job at the BBC. Later, his play To Crawl Under the Rainbow was staged in London. At the Edinburgh International Festival, his Orwellian play Archangel Michael won first prize.

More than anything else, it was likely his Absentia Reports broadcast by Radio Free Europe that marked him for murder. Every week from 1975 to 1978, he used the radio to analyze and expose the awful truth about life in communist Bulgaria. During my high school years, we waited impatiently in Sofia for each Markov report on the radio. And it’s no wonder the regime hated him. Those broadcasts, a fellow dissident explained, “were permanently and steadily debunking the myths of communism.”

A Communist court in Sofia tried Markov in absentia. Behind closed doors, it sentenced him to six and a half years in prison.

After walking across London’s Waterloo Bridge over the Thames on September 7, 1978, Markov waited for a bus to take him to his job at the BBC. He suddenly felt a sharp sting on the back of his right thigh, turned around, and saw a man with an umbrella hurrying off to a waiting taxi. By the evening, a fever required his hospitalization. He died four days later from a ricin-filled pellet, presumably launched from the umbrella. He was 49 and left behind a wife and a two-year-old daughter.

September 7 happened to be the birthday of the dictator Todor Zhivkov. It is widely believed in Bulgaria that the date was no accident, that the Bulgarian secret police arranged the murder as a birthday gift to Zhivkov.

In 1974, four years before his assassination and perhaps in anticipation of it, Markov wrote, “If we look at things historically, the victor in all events, even if I die, will be me!”

And indeed, in that he was right. The pen proved, once again, to be ultimately more powerful than the sword. Zhivkov was deposed in 1989, and a month later, the Communist regime evaporated in disgrace. Today, Bulgarians celebrate Markov, not Zhivkov. The only pity is that the chemical engineer-turned-writer didn’t live to see his own vindication.

Krassen Stanchev teaches Public Choice and Macroeconomic Analysis at Sofia University. He is a former executive director of the Institute for Market Economics in Sofia and a former member and committee chairman of Bulgaria’s Constitutional Parliament.

Originally published at FEE.org on March 8, 2018.

This Thinker Was the “Czech Bastiat”

Tomáš Nikodym and Lukáš Nikodym

This chapter’s hero is Czech classical liberal economist Karel Havlíček and the co-authors are twin brothers from Prague, Tomáš and Lukáš Nikodym, great friends who have translated many FEE publications for distribution in their country.

—Lawrence W. Reed

On the occasion of Karel Havlíček’s 180th birthday in 2001, one economist called him “The Czech Bastiat.” It was a reference, of course, to the great French author of The Law and many other powerful, timeless defenses of freedom and free markets. This is an honor of which we believe both Havlíček and Bastiat would be proud.

We find many similarities between these two men, otherwise separated by 650 miles across Europe. They both died young of tuberculosis (Havlíček at age 34, Bastiat at 49). But most importantly, both possessed a great ability to explain economic phenomena in a very simple, compelling way. FEE president Lawrence Reed labeled Bastiat “Liberty’s Masterful Storyteller” and we believe Havlíček is his Czech counterpart. Both men were also economists, journalists, and statesmen. Havlíček was a poet as well.

Early Life

Karel Havlíček was born in 1821 in the village of Borová, close to the small city of Deutschbrod, which was renamed Havlíček’s Brod in 1945. This fact attests to his importance in that town and our country. From today’s perspective, the renaming of the city for a consistent classical liberal may appear quite ironic in 1945. It was a time when socialism, first in its Nazi form and then in its Soviet form, was dominant.

In 1838, after high school studies, Havlíček decided to attend a philosophy seminar in Prague. After only two years, he reconsidered his plans for a career in philosophy and considered theology. That ended when, after a short period of time, he decided that his freethinking, liberal ideas didn’t fit the life of a clergyman.

Next, he started his self-education in languages and the literature and history of Slavic nations, especially the history of Poland and Russia. Havlíček was heavily influenced by the idea of Pan-Slavism and became a Russophile. It was quite common and naïve at that time to support Pan-Slavism which regarded czarist Russia as a natural leader of all Slavic nations. Almost none of the proponents of Pan-Slavism had ever been to Russia, however. Havlíček seized a chance to accept a tutorship in Moscow in 1843 where disillusionment with how the Russian aristocracy treated its people changed his views within a year. He returned to Prague and became an Austro-Slavist, meaning that he supported a federation of free and equal nations within the Austrian empire.

Havlíček’s increasingly liberal views (in the classical sense) made him quite unpopular among representatives and supporters of the absolutist monarchy. He fought its authoritarian principles, its censorship, and its repression. He defended free speech and open criticism of policies and ideas. The monarchy fought back, accusing Havlíček many times of violating the strict laws regulating the press. A newspaper he started, National News, was forced to close in January 1850. With patience and courage, he declared, “We are so liberal that we will never mark our opponents as heretics for their thoughts.”

Determined that liberal political and economic thought should be heard, Havlíček did not give up. He started a new journal, The Slav, which officially satisfied all the regulations but put forth his views as boldly as he felt safe to print. He focused much of his writing on educating the people on the economics of free markets.

Political Thought

Havlíček was a devotee of František Palacký, the “founding father” of Czech democratic politics and its liberal orientation. Both Havlíček and Palacký understood history as a clash between external authority and free, inner reason. Free reasoning, they believed, led directly to individual self-determination, which was in sharp contrast with the more German view of the national State as the highest authority and the embodiment of the highest collective good. To Havlíček, the individual was completely lost and denigrated in the collectivist “en masse” perspective.

Havlíček’s concepts of individualism and freedom were close to those of John Locke, a pioneer of the foundational view shared by most libertarians today. Locke wrote that “freedom is not, as we are told, ‘a liberty for every man to do what he lists’ . . . but a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.”

We can find similar ideas in Havlíček’s work, such as “freedom is not unbounded lawlessness, but natural individuality that no authority could interfere with on either personal matters or the free actions of its citizens.” As he saw it, the purpose of government was the protection of life, liberty, and property—not the manipulation of people to serve the ends of the State.

Economic Thought

In Havlíček’s day, early in the Industrial Revolution, many people believed that machinery and factories were taking work away from the workers. While he fully realized that machinery could cause the decline of some specific industries or types of production, he understood, as Bastiat did, that there is more to the story than just the people who lost their jobs to a machine.

“Every factory was harmful to certain craftsmen but it was beneficial for every person who had previously bought the expensive craftsman’s goods,” he wrote. He argued that the success of factories was a clear sign that the number of the people who benefited from the existence of factories exceeded the number of people who suffered hardship because of them. They were keys to great production and progress.

A free-market environment was needed, Havlíček maintained, to benefit fully from the existence of the factory. That included the reduction or abolition of prohibitions and tariffs on foreign goods. Those in business who demanded protectionist policies were, to him, a kind of aristocracy because aristocracy has always been connected with the misuse of the political and legal power of the State. “We see how our entrepreneurs are getting wealthier under the shadow of protectionism, due to monopoly and not their ability to serve the people,” he wrote.

So what is the cause of wealth and economic progress according to Havlíček? “Wealth and progress come from freedom and rule of law. Everyone is working for his own and is not forced to share his gains, everyone is seeking his own job; no laws and administrations are unduly binding him.” These were, in Havlíček´s opinion, the roots of the prosperity of the United States of America.

Havlíček used the English Corn Laws (tariffs on the importation of grain) as an example of wrong-headed economic policy: “Corn Laws caused the extreme rise of prices of corn. As a result, people bought less bread. Meanwhile, the aristocracy got wealthier and wealthier.”

Freedom, argued Havlíček, is a necessary precondition of economic prosperity, as well as peace in society. “It may sound strange, but peace and the certainty of protection of each individual’s property are features of the free countries.” There, he said, instead of the strife that regularly afflicted the unfree countries, economies are spared the turmoil of disruptive uncertainty and violent uprisings.

Karel Havlíček also warned society of the specter of communism. From his liberal perspective, it was unnatural to live in a society without private ownership of property. He deemed it might be possible for certain groups of people to live according to communist principles voluntarily, though it would be a ”foolish” idea. Imposing it on people by force would be an instant disaster. Communists, he said, are never content to leave people alone but instead, “are trying to make of people something ‘better’ or something ‘worse,’ but always something different than human.”

He even claimed that every absolutist government, whatever its ideology, was, in fact, a communist government because of the lack of guarantees of individual property. “The absolutist government is taking under the name of taxes, confiscation, expropriation, etc., the property of others and no one can even protest it. The government is taking the property of some and giving it to its supporters, together with other privileges. Isn’t that communism?”

The Bitter End

In November 1851, Havlíček was accused again of violating the press law. His liberal ideas and courageous fight for freedom were the cause. Luckily, he was freed by the local court but the story did not end there. One month later he was arrested by police—without any charge or trial—and deported to the small city of Brixen in South Tyrol, with no possibility to leave. Due to his ideas, which he expressed so brightly and clearly, and his criticism aimed at the government, he was meant to spend the rest of his life in exile.

After a few months, his wife and daughter were allowed to move into Brixen with him. They lived together until 1854 when his wife had to leave after contracting tuberculosis. In spite of forced exile and his wife’s illness, he did not stop his work. He decided to humorously describe his arrest and his adventurous journey to Brixen in Tyrol Laments and a blistering parody of statism called The Baptism of Saint Vladimir, his final work.

In the spring of 1855, he learned the sad news of his wife’s death. It broke him both mentally and physically. He himself died of the same illness a few months later, in 1856. He was just 34.

Despite his early death, Karel Havlíček is a great inspiration for Czechs to this day. He is widely regarded as a founder of Czech journalism, a powerful exemplar of liberal values and personal courage. “A person like Havlíček does not change his convictions. The danger lies solely in his pen,” wrote a police officer into Havlíček’s police records.

Because of his thoughts and ideas and the way in which he expressed them, some see Havlíček as a revolutionary, but that’s only accurate in a nonviolent, intellectual sense. In his own words: “I am the enemy of the revolution with weapons. I believe in revolution in heads and in hearts, because an uneducated nation bloodied in revolution will never achieve freedom from the rule of law, but will be swindled and brought back to despotism.”

Twin brothers and co-authors Tomáš Nikodym and Lukáš Nikodym are Ph.D. students at the University of Economics in Prague, Czech Republic.

Originally published at FEE.org on January 11, 2018.

Vilmos Apor, a Man Who Chose the Harder Road

Máté Hajba

This chapter’s hero is Bishop Vilmos Apor of Hungary, and the author is Máté Hajba, director of the Free Market Foundation in Hungary.

—Lawrence W. Reed

In my hometown in western Hungary, a quaint place called Győr, stands the white tower of the Bishop’s Castle. Its spectacular view complements the history of kindness and heroism in Hungary, but its cellar is soaked with the blood of a bishop who sacrificed himself to protect the innocent. His name was Vilmos Apor.

Hungary during World War II was a place of constant horror. The anti-Jewish laws, Nazi occupation, political turmoil, and pillaging by Soviet troops late in the war plagued the population. In times like that, people need hope, leadership by example, and admirable figures they can look up to and rely on. This is exactly what Vilmos Apor embodied. It wasn’t just his towering height that raised him above his compatriots. His kindness and strong sense of duty led him to save lives, reprimand Hitler openly, and then stand in defense of women threatened with rape by Soviet troops.

Vilmos Apor’s Education and Early Life

Born in 1892 into an aristocratic family in Hungarian Transylvania, Vilmos Apor bore the title of a baron. But he often later would recall what his mother used to say to her children: “If you ever get to a crossroad, always choose the harder road, as it will surely prove to be the right one.” He lived and died by those words, not by any comforts or privileges of nobility.

Apor decided he wanted to be a priest at an early age. He dedicated himself to God and the sacred task of helping others. When he was about six, he asked for a chalice for Christmas so he could pretend to be a priest celebrating mass. For another Christmas, ten years later, he asked for his mother’s leave to become a priest, which he received.

As a student, Apor excelled in both intellectual and physical activities. His remarkable kindness made him popular, as well. He was ordained a priest in 1915 and, shortly thereafter, was sent to the Eastern-Hungarian town of Gyula to assist the parish priest. There, he also founded social institutions to assist the poor and others in need. He was always available for people seeking advice or help, and he heard as many confessions as he possibly could.

Then, in 1917, he was called away by the bishop to teach at a college of theology for one year before returning to Gyula to lead the city parish. He was only 26 at the time, making him one of the youngest priests in Hungary to receive such an important post.

His skill, kindness, and leadership were desperately needed. When World War I ended with the defeat of Hungary and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, domestic turmoil ensued. A communist dictatorship briefly took over the country, the first such horrid regime in the world after Russia. It fell quickly, but it left considerable bloodshed, terror, and oppression behind.

Apor Was a Man of Kindness, Generosity, and Faith

In Gyula, the communists banned religious education in schools, an unpopular edict in a deeply religious country. Vilmos Apor wasn’t about to let the ban stand. He led masses of angry people in the streets in protest, thereby stopping the regulation from taking effect. Seeing the resolute crowd with Apor in the forefront, the oppressors relented, and religious education was allowed to continue.

In the interwar period (the 1920s and 30s), the Catholic Church in Hungary determined it should take a more active role in culture and civil society to help heal the wounds of war and calm social tensions. The clergy and laymen worked together to build communities, to support those in need through charity work, and to show that communism and national socialism would do much more harm than good.

Vilmos Apor was a prominent figure in this new direction in the role of the Church. He helped men, women, workers, intellectuals, and peasants—people of all walks of life—to build strong local communities and institutions. He wrote untold thousands of encouraging letters, donated many of his personal belongings, and spent many of his waking hours giving counsel and comfort. It seemed to many that he was everywhere at the same time, visiting hospitals, prisons, orphanages, and private homes.

When in 1941 he was consecrated Bishop of Győr, war was once again ravaging the world. The government of Miklós Horthy governed Hungary and entered World War II on the side of Nazi Germany. Győr was an industrial town important to the war machine. On a hill in the town’s historic, baroque center stood a cathedral, a seminary, and the stately Bishop’s Castle with its tall, white tower.

It would have been easy for any bishop there to shut himself away, to wander about the attractive and ancient buildings on the hill, above the noise of the factories and the suffering of the people. Given his high position in the Church and his aristocratic origins in the town, Apor might have lived in protected seclusion. But that was not in his character.

While the country was fighting on the wrong side, Apor was not content to play it safe. He never shied away from expressing a strong opinion, even if it opposed the will of the authorities. Despite all the official propaganda, he knew the war would be lost, and he only hoped that Hungary could negotiate with the Americans rather than with the Soviets. Apor wanted a Western-style, multi-party system after peace. In order to facilitate that, he organized meetings with like-minded people to start building the post-war future.

Apor Was Determined to Help His Jewish Neighbors

By 1944, even Miklós Horthy lost faith in the German war effort and was considering leaving the alliance with Hitler. To stop this, Germany occupied Hungary, bringing on a period of extreme terror. Jews in particular were targets and were herded into ghettos and later deported to concentration camps.

Apor headed an organization representing Jews who had converted to Catholicism. In that capacity, he often intervened with ministries of the Hungarian government on behalf of Hungary’s Jews, whether they had converted or not. He drew the wrath of the regime which increasingly focused its propaganda against the Church. When authorities resorted to property seizures, arbitrary arrests, and torture, he spoke truth to power with ever-greater eloquence and courage.

When news reached Bishop Apor that a ghetto would be set up in Győr to concentrate the Jews, he was on his way to the cathedral to celebrate Pentecost. He immediately discarded his prepared speech and in impromptu remarks, he declared:

Whoever disregards the first and foremost commandment of Christianity, the commandment of love, and says that there are people, groups and races who can be hated; whoever advocates the torture of humans, whether they are blacks or Jews, no matter how much he boasts about his faith, must be regarded as a heathen.

He denounced mistreatment and torture, but he didn’t stop there. After the mass at the cathedral, he wrote a letter to the minister of internal affairs, condemning the government’s actions of punishing innocent people without trials and holding the minister responsible for any deaths, injuries, and diseases following his actions. The angry minister replied that if it weren’t for Apor’s titles, he would be imprisoned for such insolence.

The bishop regarded the fight for what was right to be more important than any threat to himself. He tried to ease the suffering in the ghettos. He lobbied against the cramped living conditions and insisted on visiting the inhabitants, many of whom he knew personally. His request was denied by the Hungarian government which said that, although a priest could go into the ghettos, a bishop could not. Then the Germans took the additional measure of preventing any clergy at all from entering.

Upon hearing this, Apor went to the local headquarters of the Gestapo in Győr and demanded that the officers there convey this message to Hitler: “Even the Führer must abide by the laws of God. The time will come when he has to answer for his actions in front of the court of the world and God.”

It was only a matter of time before the Nazis would have to silence this courageous voice.

When the Nazis began the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, Apor organized a grassroots effort to collect food for them. He utilized not only the assets of the Church, but also contributions from friendly laymen to transport the donations secretly to the suffering people. The atrocities intensified, and it became ever more dangerous to go against the government. Apor, however, openly condemned the regime and disregarded its orders. Despite the threat, he harbored persecuted people in the Bishop’s Castle and provided Jews with forged documents. Every free space in the Castle was filled with people seeking refuge.

First the Germans, Then the Soviets

Soviet soldiers captured Győr from the Nazis in early 1945. The news of their pillaging, raping, and unchecked murderous activities had already reached the Bishop. The Castle was often visited by Soviet troops, but Apor managed to get rid of them more than once by giving them wristwatches. He sent envoys to high-ranking Soviet officials, asking for protection of the Castle because of the refugees there, many of them women and children. When the Soviets denied the request, confrontation was inevitable.

In early April 1945, Soviet soldiers came to the Castle to ask for women for “household chores.” Everyone knew what fate awaited them. Stories of rape had deeply disturbed the Bishop, so he categorically refused to let the soldiers take any women from under his protection. The soldiers stormed the building, found the women hiding in the cellar, and started to drag them out. Upon hearing the cries for help, Bishop Apor accosted the troops and furiously ordered them to leave. He was shot on the spot and died shortly thereafter at the age of 53. His last words were to offer himself for “dear Hungary and the whole world.”

This was a man who could have lived in comfort, but chose the “harder road” that his mother had advised so long before. He had relentlessly fought for what was right and died a martyr’s death. He was buried in a humble church plot. Later, members of the Győr Cathedral’s congregation raised donations to build an ornate tomb for the Bishop, but the communists would not allow his remains to be reburied there. That didn’t happen until the late 1980s. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1997.

Today the whole country of Hungary can be openly thankful for the deeds of the martyred bishop. He bravely stood up against the oppressive regimes of national socialism and communism. He helped people of all walks of life, regardless of their backgrounds or their faith. His kindness and dedication inspired many.

He chose the harder road because he knew it was the right one.

Máté Hajba is the director of the Free Market Foundation, which advocates economic freedom, civil rights, and tolerance. He is also the vice president of Civic Platform which runs anti-racist campaigns and promotes democratic values. He is interested in the relationship between the state and the individual and in the concept and history of liberty. He writes for international and national press and blogs on issues such as tolerance, international relations, and the digital economy. To spread the concept of individualism, liberty, tolerance, and the free market, he co-founded a youth organization named the Eötvös Club.

Originally published at FEE.org on December 21, 2017.

This Priest Didn’t Back Down from the Nazis or the Communists

Zoltán Kész

This chapter’s hero is Kornél Hummel of Hungary. The author, Zoltán Kész, is a personal friend who was the most gracious host when I visited Hungary a few years ago. Touring the “House of Terror” with him in Budapest, where atrocities of both the Nazis and the communists are documented, was an experience I’ll never forget. Zoltán is a member of the Hungarian Parliament and a FEE seminar alum.

—Lawrence W. Reed

“There are times in our society when we have to act in faith on behalf of the greater good. And, unfortunately, this is one of them.”

These lines come from a recent episode of ABC’s dramatic series called Designated Survivor (starring Kiefer Sutherland). They could easily have been spoken by the hero I choose to write about here, Kornél Hummel (1907–1945) of my native Hungary.

Hummel lived during one of the most crucial times in the history of the 20th Century, the 1940s. The last year of World War II witnessed the most brutal acts of war in my country, as noted by Máté Hajba in his essay in this series on Bishop Vilmos Apor. More than half a million Jews were herded on to cattle wagons and shipped to the concentration camps where very few survived. Besides the Germans, the brutality of the “liberating” Soviet troops posed a great challenge to Hungarians, too. Fortunately, the period also produced some true heroes like Hummel.

First Came the Nazis

He was only 37 years old when the front lines of battle passed through the Hungarian capital of Budapest. Hummel was a priest, a teacher of religion, and the protector of a community of blind people. He had already saved hundreds when the siege of Budapest started in 1944.

He oversaw a community of 120 people in a building complex known as the Institute for the Blind, but they had no chance to leave the compound when the Soviets arrived—not because they didn’t want to, but because their blindness prevented them from going anywhere. Since Hummel had been serving them as their priest, he personally moved into the building when all the workers there had fled and deserted the 120 blind residents.

Hummel knew that his decision to stay and protect his flock might have a fatal ending. But he was a man of faith, courage, and duty. Twenty years earlier, while preparing to be a Catholic priest, he had a dream one night that he would be shot to death by a soldier. He told his students he believed it may have been a sign that he would someday be a martyr to the faith, and that he would willingly accept it if it proved to be the case.

Once shy and reserved from behind the pulpit, Hummel’s fortitude and resolve came bursting forth when a real need surfaced. He decided everything related to the operations of the Institute—what care and treatments were necessary, how food was to be provided, and what measures needed to be taken to protect those who were stranded there with him.

Thanks to him, there was no major damage in the crowded building during the Soviet siege, but his own quarters were damaged by a bomb, and all his personal belongings were consumed by the flames. He lost his diary to the fire, a treasured possession that he had kept since he was a young student. He was wearing half-burnt pants when he went to ask his friends for a new change of clothes. He shrugged off his loss, saying that God was good to have spared him and would pay it back a thousand times.

Then Came the Soviets

With the Nazis gone, the first Soviet soldiers entered the building on January 10, 1945. Surprisingly, most of them were rather humane, at first, rather than aggressive. When they realized that the people in the building were blind, they even brought some bread and pickles to them.

From time to time, however, some drunk soldiers wandered into the premises and started to take their chances with some of the young girls. Some soldiers did not believe that the girls, who were quite self-confidently moving around in the building, could not see. One aggressive soldier only believed his victim when a pretty one whom he had wanted to rape showed him her artificial eye.

On the day that he met his fate, Hummel spent the whole day driving many of the sick and wounded of the city to a hospital. Then he went back into the Institute building in the evening to hear confessions. As he was listening to the last confession for the day, he was informed by a frantic caretaker that a Soviet soldier was harassing a young, blind girl in the courtyard. Hummel raced to the scene, where he saw the girl lying on the ground and about to be raped.

The priest somehow managed to separate the two and stood between the girl and the assailant. The soldier brandished his weapon and shouted something in Russian. Hummel gestured that he didn’t understand a word. The soldier stepped back and it seemed at first that he was going to leave. But suddenly he drew his gun, aimed, and shot Hummel in the chest at point-blank range. The priest arched back, fell, and twice uttered, “Deo gratias” in Latin, which means, “Thanks be to God.” He tried to say it again for the third time, but only his lips were moving. He couldn’t make another sound.

From that moment and ever since, Kornél Hummel was a martyr, as his dream had foretold. But to those of us who cherish his memory, he did not die in vain. His courage and his essential decency show us that one’s choices in trying circumstances can be an inspiration that touches many hearts. He was a hero who knew the risks in front of him. He chose to accept those risks and help those entrusted to his care. He didn’t run from danger to save himself. He did what he could for the lives and liberties of others, which is perhaps the greatest service any human can provide to another.

(Note: For further information in Hungarian on Kornél Hummel, see here.)

Zoltán Kész, the founder and former director of the Free Market Foundation in Veszprem, Hungary, is an elected member of the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest, where he argues vigorously in defense of liberty and free enterprise. He is a 2010 FEE seminar alum as well, and has sent Hungarian students to FEE programs.

Originally published at FEE.org on March 1, 2018.

Adam Heydel, A Mises Student From Poland

Marcin Chmielowski

This chapter’s hero is economist Adam Heydel and the author is Marcin Chmielowski of the Freedom and Entrepreneurship Foundation in Krakow, Poland.

—Lawrence W. Reed

Every nation boasts exceptionally brave individuals who, especially when motivated by fighting oppression, became great heroes worthy of praise and examples for others to follow.

European history, my native Poland included, is full of stories of insurgent, scythe-wielding warriors whose bravery inspires. But this has become somewhat of a cliched narrative, sometimes clouded by time, myth and emotion.

It is always good practice to balance this and show a different kind of bravery in history, like that of my subject here, Professor Adam Heydel. He was certainly courageous, but his weapon was his quill and his strength was the strength of mind. He paid the ultimate price for being faithful to the ideals he stood for. Fortunately, his legacy lives on and can be helpful to modern lovers of liberty if we acquaint ourselves with his importance.

The Central European Picture Puzzle

Adam Heydel was born in 1893 in a region of Poland that had been annexed by Russia. In fact, during the whole of the 19th century, Poland did not even exist as a sovereign state. It was divided into three sections by Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary. Though Heydel came from the Russian portion, he sought formal education in Krakow, which was then within the portion governed by Austria-Hungary.

There, he became close to a family relation and prominent painter, Jacek Malczewski, a distinguished artist who left a deep imprint on Heydel’s character that lasted a lifetime. As an economist in the future, he would retreat to art to find inner peace. He credited this exposure to art for helping him understand the relationship between what is rational and what is emotional.

Later in life as a straightforward free market economist guided by rational thinking, Heydel did not forget about his ancestry. He thought of himself as a Polish nationalist, but one who emphasized the importance of democratic institutions and multi-party republicanism. He believed a nation to be a spontaneously shaped community based on the shared cultural identity of its members. That national bond wasn’t always rational, but it was something absolutely natural and pervasive.

After passing his high school exit exam and graduating, Adam Heydel returned home to his family in the Russian-controlled region of historical Poland, but not for long. His father was accused of spying against the tsarist regime and the entire family was deported—not to Siberia, fortunately, but to Moscow, which was sufficient to cut the Heydels off from their friends and local community. It was in Moscow where Adam Heydel began his study of economics. He continued that education in Kiev, Ukraine, where he developed an interest in teaching as a way to influence the fate of Poles and Poland. As the Great War ended, he returned to reborn Poland and began working at Krakow’s prestigious Jagiellonian University in 1921.

Heydel was lucky to get under the wing of Professor Adam Krzyżanowski, who considered himself a student and follower of Adam Smith’s ideas. Krzyżanowski believed that only capitalism with its private property and competition components allows for the creation of a properly functioning civil society—and consequently, responsible voters. He had Heydel quickly found common ground.

The spirit of economic thinking in Krakow at the time was rather liberal (in the classical, European sense) and influenced by several factors, including: Krzyżanowski’s own scholarly interests and prominence, the proximity of Vienna and the Austrian school, and the relatively liberal perspective of the late Austria-Hungary environment.

Krakowian liberals like Krzyżanowski and Heydel were perfectly aware of the fact that the course the future would take would be determined by the power of ideas in general and their persuasiveness in particular. Under the changed conditions of a post-war independent Poland, they needed to act quickly, recognizing the gravity of the situation and the risks. They created the Economic Association of Krakow in 1921.

The Association could be called a freedom-oriented advocacy group or think tank. Its aims included “supporting any endeavor determined to improve the productivity of the nation on the basis of free market ideas, nurturing the teachings of entrepreneurship in all its branches, as well as observing the current economic life, the assessment of draft legislation, acts and decrees concerning any field related to social entrepreneurship and spreading the news related to economics in society.” Such a declaration could be readily accepted and signed by any modern libertarian think-tank today.

Krakow School of Economics

With a core of classical liberal scholars within the Association and at Jagiellonian University, the Krakow School of Economics began to emerge. Its most prominent representative was Adam Heydel himself, who soon became a full-time economics professor at the University. The Krakow School undertook the challenging task of convincing Polish citizens of the merits of free market ideas, the beneficial effects of free trade and principled opposition to the government’s interference with the economy.

A big problem was a very weak liberal tradition in Poland. The Krakow liberals struggled to find examples to point to and often had to refer to the USA or UK, which weakened the whole message they were trying to get across. But they worked hard, writing and speaking and teaching as if the future depended on acceptance of liberal ideas, which of course, it did.

During its existence, put to an end by the Nazis in 1939, the Economic Association of Krakow published 105 works of which several remain classic works of Polish free market economics. The members of the Association participated in uncountable debates and lectures. They invited prominent guests from abroad to stimulate thought about what the future of Poland should be like. Slowly and arduously—but systematically—they spread the knowledge of freedom and free markets, even as the world plunged into depression and hurtled toward war.

Meeting Ludwig von Mises

Heydel understood that educating others requires a never-ending mission of educating oneself. In 1928 he went to Vienna in order to get acquainted with its economic tradition. There, he met F. A. Hayek and participated in Ludwig von Mises’s seminars. His time in Vienna started a new chapter in his life, allowing his ideology and methodology to develop. He became committed to the Austrian tradition of conducting economics as a value-free science.

Heydel was not an original economist. His influence and achievements were based on his attempts to implement Austrian economics and Mises’s ideas to the Polish reality of that time. Though that doesn’t appear as a remarkable achievement in the larger sense, from the perspective of the Polish economic tradition it was a praiseworthy endeavor. Those of us who work today to teach and spread Austrian free market economics in Poland believe we owe a great intellectual debt to Adam Heydel and the seeds he planted.

Heydel expressed his ideas in writing mostly through short pieces, commentaries and the like. His scholarly works are not long, but concise and analytical with nary a redundant sentence. His legacy also includes numerous journalistic works with different levels of complexity.

A few characteristic elements were frequently present in his lectures and writings. Most of all, he tried to differentiate between ideology and science. One the one hand, as an ideologue possessing a complex system of principles, he was a staunch free marketeer. On the other hand, as a scientist examining human action, he maintained a value-free approach. At all times, he sought truth for its own sake and kept his eyes open to what experience could teach. For instance, he believed communism to be an obvious ideological and economic failure, writing that “all the swords wielded by the Bolshevik terror broke on the iron bars of economic laws.”

Heydel regarded the mechanism of competition to enable individuals and whole nations to gain wealth—not the ivory tower, the mythical notion of “perfect competition” that was the rage in some circles at the time, but actual, rivalrous behavior in the real marketplace. Real competition involved a process of negotiating prices in the midst of always-incomplete information. The state with its will to regulate private contracts was a nuisance to him. And since active individuals are smart enough to get around the regulations, he regarded their imposition as usually pointless.

A recurrent theme in Heydel’s ideas was the harm of statism, the government’s intervention in the economy. Since the location of Poland and the increase of the power of totalitarian states—Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia—he thought it acceptable for the state to intervene in the branches of economy concerned with defense, though he argued that it should still be as little as possible. Heydel wanted to see the Polish economy as “a free space” with low barriers to entry and allowing for the realization of diversified business. The government would be responsible for guaranteeing order through a legal system.

Unfortunately, the seeds of thought that Adam Heydel and his free market colleagues from the Krakow School were planted in hostile ground. In 1926, Poland experienced a coup and an army-backed government seized power.

The new rulers aimed to invigorate Polish institutions and put an end to corruption, both praiseworthy postulates in the context of the day, but their implementation was downright horrible. The government proved to be openly hostile towards free market capitalism, so it constantly tried to limit and nationalize it. The economy, already oppressed by regulations imposed by former democratic governments, was additionally burdened by new laws.

As government discretion increased and the sphere of civilian life was limited, the chances of developing the country diminished. Elections were rigged. The Krakow School’s educational efforts went underground. The government did not appreciate the School’s critical assessment of its policies and considered Heydel in particular an inconvenience, so in 1933 he lost his post at Jagiellonian University, regaining it in 1937.

The Tragic End

Nonetheless, all that was incomparable to the Hell that was yet to come. On September 1, 1939, Poland was attacked by Hitler’s army. On September 17, the Red Army fulfilled the secret terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and stabbed Poland in the back, invading the Eastern parts of the country. Adam Heydel, after being found guilty of plotting against the Nazis—he had joined the underground movement but was found out—was turned over to the German army. He died in March 1941 in the infamous Nazi concentration camp known as Auschwitz.

Before his death, Heydel actually had a chance at release from Auschwitz. His ancestors came to Poland from Thuringia around the end of the 17th century and one of the German officers in the camp recognized the unique surname. He offered Heydel freedom on the condition that he would renounce his Polish background and sign the Volksliste, an official roster of people of German ancestry living outside of Germany. Heydel rejected the offer. In no way did he want to be connected with the totalitarian regime. To him, it was the very negation of freedom. He wanted no part of slavery or stripping individuals of their choices and dignity.

In post-war communist Poland, there was no place for Adam Heydel’s legacy. Poland was basically governed by Moscow and was incorporated to the Eastern Bloc. Heydel’s works were forgotten and his economics textbook for college students was removed from the libraries and destroyed. It was not until the 1980s that Poles started to remember him. The Jagiellonian University staff posthumously awarded him with the Merentibus medal in recognition of “unyielding tenaciousness against the Nazi occupant, defense of the human dignity and of the fatherland, as well as of the independence of science.”

The collected works of Adam Heydel were published in 2012. As a consequence of the decades of systematic suppression of the Polish free market capitalist tradition, Polish citizens are still largely unfamiliar with one of the most important representatives of Polish free market economics.

Ideas Are Bulletproof

At the Freedom and Entrepreneurship Foundation where I serve as vice-president, we want to change this sad fact! We have produced a movie on the Krakow School of Economics, partly focused on Adam Heydel, and titled “The Forgotten: History of the Krakow School of Economics.” I was honored to be the scriptwriter and the director of the production. You can Watch the move on YouTube.

Through films like this and many more to come, Polish citizens will know that they have their own freedom-fighting intellectual heroes, those who fought by means of the strength of their minds and cared for education. We believe that it will make it easier for today’s Polish liberty advocates to publicize our own history of heroes and heroic ideas, and dismiss the false impression that freedom ideas might be good, but just for Americans.

Adam Heydel was a martyr of Polish liberalism and the Austrian School of Economics. But after all this time, he can still be victorious. He can continue teaching us. All we have to do is to be smart enough to carefully listen to his advice.

Editorial Note: The Polish Mises Institute has published all of Heydel’s collected works and made them available online for free in pdf, epub and mobi formats.

Dr. Marcin Chmielowski is a political scientist and philosopher, commentator, and vice-president of the Freedom and Entrepreneurship Foundation in Krakow, Poland. His organization, with the help of FEE and other cosponsors, plans to produce a film about Ludwig von Mises. He invites you to learn more about that project here: http://misesthemovie.com/.

Originally published at FEE.org on December 14, 2017.

The Epic Life of Lenin’s Personal Enemy and One of Tolstoy’s Favorite Authors

Mikołaj Pisarski

This chapter’s hero is the Polish writer and anti-communist activist Ferdynand Ossendowski, a courageous man whose exploits deserve to be better known. Poland has produced an abundance of heroes in the last century, one of the reasons it’s been a very special place to me since my first of many visits there in 1986. The author is Mikołaj Pisarski, recently named the new president of the Mises Institute (Instytut Misesa) in Wroclaw, Poland.

—Lawrence W. Reed

It was early 1921 in Mongolia, an arena of conflict between Bolsheviks eager to coerce the local population into a new communist order and anti-communist “White Russian” forces. Inside an old Buddhist monastery on the river Orkhon, a secret meeting occurred between two important fugitives from tyranny. One was a 35-year-old named Roman von Ungern-Sternberg—an anti-Bolshevik general of German descent infamously known as “the Bloody Baron” for cruel treatment of both his enemies and his own men. The other was a 43-year-old Polish intellectual named Ferdynand Ossendowski, the man who would come to be known as “Lenin’s personal enemy.”

Ungern had turned his attention to fighting Lenin’s Bolsheviks after his Asiatic Cavalry Division had just expelled the occupying Chinese from Mongolia. A mystic deeply fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism and consumed with a passion for restoring the Russian monarchy, he didn’t see eye-to-eye with his new Polish comrade on many issues. Ossendowski had no use for the monarchy. But the two were passionately united in their unremitting hostility for the Leninist regime in Moscow. From all indications, Ossendowski provided Ungern with valuable advice. In return, the Bloody Baron gave Ossendowski his means of escape: his private Fiat auto, an absolutely priceless possession in the middle of the vast Mongolian steppes.

By September, Ungern’s forces were crushed in East Siberia, and he himself was executed in Novonikolaevsk. Ossendowski made his way in the Fiat into China, then later to safety in Japan before arriving in New York City. It was there, in late 1921, that he published his first book in English, Beasts, Men and Gods. It described his travels during the Russian Civil War and the campaigns led by the Bloody Baron. It quickly became a bestseller. The following year, he settled in Warsaw, Poland. Thanks to the Bloody Baron’s gift, Ossendowski would give the communists fits for the next two decades.

Early Life

Now, let me turn the clock back a few years.

Born in 1876 in Ludza (today’s Latvia), Ossendowski received a good education at a famous grammar school, where he exhibited traits of exceptional imagination. Tasked by one of his teachers to describe his family home, he instead provided a colorful account of one of Constantinople’s palaces. The headmaster soon declared that the boy was destined to become a great litterateur.

Before he could finish school, Ossendowski and his family moved to St. Petersburg, Russia. As an assistant to famous naturalist Szczepan Zalewski at Petersburg University, he had an opportunity to explore his interests in the natural sciences as well as his passion for travel. As a member of scientific expeditions, he visited many places secluded even by today’s standards: the Altai Mountains, the Caucasus, the Janisej River, and the Baikal region.

During summer months, he often worked as a ship’s writer on the Odessa-Vladivostok line. The pay was not bad: 40 rubles per month. What really mattered for Ossendowski, though, was the opportunity to explore more exotic countries. He visited India, Japan, China, and the Malayan Archipelago. A few weeks that he spent in India resulted in his first significant novel, A Cloud over the Ganges, which received the coveted Petersburg Society of Literature Prize.

Getting Political

The young Pole’s academic career came to an abrupt halt in 1899 when, after taking part in student riots against the czarist government, Ossendowski was forced to flee Russia. He studied in Paris until he was able to return to Russia three years later and resume his promising career as a university professor.

Until the end of the First World War, Poland was not present on any map. Partitioned between Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Imperial Russia in the 1790s, it had been wiped out for 123 years. The largest part of its territory was controlled by Russia, which undertook harsh measures of ethnic cleansing to “Russify” its Polish population.

After the failed Revolution of 1905 against the czar, in which he participated, Ossendowski played a significant role in upholding Polish traditions and language within the Polish community in St. Petersburg. He edited and produced several newspapers in collaboration with many individuals who would later help restore an independent Poland in 1918.

Ossendowski organized protests against the czar’s brutal repression in Russian-occupied Poland. For this activity, he was sentenced to death. He avoided execution (and was sent to prison instead) by convincing the judges and generals with the following explanation:

Had our committee been unable to take hold and contain the outbreak of revolutionary passions, you, dear Sirs, would undoubtedly have been slain by bullets of your own soldiers or hanged by anarchists raging like beasts

He left prison branded as a political prisoner, which prevented him from getting a job. Hounded by the czar’s secret police, he frequently changed his place of residence to stay a step ahead of them. During this time he wrote the first of his many anti-authoritarian books, “W ludskoj pyli” (In Human Dust), which described in detail the inhumane conditions inside the czar’s prisons. The book made him famous, earning praise even from Leo Tolstoy, who referred to it as one of his “favorites.”

A Man with a Mission

The 1917–1922 civil war between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the anti-communist “White Russians” convinced Ossendowski of two things: to vigorously oppose Lenin and to make the country of his heritage, Poland, his new homeland. He believed that communism had to be stopped at all costs. It was that determination that took him to Mongolia and to the meeting with Ungern in 1921, after escaping the hellish nightmare of communism’s early days in St. Petersburg, followed by two long winter months of surviving in the Siberian wilderness.

A keen observer and a man of conscience, he was horrified by the unfolding terror of Lenin’s regime. He helped expose Lenin’s ties to German intelligence. He wrote much about the true nature of communism and the ugly truth about its leaders. He remained a dedicated enemy of communism for the rest of his life.

Ossendowski dared to challenge the myth, propagated by Lenin’s friends both at home and in the West, of the new Soviet leader as a heroic, positive figure instead of the power-hungry tyrant and remorseless war criminal that he was. His 1931 masterpiece, Lenin: God of the Godless, ripped that myth to shreds. His description of Moscow in the grip of Lenin’s dictatorship—“where justice was a mockery,” in his words—still elicits shudders in readers today:

There was no law but the anarchy of terrorism. All night long the machine-gun spluttered. Time after time the black van left the Bolshaya Lubyanka [a torture and execution center] to dump its load of corpses beyond the city. All day the limousines that once belonged to the court dashed through the streets carrying Commissars in leather coats, whose leather portfolios symbolized now the power of life and death. Then night came down again and the patrols, like wolves, broke into the rooms of private houses, ransacked them, and took away women and children to shame and death. Meanwhile, the church bells were silent and military bands played the Internationale on the Kuznetsky Bridge.

Lenin: God of the Godless was easily Ossendowski’s most important book. It provoked a strong response. Critics tried unsuccessfully to discredit his sources. Soviet embassies worked to get local governments to suppress it, but the message got out. Parts of it were reprinted in major newspapers, and famous actors read descriptions of Lenin’s brutality over the radio. Pope Pius XI sent his blessings and gratitude for his personal copy.

Late in Life

In the period between the two world wars, Ossendowski also earned a reputation as a globetrotter and an outstanding writer, often compared favorably to Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and Karl May. As a renowned Sovietologist, he published articles and secret reports on Revolutionary Russia.

He wrote several well-received novels and organized two expeditions to Africa. He was cited as one of the five most widely-read writers in the world. With dozens of published books, several of them worldwide bestsellers, it would have been easy for him to lead the life of a carefree socialite. But politics and world affairs ensured that he would become one of the most renowned and outspoken critics of communism.

The German invasion of Poland started World War II in September 1939. Ossendowski remained in and near Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, assisting with the risky business of underground education in wartime. Even in failing health, he worked with the Polish underground to create post-war curriculum and education programs intended to rebuild the country’s devastated education system in a free, post-war Poland.

He died in January 1945 at the age of 68, just four months before the war ended. Two weeks later, when the Red Army seized the town of Milanówek where he was buried, the Soviets ordered the exhumation of his body to confirm that “the personal enemy of Lenin” was truly dead. The post-war, Soviet-imposed communist government of Poland banned his books and ordered existing copies confiscated and burned—proving that to a dictatorship, truth in the form of mere words is the greatest enemy.

More than seven decades later, we Poles understand and appreciate what Ossendowski did and what he stood for. In 1989, we demolished the communism that was imposed on us by Soviet power in 1945. We despise Lenin and revere our heroes of liberty. Ferdynand Ossendowski ranks as one of our best.

Mikołaj Pisarski is president of the Mises Institute (Instytut Misesa) in Wroclaw, Poland, an education-oriented think-tank focusing on advancing research on Austrian Economics and promoting its insights in Polish universities and high schools.

Originally published at FEE.org on January 25, 2018.

The Man Who Saved Russia from the Soviet Union

Yuri N. Maltsev

This chapter’s hero is the Russian architect of the “perestroika,” or “restructuring” of the Soviet Union that ultimately led to its downfall, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev. The author is Yuri Maltsev, an economics professor at Carthage College in Wisconsin. Before defecting to the United States in 1989, he was a member of a senior team of Soviet economists that worked on the reform program of perestroika.

—Lawrence W. Reed

It is time to give an important figure in recent Russian history his historical due—Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev. A leading figure in the latter years of the Soviet government, Yakovlev began his career as a Red Army officer and a Communist Party apparatchik, but he ultimately became a devoted and effective enemy of Soviet tyranny.

He will be remembered as the architect of “perestroika” (restructuring of the political and economic systems) in the late 1980s and its consequences: exposure of the heinous lies and crimes of the criminal Soviet regime and the inevitable demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). For most of his life, Yakovlev was a closet classical liberal in one of the most illiberal and collectivist societies in history. He did not share either the socialist or Russian nationalist worldviews.

During the tumultuous 1980s, the final and climactic decade of the Soviet Union, he was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party, second in authority only to Mikhail Gorbachev, who was more his student than a boss. The chief of party ideology, Yakovlev was called various names in addition to “architect of perestroika”: “godfather of glasnost,” “Gorbachev’s puppeteer,” “Traitor-in-Chief,” “CIA agent,” “ardent anti-Soviet fanatic,” “enemy of the people,” and “capitalist Satan,” depending on who did the name-calling.

Early Life

Yakovlev was born in 1923 into a peasant family in a tiny village on the bank of the Volga River near the ancient city of Yaroslavl. Young Alexander was very well acquainted with the misery of Soviet life during and after the genocidal “collectivization” of the peasantry. Between 1929 and 1932, over 30 million Russian, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian peasants were starved to death, deported to Siberia, or murdered on the spot by Stalin, his Marxist social engineers, and their troops.

Yakovlev never forgot the images of suffering, deportations, murder, and torture. There was not much, however, that he could do about it.

The Second World War began a month after he graduated from high school and he was immediately drafted into the Red Army. He wrote,

Even then, in my eighteen years, I realized that I was bringing cannon fodder to the front. And all my comrades, young officers, thought the same thing. We concealed our doom by bravado, songs, boastful denial, and senseless disputes about how quickly we will defeat fascists. . . .And at night we dreamed of mothers and homes. . .

He endured great hardships, serving in the Army as a lieutenant after graduation from officer school. He was badly wounded in the German siege of Leningrad and discharged from the Army in 1944. He hated wars and the governments that initiated them. In his autobiography, The Dusk, he wrote, “Who sent them to their deaths? Why were they killed? For what sins?. . .The insanity of war, the insanity of governments, the madness of rulers—murderers!”

The same year he joined the Communist Party (it was a necessity for advancement at the time) and became a history student at the Yaroslavl Pedagogical Institute. He was awarded a prestigious Stalin scholarship, but for him,

It became more and more obvious that everyone lied—both those who were giving speeches, and those who listened to those speeches. For me, a village boy, a frontline soldier who went to war from school, all this was unbearable.

Majoring in history, Yakovlev and his insatiable curiosity found his lifelong hero in Piotr Stolypin (1862–1911), a free-market reformer and Prime Minister of the Imperial (czarist) government. Stolypin was assassinated by Dmitry Bogrov, a socialist revolutionary, but his reforms left a deep impression on Yakovlev. They aimed for the creation of a strong farmer and citizen through privatization, the building of rural self-government at the expense of the national government, and the abandonment of communal land use and communal ownership.

Though short-lived, these reforms produced astounding results. Productivity in agriculture almost doubled. In 1912, Russia’s grain exports exceeded by 30 percent those of the United States, Argentina, and Canada combined.

“Judging by Stolypin’s deeds,” said Yakovlev, “he laid down his life for the Russian peasant to become the owner and the master. . . .But no. They killed him. . . .All hopes for a free and prosperous Russia were dashed with the establishment of the criminal socialist regime in 1917. They hung, and shot, and burned. . .Lenin was delirious with terror. . . ”

When he graduated from the Institute, Yakovlev, as a decorated war veteran, was asked to become a Communist party apparatchik. Bright, attentive, and educated, he made an exceptional career for himself in the party apparatus. Like many of us who detested communism, though, he had to say one thing, do another, and think something else. He respected the courage of dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov but he realized that the only way to destroy what he later termed a “regime of the ultimate evil” was from the inside. History proved him right.

North America and Meeting Gorbachev

In 1958, he was sent for graduate work to Columbia University in New York, along with the future KGB general and later defector Oleg Kalugin. Both Russian communists and fascists today are convinced that Yakovlev became a Central Intelligence Agency agent and was recruited during his 1959 Columbia University fellowship.

Upon his return from the United States, Yakovlev served as editor of several party publications. He rose to the key position of head of the Department of Ideology and Propaganda from 1969 to 1973. He was then appointed the Soviet ambassador to Canada, partly because party officials objected to his anti-nationalist views and wanted him out of the country.

Yakovlev remained in Canada for a decade. In 1983, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the member of the Politburo in charge of agriculture, toured Canada in search of advanced technologies in farming. Gorbachev was looking for lessons that he could take back and apply in the Soviet Union. It was during that 1983 visit to Canada that Yakovlev, cautiously at first, began to discuss with Gorbachev the prospect of liberalization in the Soviet Union. In an interview years later, Yakovlev recalled:

At first we kind of sniffed around each other and our conversations didn’t touch on serious issues. And then, verily, history plays tricks on one. We had a lot of time together as guests of the [Canadian] Minister of Agriculture Eugene Whelan . . .So we took a long walk on the Minister’s farm and, as it often happens, both of us suddenly were just kind of overwhelmed and let go. I somehow, for some reason, threw caution to the wind and started telling him about what I considered to be utter stupidities in the area of foreign affairs, especially about those SS-20 missiles that were being stationed in Europe and a lot of other things. And he did the same thing. We were completely frank. He frankly talked about the problems in the internal situation in Russia. He was saying that under these conditions of a dictatorship and the absence of freedom, the country would simply perish. So during our three-hour conversation, almost as if our heads were locked together, we poured it all out and came to agreement on almost everything.

Less than a month after his visit, Gorbachev asked the Politburo to recall Yakovlev from Canada and appoint him as a Director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (MGIMO) of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. MGIMO was and still is the most prestigious institution of higher learning and social science research in Moscow. Most of its students are children of the ruling elite.

The Beginning of the End of the USSR

The General Secretary of the Party at the time was the old and frail bureaucrat Konstantin Chernenko, who could barely walk or talk without assistance. Even for Soviet hardliners, it was obvious that someone younger was needed to save the Communist regime. Gorbachev was elected as the General Secretary of the Communist Party on 11 March 1985, only three hours after Chernenko’s death. At age 54, Gorbachev was the youngest member of the Politburo.

This event started a train of unanticipated consequences. Gorbachev quickly named Mr. Yakovlev to key party posts. In 1987, Yakovlev became a full member of the Politburo in charge of ideology, the Number 2 post in the Soviet hierarchy. With Gorbachev’s approval, Yakovlev began the program of “perestroika” (“restructuring” in English) which “restructured” the Evil Empire into a pile of rubble in less than five years. Reflecting back on the period years later, he wrote, “The USSR lost the Cold War. . . .That victory in the Cold War is our common victory. It was a breakthrough to the civilized community of states. . . ”

Through his policy of “glasnost” (openness), Yakovlev encouraged media freedom. Almost overnight, free media exposed Soviet history as a sequence of horrific crimes and lies. Yakovlev himself revealed the hidden details of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (between Nazi Germany and the USSR) that paved the way for Soviet aggression against Finland and Soviet annexation of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. That delegitimized Soviet occupation of the Baltics.

When Lithuania moved toward independence from the USSR in January 1991, Gorbachev asked Yakovlev about the wisdom of repression against Lithuanians. “Should we shoot?” he asked. Yakovlev answered, “If a single Soviet soldier fired a single bullet on unarmed crowds, Soviet power would be over.”

There were bullets and tanks: 14 civilians were killed and 702 were injured. And the USSR collapsed later in the same year. In between, Yakovlev resigned from both the Politburo and the Communist Party.

A Vocal Critic of the Regime until His Death

After his lifelong work contributing to the demise of the USSR in December of 1991, Yakovlev became head of Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s commission for the rehabilitation of victims of Soviet political repression. In that role, he exposed the Soviet regime as criminal and genocidal. He called it a kind of fascism and documented its longstanding policies of mass murder.

In 2000, Yakovlev presented iron-clad evidence that Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg had been shot in Moscow’s Lubyanka, headquarters of the Soviet secret police, in 1947. Mr. Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews in Hungary at the end of the Second World War but mysteriously disappeared after Hungary was occupied by the Soviets.

In his later life, he founded and led the International Democracy Foundation. He advocated the full exposure of the crimes of communism and was critical of President Putin’s restrictions on freedoms of speech and economic enterprise.

Yakovlev died on October 18, 2005, at his home in Moscow at the age of 81. “He made an enormous contribution to the democratic processes and the transformation of the country,” said Mr. Gorbachev in his eulogy, “We often argued but always understood each other.”

In reality, it was Yakovlev who led Gorbachev to the liberation of the countries enslaved in the USSR. It was Yakovlev who stood most firmly against the Soviet regime’s deadly socialist ideology with its worship of envy, violence, and mass murder.

Professor Yuri Maltsev earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Moscow State University, and his Ph.D. in Labor Economics at the Institute of Labor Research in Moscow, Russia. Before defecting to the United States in 1989, he was a member of a senior Soviet economics team that worked on President Gorbachev’s reforms package of perestroika.

Originally published at FEE.org on February 1, 2018.

Archbishop Damaskinos, the Greek Clergyman Who Stared Down the Nazis

Michael Iakovidis

This chapter’s hero is Archbishop Damaskinos of Greece, and the author is Michael Iakovidis, co-founder of FEE’s partner organization in Athens, Greek Liberties Monitor.

—Lawrence W. Reed

In the darkest hour, some shine while others fade away.

One of the darkest hours in the history of my country, Greece, came on the 27th of April in 1941. German troops entered Athens and brought the whole country under Nazi occupation. It was at that crucial moment that Archbishop Damaskinos chose to shine.

Determined to Help

Dimitris Papandreou was born March 3, 1891, to a very poor family in rural Greece. He nonetheless managed to attend both theological and law school simultaneously, graduating from both before being drafted to fight in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. He was ordained as a minister in 1917, taking the name Damaskinos.

His career leading up to the days of the German occupation shows a man who was devoted to the Church as well as its role in helping and uplifting the Greek people. He presided for three years over an organization aimed at creating a higher level of education in the Greek clergy. As Bishop of Corinth during the disastrous earthquake there in April 1928, his deep commitment to his flock was widely recognized. He assumed a leadership role in the relief and repair efforts, traveling to the U.S. where he galvanized the Greek Diaspora to contribute to those efforts.

In 1938, Damaskinos was voted by the Greek Orthodox Church into the position of “Archbishop of Athens and All of Greece.” However, fearing his democratic sentiments and support for former Prime Minister and Liberal Party leader Eleftherios Venizelos, the dictatorship at the time overturned the decision in the courts. Damaskinos was placed under house arrest in Salamina for the duration of the dictatorship and the Greek-Italian War of 1940–41.

If nothing else had happened in the life of Damaskinos, he would still be remembered as a significant figure in 20th-Century Greek history. But there was so much more to come.

The German Invasion

The government that had arrested Damaskinos fell with the German invasion of Greece in 1941. The Church seized the opportunity to reinstate Damaskinos as Archbishop. Meanwhile, the occupying forces imposed a truly tyrannical order, leading to widespread famine, mass shootings, and other reprisals against Greek patriots. Lesser men would have been silenced (or have silenced themselves), but not Damaskinos. He believed that his sworn duty as a cleric was to be a shepherd to all his flock, which he regarded as all citizens of Greece, not just those of his Church.

The Archbishop used his influence to get the UK and Turkey, especially the latter, to ship food to starving Greeks. Then, when the German occupation forces announced conscription of Greek citizens with plans to send them to the Russian front or to forced labor in German factories, he masterminded a widespread worker strike.

His love for his flock and his deep belief in the sanctity of all life came mightily to the fore during the darkest times of 1943. Deportation of Jews, gypsies, and other minorities had reached a fever pitch, not just in Greece but all through occupied Europe. At a time when even many religious voices were quieted, the Archbishop boldly challenged Nazi authorities.

On the 23rd of March, 1943, Damaskinos marched into the office of SS General Jürgen Stroop, the man who had personally overseen the complete destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews in Warsaw, and presented him a letter (which he had previously submitted to the Prime Minister of the occupation government). It read,

Mr. Prime Minister:

The Greek people were rightfully surprised and deeply grieved to learn that the German Occupation Authorities have already started to put into effect a program of gradual deportation of the Greek Jewish community of Salonika to places beyond our national borders, and that the first groups of deportees are already on their way to Poland. The grief of the Greek people is particularly deep because of the following:

According to the terms of the armistice, all Greek citizens, without distinction of race or religion, were to be treated equally by the Occupation Authorities.

The Greek Jews have proven themselves not only valuable contributors to the economic growth of the country but also law-abiding citizens who fully understand their duties as Greeks. They made sacrifices for the Greek country and were always on the front line in the struggles of the Greek nation to defend its inalienable historical rights.

The law-abiding nature of the Jewish community in Greece refutes a priori any charge that it may be involved in actions or acts that might even slightly endanger the safety of the Military Occupation Authorities.

In our national consciousness, all the children of Mother Greece are an inseparable unity: they are equal members of the national body irrespective of religion or dogmatic differences.

Our Holy Religion does not recognize superior or inferior qualities based on race or religion, as it is stated: ”There is neither Jew nor Greek” (Galatians 3:28) and thus condemns any attempt to discriminate or create racial or religious differences.

Our common fate, both in days of glory and in periods of national misfortune, forged inseparable bonds between all Greek citizens, without exemption, irrespective of race.

. . .Today we are interested in and deeply concerned with the fate of 60,000 of our fellow citizens, who are Jews. For a long time, we have lived together in both slavery and freedom, and we have come to appreciate their feelings, their brotherly attitude, their economic activity and, most important, their indefectible patriotism. Evidence of this patriotism is the great number of victims sacrificed by the Greek Jewish community without regret and without hesitation on the altar of duty when our country was in peril.

Mr. Prime Minister, We are certain that the thoughts and feelings of the Government on this matter are in agreement with those of the rest of the Greek nation. We also trust that you have already taken the necessary steps and applied to the Occupation Authorities to rescind the grievous and futile measure to deport the members of the Jewish community of Greece. . .

We hope that the Occupation Authorities will realize in due time the futility of the persecution of Greek Jews, who are among the most peaceful and productive elements of the country.

If, however, they insist on this policy of deportation, we believe that the Government, as the bearer of whatever political authority is left in the country, should take a clear stance against these events and let the foreigners bear the full responsibility of committing this obvious injustice. Let no one forget that all actions done during these difficult times, even those actions that lie beyond our will and power, will be assessed someday by the nation and will be subjected to historical investigation. In that time of judgment, the responsibility of the leaders will weigh heavily upon the conscience of the nation if today the leaders fail to protest boldly in the name of the nation against such unjust measures as the deportation of the Greek Jews, which are an insult to our national unity and honor.

Respectfully,
Damaskinos
Archbishop of Athens and Greece

General Stroop was outraged and threatened to shoot Damaskinos. The Archbishop’s response, in part, was, “According to the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church, our prelates are hanged and not shot. Please respect our traditions!” This remark so shocked the General that he did not carry out his threat.

The Salvation of the Greek Jews

The letter failed to bring results, but the Archbishop pressed his demands elsewhere. He called upon the police chief of Athens, Angelos Evert, who was of a similar mind and disposition, and told him, “I have spoken to God, and my conscience tells me what we must do. The Church will issue false baptismal certificates to any Jew who asks for them and you will issue false identification cards.” More than 27,000 such false identity papers were issued.

“I have taken up my cross,” the Archbishop declared. “I spoke to the Lord, and made up my mind to save as many Jewish souls as possible.”

He urged the clergy to shelter and provide aid to any of the persecuted who asked for it. Many Jewish families survived in hiding because of the Archbishop’s request. His courage—and that of the clerics who followed him—was a clarion call to the Greek people more generally, who took up the task of protecting the Jews.

One of the most telling stories was from the Isle of Zakynthos, where the Nazi SS asked the mayor and the bishop to hand over the names of the resident Jews for deportation to Auschwitz. In a brave act of defiance, the list given to the Germans contained two names: the mayor’s and the bishop’s! Of the 275 Jews of the island, not a single Jewish name was handed over, and every Jew was hidden for the duration of the occupation.

The same sentiment was echoed by Joachim, Metropolitan of Volos, who, when asked for a list of Jewish residents replied, “I am a Jew.” Then he mobilized local resistance to evacuate the 702 Jews of the city to the adjacent mountains and villages. During the Nazi occupation, over 600 Greek Orthodox priests were detained and deported for their actions, inspired by the courage of Archbishop Damaskinos.

His Lasting Legacy

The Archbishop was placed under house arrest in 1944, and there was talk of deporting him to the concentration camps. Luckily this never happened, and Damaskinos lived to see Greece freed from the Nazis. In fact, he briefly served as the country’s regent after the War. He lived until 1949, where he died at the age of 59.

The legacy of Archbishop Damaskinos was not forgotten. He was honored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, as “Righteous Among the Nations,” an important designation given to non-Jews who risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. He is prominently featured in a permanent exhibition at the International Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

And in Greece today, he is universally remembered as a hero for all humanity. I believe, as do most Greeks, that love of your fellow man and the courage of your convictions in the face of adversity are triumphs of human will and of good over evil.

Michael Iakovidis is co-founder of the Athens-based organization, Greek Liberties Monitor which works to educate the citizens of Greece about ideas of liberty and sound economics. GLM is translating, publishing and distributing FEE courses and articles.

Originally published at FEE.org on January 4, 2018.

Meet the Wealth-Creating Brothers Who Helped Build Modern Greece

Michael Iakovidis and Thomas Gazis

This chapter’s heroes are the Zosimades brothers of Greece, major players in both the Greek Enlightenment and the effort to free Greece from Ottoman rule in the 1820s. The authors are Michael Iakovidis, co-founder of FEE’s partner organization in Athens, Greek Liberties Monitor (GLM), and Thomas Gazis, the Projects & Operations Manager for GLM. Michael also wrote a few weeks ago about another Greek hero for this series, Archbishop Damaskinos.

—Lawrence W. Reed

On one of the first official flags of the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829), the message prominently displayed in bold letters was simple: Liberty or Death. It became the clarion call of the successful revolution against rule by the Ottoman Turks.

That message is still in use today on Greece’s national flag, in the form of its nine stripes (for the nine syllables of the motto): Five blue stripes represent the syllables of the word “Eleftheria,” meaning “Liberty,” one white stripe stands for the Greek word for “or” and four white stripes refer to “Thanatos,” meaning “Death.”

The roots of liberty, however, predated the revolution. Even more noteworthy is this fact: It was men of enterprise and business who were in the forefront, using the power of international trade to water the roots of freedom in Greece.

The Zosimades Brothers

The Ottoman Empire was known for its huge bureaucracy and onerous taxes. Positioned astride the major Mediterranean trade routes of the time, Greeks who wished to be merchants faced two options. They could either operate within the confines of the Empire, paying the Sultan’s taxes and risking the capricious whims of the regional pashas (Turkish officials), or trust their instincts as merchants and entrepreneurs, and relocate to freer pastures. They chose freedom and flourished.

One of the most renowned examples is that of the Zosimades brothers, all born between 1752 and 1766. They and their family members harnessed the power of enterprise for the good of their country and their fellow citizens. The story starts with the father, Panagiotis.

His origins were in the Ioannina region of northwestern Greece. From a family of merchants, Panagiotis was himself a successful businessman. His marriage to Margarita Tsoukalas produced nine children—three daughters and six sons. As was common custom at the time, Panagiotis personally mentored his sons in moral principles in the hope that they would follow in his footsteps in honorable business.

Reflecting the spirit of enterprise imbued by their father, the six brothers—Ioannis, Anastasios, Theodosios, Nicholas, Zois, and Michail—chafed at the limitations imposed by Turkish authorities. So Theodosios, Nicholas, and Michail moved to Livorno, Italy. The other three brothers, Ioannis, Anastasios, and Zois, moved to Nizhny, Russia, which, at the time, was a well-known trade center for European and Asian products.

Two of the brothers died young, Ioannis Zosimas in 1771 at age 19 and Theodosios in 1796 at 33. The other four, who had become hugely successful and wealthy by the late 1790s, became much closer thereafter, partly to fulfill the desire of Theodosios that the family become benefactors to Greece. Anastasios, Nicholas, Zois, and Michail devoted themselves thereafter to “the light and consolation of the homeland.”

Contributing to the Greek Enlightenment

The brothers bestowed much of their fortunes on northwestern Greece for educational purposes, including the construction and maintenance of libraries and schools, the creation of orphanages, and the distribution of books. It is impossible to discuss the “Greek Enlightenment” in the half-century before independence in 1829 without noting the indispensable contributions of the Zosimades brothers.

The brothers’ success in business, the strong familial bond between them, and a commitment to their homeland and its freedom came together for the betterment of their countrymen in many ways. Their example inspired others to enter the world of business and create wealth even in the face of oppression. They gave hugely to charities that eased the pain of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the handicapped. As generous benefactors to the arts and to the appreciation of literature and history, they accelerated the flowering of the Greek Enlightenment.

While living in Russia, Anastasios and Zois were prominent among the so-called “Brotherhood of the Greeks,” known as the Magistrato. Because the Russians respected the business acumen of the Greeks, they made Nizhny an economic freedom zone, which gave the brothers considerably more freedom to engage in commerce than they would have ever had in occupied Greece. But though this allowed them to become wealthy, they chose to live modestly and, as historian Goudas writes, “to use their wealth to illuminate and set it (Greece) free.”

The brothers (Zois, especially) invested in precious antiquities with the ultimate purpose of offering them to their homeland when it could be liberated. Their massive collection of ancient coins and archaeological treasures—which they ultimately donated to the country—would play a catalytic role in stimulating a sense of Greek identity and the desire for independence from the Ottoman Empire. So did their impressive gifts of rare Greek texts, which helped Greeks rediscover in the 19th Century the rich literary contributions of their ancestors from centuries earlier. They spurred Greek fervor for independence by joining the Philiki Etaireia, a secret society of friends of liberty whose purpose was to overthrow Ottoman rule.

The Power of Wealth Creation

By the time Greek independence was achieved in 1829, all the brothers had died except for Nicholas, who lived until 1842. He carried on the family’s philanthropic tradition until his final days, founding schools, retirement homes, and other important social institutions that educated the young and cared for the poor and sick. Though these acts of philanthropy were significant—some would even say indispensable to getting a newly-free Greece off the ground—one must remember that none of the family’s gifts could ever have been given if the brothers hadn’t mastered the art of wealth creation in the first place.

When Nicholas, the last of the Zosimades brothers, died in 1842, Greece’s King Othon declared three days of national mourning. The King paid tribute to the brothers and their enormous contributions to the economic, social, and political transformation of Greece from an oppressed province of Turkey to a new, free, and hopeful nation that respected private commerce, business success, and charitable giving.

Enterprise and trade helped give birth to the modern Greek nation. The Zosimades brothers personified that historical fact as well as any. Today, however, Greece suffers from many of the same problems that motivated those six brothers to leave, create wealth elsewhere, then use their riches to help liberate the country. We desperately need more men and women just like the Zosimades brothers!

Michael Iakovidis is co-founder of the Athens-based organization, Greek Liberties Monitor which works to educate the citizens of Greece about ideas of liberty and sound economics. GLM is translating, publishing and distributing FEE courses and articles.

Thomas Gazis is Project & Operations Manager of the Athens-based organization, Greek Liberties Monitor which works to educate the citizens of Greece about ideas of liberty and sound economics. GLM is translating, publishing and distributing FEE courses and articles.

Originally published at FEE.org on March 22, 2018.

This Italian Catholic Priest Was a Great Scholar of Liberty

Alberto Mingardi

This chapter’s hero is a remarkable 19th-Century Italian priest, Antonio Rosmini. The author is Alberto Mingardi (a good friend with whom I had dinner in Milan, Italy just last week), director general of the Bruno Leoni Institute in Milan.

—Lawrence W. Reed

Over the past several decades, FEE has introduced the liberty-loving public to many great thinkers of the past who otherwise would have fallen into oblivion. Frédéric Bastiat, whose masterpiece The Law was rescued by Dean Russell’s translation in 1950 and has since become almost required reading among American libertarians and conservatives, is just the first example that comes to mind. One great classical-liberal thinker who today is nearly forgotten, even in his own country, Italy, is Antonio Rosmini.

A man endowed with magnificent talents—Catholic priest, founder of orders, theologian, and scholar—Rosmini left behind an enormous body of scholarship and writings. The still-incomplete critical edition of his works will comprise more than 100 books. His contributions covered a wide variety of subjects, ranging from religion and metaphysics to anthropology and economics. In this vast landscape of intellectual achievement, political philosophy and economics occupy but a small lot, but Rosmini’s contributions in these fields are noteworthy and often illuminating. He held the defense of property as his central concern for the building of a just political order.

In a footnote in the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty, F.A. Hayek noted that Rosmini’s The Constitution Under Social Justice made “more generally known” the term social justice “in its modern sense.” But Rosmini’s understanding of these words was quite different from the one widely accepted today. He was perhaps the staunchest defender of private property in 19th-century Italy.

A Brief Overview

Rosmini was born March 24, 1797, into one of the richest and noblest families in the city of Rovereto. Having learned to read at home, mainly from the Bible, the young Antonio began school at the age of 7, completing the normal course, and simultaneously educating himself as a polymath in his uncle’s library. The young man’s higher studies were completed in theology at the University of Padua (a notable center of Aristotelian philosophy). He graduated in 1823.

Even at this early stage of his life, Rosmini was remarkable not only for his studiousness but also for his spiritual intensity. But if he enjoyed a restless life of meditation, studies, and priestly duties, he did refuse to be engaged in the daily affairs of his time.

His political philosophy developed and assumed precise form between the 1820s and the 1840s. Rosmini began his lifelong journey in political thinking as a critic of the French Revolution: as a Catholic, he understood its limits and dangers and was strongly influenced by the writings of restorationist thinkers such as François René de Chateaubriand, Luis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, and especially Karl Ludwig Haller.

It was perhaps because of the 1821 uprisings in Italy that Rosmini started working on a major work on politics in 1822—his Politica prima. Though it consumed much of his time during 1822–1826, it was never published in his lifetime. But it served as a preparatory work for other more ambitious writing in the same field. In particular, by 1839 Rosmini completed his Political Philosophy and by 1845 his immense masterpiece Philosophy of Law and Theodicy. These works, with the subsequent The Constitution Under Social Justice (1848), a blueprint for a liberal constitution for the yet-divided Italy, form the consistent body of his political thought.

In 1848, Rosmini joined Pius IX in Rome, where the pope initially welcomed him and (after the assassination of Pellegrino Rossi) made him a cardinal and prime minister of the Papal States. However, as soon as the Roman Republic was established and the pope was forced to flee to Gaeta, this relationship apparently broke down. Rosmini’s Delle cinque piaghe della santa Chiesa, where he preaches renovation within the borders of the Church, and La Costituzione secondo la giustizia sociale were listed in the Index of Forbidden Books. This caused him immense pain.

Dismissed by the pope, Rosmini returned to his house in Stresa (on Lago Maggiore) where he peacefully spent the rest of his life. But the polemics on his writings did not end with his death in 1855. The Jesuits were particularly fierce in attacking his work. In 1887, the Sant’Uffizio (Holy Office—known now as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) promulgated a decree, Post Obitum, which stated that 40 propositions extracted from Rosmini’s works had not “conformed to the Catholic truth.”

This condemnation lasted until the pontificate of Karol Wojtyla. John Paul II opened the cause of beatification of Rosmini, and in his encyclical Fides et Ratio mentioned him among “significant examples of a process of philosophical inquiry that was enriched by engaging the data of faith.” Finally, on July 1, 2001, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in a Nota signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) and then-Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, repealed the Post Obitum. Ever since, Rosmini’s works have attracted growing interest in Catholic circles.

Thinking Matured Early

Rosmini’s thought on political and social issues, such as individual rights, property, the meaning of the French Revolution, and social justice, matured at an early stage of his life. Son of a loyal servant of the Habsburg Empire, the young Antonio distinctively absorbed and developed a lasting distrust of the ideals and means of the French Jacobins. Commentators argued that Rosmini was very much in tune with the wave of anti-revolution thinkers in his first years’ meditating on political questions, turning to classical liberalism later on.

However, the concern for private property stands as a landmark in the development of his thinking. In his eulogy for Pius VII, which embodied the essence of his political thought, Rosmini dealt, to a certain extent, with the question of property rights, making their protection the difference between “a system based upon justice” and one grounded on “universal utility.”

The first (justice) is the tradition of thought endorsed by Pius VII:

It decrees: Consecrate property! Everybody’s own must be untouchable, not because of the power he may or may not retain but because of his own dignity: This is the only possible equality among men. Do not let charity, nor its name, be associated with crimes: It must not infringe those seals posed by God on everyone’s property.

Rosmini openly criticized redistributive policies, which limit and seize private property in the name of compulsory benevolence.

The second system (universal utility), which was propagated by the Napoleonic armies all over Europe, was instead “not generated by the experience of centuries, not by the course of human things, nor by the study of the eternal truth; it is rather the product of the fancies of those who nowadays call themselves philosophers.” The output of such a system is the attempt to “sacrifice any property to an illusion of public good.”

In essays composed between 1822 and 1825, Rosmini dug deeper into the question of property, ending up enunciating two principles of justice that would be the mainstay of his political thought for the rest of his life: “Everyone’s property must be so sacred as to not be violated for any reason” and “Original appropriation has to be considered a legitimate entitlement of ownership, as long as the appropriated thing was not yet someone else’s property.”

In the same work, Rosmini closely linked the defense of property with the problem of guaranteeing everyone’s right to life. When all property is safe, life will never be in danger. The scope of society is thus the protection of property because once property rights are guaranteed, everything follows, and personal security comes as a consequence of the defense of the rights of ownership.

However, Rosmini’s system was to find its final formulation later on. Between 1837 and 1844, he published the two volumes of his Political Philosophy (“The Summary Cause for the Stability or Downfall of Human Societies” and “Society and Its Purpose”), followed by his magnum opus, Philosophy of Law.

Perfectism and Socialism

Political Philosophy is clearly indebted to the studies of anthropology and moral science that Rosmini conducted in those very years. His anthropological realism applied to the facts of politics brought Rosmini to reject boldly any ideological “idealization” of social affairs, which he saw as inherent in some of the leading doctrines of his time. Rosmini characterized “perfectism” as a

system that believes perfection to be possible in human things, and which sacrifices today’s goods to an imaginary future perfection. . . . [I]t consists of arrogant prejudice, for which human nature is judged too favorably.

Judging political options from “pure hypothesis,” the risk is to elaborate theories that do not rest on a proper consideration of the “natural limits of things.” Rosmini’s target is represented mainly by the utopianism of socialists, who dream of a property-less society. Human society without property, however, is impossible because the “law of property” confronts men “with the mere alternative, either to accept it, or to eat themselves one each other.” The absence of property will produce misery and need, which, in turn, will provoke crime and widespread aggression, which is the contrary of society itself. Ideology, for Rosmini, can “blind” men to the extent of not recognizing the importance of this institution.

This realistic vision of human beings and human societies is at the core of Rosmini’s feelings toward the state: “Government is made of persons who, being men, are fallible.” Today’s readers will find his polemics against perfectism similar to Hayek’s against central planning; like Hayek, Rosmini emphasized that legislators cannot be presumed omniscient, and he also put the responsibility for making meaningful decisions in the hands of individuals.

Indeed, in the essay “On Communism and Socialism,” written in 1847 after Pius IX’s encyclical Qui Pluribus, Rosmini called utopians “false sages” and vindicated individualism by saying that “a man is not a machine,” meaning that he is not as mechanically predictable as prophets of planning would like him to be. These “monstrous utopias,” he wrote, are “the grave of liberalism and of any desirable progress”: communism and socialism, “far from growing the liberty of men and society, provide for them the most unheard and absolute slavery, oppressing them under the heaviest, most despotic, most picky, immoral and impious of all governments.”

It is in Philosophy of Law that Rosmini explained in full detail his account of natural law. For him, the fundamental goal to be achieved is the protection of the human person—“the first seat of freedom.” In his system, “juridical freedom means nothing but the power that the person-proprietor has over his own thing, with which he can morally do what he pleases.”

Boundaries for each individual’s legal actions are to be found in the equal guarantee of everybody else’s freedom. Instead of formulating a “law of equal freedom,” which he found problematic insofar as this mutual respect of individual rights was not rooted in reality, Rosmini resorted to property as a measure of freedom. For him,

property constitutes a sphere around the person in which the person is the center. No one else can enter this sphere, and no one can separate from the person that which is inherent in him as a result of the connection between him and what is his own. This kind of separation would cause suffering to the person. But suffering (considered in itself), when imposed upon a person, is forbidden as evil by the moral law.

According to Rosmini, the “concept of freedom does not exist if completely deprived of property.”

This argument was not tempered by the existence of social inequalities. Property is a projection of the profound individuality of the individual, a “social representation” of him. “Conceiving equality in properties is like conceiving the inconceivable existence of identical individuals, that is, of non-individual individuals,” Rosmini wrote. Respecting property is thus respecting the other as a human person: “properties have to be reciprocally respected because the thing of the other is the other [himself].”

A Constitution Under Social Justice

In his exercise in applied constitutionalism, the 1848 Constitution Under Social Justice, Rosmini held dear all these principles. As a critic of the French Revolution, however, he could not concur with those who wanted to establish a liberal society in Italy by following the way opened by the French in 1789.

In particular, he identified a major problem: the balance between democracy and freedom. The constitutions written under French influence all tended to “promote in all citizens an inordinate ambition to conquer an always higher grade in public society,” “open the door to corruption,” and “not guarantee enough and in the fullest extent the freedom of citizens.” To correct these inner defects, Rosmini proposed two devices: “the institution of the tribunal of political justice” and “the franchise proportioned to the direct tax a citizen pays to the state.”

The tribunal of political justice was, in Rosmini’s view, a device by which a jury (elected by every citizen) would have the opportunity to settle infringements of individual rights. This institution originated from Rosmini’s profound conviction that

all rights cannot be represented through a majority vote. A majority, by its nature, represents only the greater part of the voters, not all. The nature of law, however, is such that it must be fully respected in all members individually, not simply in the majority: Ninety-nine against one would be no more just than one against ninety-nine. Respect for a right does not depend on the number of persons who possess it or defend it, but rather, requires equal respect in any subject whomsoever.

The political tribunal was to be an institution regarded as the guardian of everyone’s rights, in spite of the fact that majorities come and go. It was conceived as an instrument to scrutinize positive laws—a custos of people’s rights vis-à-vis the government.

The idea of franchise proportioned to the amount of taxes paid, and thus to the property owned by each member of a society, was prompted by similar considerations. Having carefully observed the march toward despotism of those states conceived in a way consistent with the ideals of the French Revolution, Rosmini argued that an unqualified franchise “violates the right of property,” “rapes the property itself,” and “opens the door to corn laws and communism.”

Hence, Rosmini designed a system in which owners of large estates would elect the first chamber, owners of small estates would elect the second, the franchise would be proportioned to the income tax paid, and nonproperty holders would not have any right to vote. A constitution, according to Rosmini, has to state the juridical equality between citizens, but never a substantial equality to be achieved via redistribution, which “would destroy any justice.”

Rosmini’s point here is that an unqualified franchise opens the door to redistribution, putting property at the mercy of an elected majority.

Socialism and communism are but the logical consequence of universal franchise in the election of the deputies. If this electoral universal right to vote is just, then we must say that it is just that he who does not have anything puts his hand in the pocket of one who possesses something and steals what he wants.

It should be observed that Rosmini’s foundation of franchise on property served also the purpose of legitimizing taxation itself. “Taxation” and “representation” should be married, because those who are harmed by taxation have to be at the same time those who can decide the size and the scope of taxation—that is, to what extent they are to be harmed. If those who pay taxes do not directly consent to that payment, “how can we say that a given nation is free?” This is the reason he maintained that the progressiveness of taxation was nothing but a form of “masked theft.”

A thinker of great clarity, though not endowed with a clear writing style, Rosmini belongs to the pantheon of the great classical liberals of the 19th century. An admirer of Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and Jean Baptiste Say, this Catholic priest understood better than many liberals the most important problem that endangers the survival of liberty in modern societies: the uneasy marriage between property and democracy.

Alberto Mingardi is Director General of Istituto Bruno Leoni, Italy’s free-market think tank.

Originally published at FEE.org on April 19, 2018.

My Father’s Role in the Fall of Fascism: The True Story behind the 2017 Bestseller ‘Beneath a Scarlet Sky’

Michael Lella

This chapter’s hero is a man I was privileged to meet in person on Lake Maggiore in Italy on April 12, 2018. His name is Pino Lella. He’s 92 today. At age 17 in 1943, he began a two-year war-time experience that is the subject of a recent and riveting Amazon bestseller, Beneath a Scarlet Sky, by Mark T. Sullivan.

I read the book in December 2017 and then posted about it on my Facebook page. A friend from Montana, Ann Koopman, commented, “The author lives right here in Bozeman!” I contacted Mr. Sullivan and asked if he might arrange for a friend, Kendra Shrode from Michigan, and me to meet Mr. Lella during an April vacation in northern Italy. He put me in touch with Mr. Lella’s son Michael, who lives in California. Michael and his wife Norma and I became good friends when I visited them in late March. Michael arranged for Kendra and me (and another friend, Luigi Manzione from Rome) to meet Pino on April 12, and he is the author of this very moving essay about his father Pino.

—Lawrence W. Reed

A son’s account of his father’s role in Amazon’s #1 Best Seller, Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan.

If you were 17 and growing up in Milan, Italy, in 1943, more than likely you would have been forced, indoctrinated, and brainwashed into Fascism. The dictator of Italy responsible for it, Benito Mussolini, had been in power since 1922.

My dad, the protagonist of author Mark Sullivan’s 2017 Amazon bestseller, Beneath a Scarlet Sky, was born in 1926. The voice and image of “Il Duce” (as Italians were obliged to call Mussolini) were ubiquitous in Italy at the time. Mussolini would ultimately drag the country into the Second World War on the side of Germany’s Adolf Hitler. My father is now 92 and lives an hour north of Milan, and his name is Pino Lella. His last two years as a teenager are inseparable from the war and the fall of Fascism.

A Young Man from Milan

If you had to pick a time to be a teenager in Milan, 1943 would have been the worst of choices. In June, as my dad was nearing his 17th birthday, the British began an intensive six-month bombing campaign. It left a third of the city’s population homeless (about 400,000). My father and his younger brother (my Uncle Mimmo) narrowly escaped death one night following the bombing of a movie theater. They were there to see You Were Never Lovelier with Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth and witnessed many casualties.

My grandfather Michele, in an effort to keep his boys from becoming victims of the continued bombing, sent my father and uncle to a Catholic Boys School. They were familiar with it because it was there that they had learned to ski and to love the mountains as children. The school was located high in the Alps, above Lake Como, not far from the Swiss border. It was called “Casa Alpina” and was run by a courageous priest by the name of Father Luigi Re (pronounced “Ray”). Being the oldest of the boys, my dad was singled out by Father Re and trained to become an Alpine guide.

At first, my father knew nothing of the brutality of the Nazis against Jews and others. In fact, he had learned to respect the Nazi High Command, many of whom were customers of his family’s leather goods store. They had occupied Milan as “brothers-in-arms” to defend Milan from the British bombing. But my dad became brutally aware of Nazi crimes in September of 1943 when word came of 52 prominent Jews being rounded up by the Nazis and executed in the village of Meina on Lake Maggiore. Their bodies were thrown into the lake for the local citizens to see.

Smuggling Refugees Through the Alps

It was then that many Italians rebelled and began hiding and protecting their Jewish-Italian friends. They formed an “Underground Railroad,” a network of escape routes similar to the one that was developed to save American slaves before and during America’s Civil War. One of the network’s routes went through Casa Alpina, where the Lella brothers were sent to wait out the bombing of Milan.

For nine harrowing months while at Casa Alpina, from the fall of 1943 through June of 1944, the month of his 18th birthday, my father guided many Jewish refugees across the Alps into neutral Switzerland to escape Italy. He risked his life evading Nazi patrols, surviving avalanches and grenade attacks. He was robbed by bandits disguising themselves as anti-fascist partisans. He often carried the weak and elderly on his back in the dead of winter over the top of the Alps, some of the world’s most rugged mountain terrain. Some had embarked on the journey with my father Pino in such a hurry they wore street shoes—not exactly hiking gear for the Alps in below-zero temperatures.

At the time, my dad simply did “what he was told to do” and thought little of it. Father Re instructed him to take people to safety and so he did it. He knew it was dangerous, of course, but even to this day, he doesn’t think of what he did as “heroic.” He had faith in doing “the right thing” and such high regard for Father Re that he would have done anything for him. But the missions gave him an identity, a meaningful purpose, and an opportunity to lead. And like many 17-year-olds, with reckless abandon, he thrived on the excitement and adventure of it all while it lasted.

In June of 1944, my father turned 18, the age at which young Italians were drafted by the state into the military. He had two choices. He could join Mussolini’s Fascist army and quite likely end up on the Russian Front. His other option was to conscript with the German Army. His aunt and uncle had connections that might land him a secure and hopefully safer job in the “Organization Todt,” the armament and construction division of the Third Reich. For his safety, but against his wishes, Pino’s father and mother (my grandparents) talked him into enlisting in the German Army. Pino reluctantly donned the military uniform with the Nazi swastika and was ordered to the Todt Boot Camp in Modena.

What happened next was almost unbelievable.

“The Observer”

Through a series of extraordinary circumstances, including his wounding during an Allied bombing raid, my father was ordered back to Milan to convalesce for two weeks. Then, with a little help from family and the abilities to speak French and drive a car, he landed a position as the personal driver and confidant for one of Hitler’s most mysterious officers in the German High Command. He was a man so powerful in Italy that he responded directly, personally, and only to Adolf Hitler. His name was General Hans Leyers, the Plenipotentiary of the Italian Sector for Organization Todt.

To Pino’s aunt and uncle, his assignment as the driver for such a powerful figure was a serendipitous opportunity of a lifetime. It could help change the direction of the War. They understood the importance of it because they were already working in secret for the Allies and the Italian Resistance. The kind of information their nephew now would have access to could be critical for the fight against the Germans. My father, still a teenager, as the new, personal driver for a top Nazi commander, became a spy known to the Allies as “The Observer.”

For the last year of the War, while driving General Leyers around northern Italy, my dad learned the locations of tank traps, land mines, ammunition tunnels, and every fortification between Florence and Milan. He observed the building of the Gothic Line, the Germans’ main defensive positions. He secretly documented troop movements. He took notes and photos. And he fed mounds of that crucial information to the Allies by using his uncle’s shortwave radio.

More than once, Pino was nearly caught, which would likely have led to his torture and execution. But he kept the trust of an unwitting General Leyers. My dad personally witnessed the Nazi persecution of Jews as well as the working to death of slaves from many faiths and nationalities in work camps, hoping and dreaming that one day he could testify against those responsible.

From Observation to Action

At midnight on April 24th, 1945, upon orders from the Resistance, my father single-handedly arrested General Hans Leyers and delivered him to the American Command, led by 5th U.S. Army Major Frank Knebel. For the next five days, he became Major Knebel’s personal guide and translator, at last discarding his uniform and the Nazi swastika.

On April 28th, Pino and Major Knebel witnessed a hideous moment in Italian history: the public desecration of Mussolini’s body in Piazzale Loreto amid the hysteria and fanaticism of frenzied Italian mobs. Hitler killed himself in Berlin two days later. With the deaths of the two fascist dictators, my dad thought he was done with the war. But in fact, the war wasn’t quite done with him.

In early May, the famous Brenner Pass through the Alps was the most dangerous corner of Europe. The German Army was retreating from Italy through the Pass into Austria. Thousands of Nazi troops who refused to surrender were on-the-run, being chased down and cut off by Italian Resistance fighters and the U.S. Army. In the midst of this, my father was asked if he would “do America a favor” and accept a final mission.

The Americans asked my dad to be a guide one last time, leading one final escape from Italy. His mission was to drive an important, high-ranking Nazi from American custody to the Austrian border where he could be safely interrogated for the intelligence he possessed about Hitler’s Reich.

Who was this top commander my dad was enlisted to escort to safety? None other than the very man he had driven for, the very man he had arrested and turned over to the Allies just weeks before—General Hans Leyers.

Distraught and tormented over the events of the last week of the War, Pino accepted that final mission. You can only imagine the conversation in the car between my dad and General Leyers. By evening of that same day, May 3, my dad delivered General Leyers to the Americans waiting for him on the Austrian border.

That final escort ended my father’s involvement in World War II, but like many of that “Greatest Generation,” the experience and the weeks preceding the War’s end continued to haunt him for the rest of his life.

And without spoiling it, let me say that you’ll have to read the book (Beneath a Scarlet Sky) to know the rest of the story. A television mini-series based on the book, starring British actor Tom (“Spiderman”) Holland as my dad, will premiere in a year or two, and I hope you will want to see it. I know that my dad, and all of us in the Lella family, are looking forward to it!

(Editor’s Note: The picture at the top of this chapter, of Pino Lella and his son Michael, includes a Spiderman mask next to copies of Beneath a Scarlet Sky. Just one week before my April 12, 2018, visit with Pino on Lake Maggiore (pictured below), British actor Tom Holland, the most recent Spiderman in two major motion pictures, visited with Pino to meet the man whom he will play in a forthcoming television mini-series based on the book. Filming begins soon.—LWR).

Michael Lella, Pino’s son, is retired from many years of working in the California correctional system.

Originally published at FEE.org on May 3, 2018.

Meet the Italian Scholar Who Influenced Hayek and Became a Founding Father of the Libertarian Movement

Alberto Mingardi

This chapter’s hero is the Italian classical liberal scholar Bruno Leoni, for whom the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Milan, Italy, is named. The author is the founder and director general of the institute, Alberto Mingardi.

—Lawrence W. Reed

Bruno Leoni was that rare thing: an Italian scholar who can be considered a founding father of the modern libertarian movement. This is largely because of Freedom and the Law, a 1961 book that had a considerable impact on the thinking of Nobel laureate and Austrian economist F.A. Hayek and on the development of the “law and economics” movement.

In contrast to most of Leoni’s works, Freedom and the Law had the good fortune to be written in English. It was immediately translated into Spanish and is now available in half a dozen languages (Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, German, French, Czech, Polish, and Georgian). In Leoni’s mother tongue, Italian, it was only published in 1995, thanks to the intellectual entrepreneurship of Professor Raimondo Cubeddu and to maverick publisher Aldo Canovari, “Liberilibri” (Freebooks), who has since published the likes of Frederic Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, Michael Novak, David Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard.

Early Life, Education, and the War

Bruno Leoni was born in 1913. He spent his youth and, indeed, most of his life in the northern Italian city of Turin. He studied law under Gioele Solari, the foremost legal philosopher of his generation and a mentor to many brilliant scholars. It was in these years that he first acquired a taste for classical liberalism. Among his teachers, there was the great Luigi Einaudi, the economist who, after WWII, was to be the country’s first Republican President. A scholar and a relentless publicist, Einaudi was for sixty years the voice of limited government in Italy.

Leoni was a young man when the star of Benito Mussolini was at its zenith. Fascism clearly influenced his understanding of liberty. Mussolini took power in 1922, twisting the young Italian democracy into an increasingly authoritarian regime. But during Mussolini’s entire time in power, the Italian Constitution remained the same as it was in 1848, enacted in the Kingdom of Savoy under the auspices of the liberals (in the classical, European sense). For seventy years, that Constitution allowed for a liberal—if not fully democratic—regime. (Constitutions, the rules upon which classical liberal hopes rested, can indeed be compatible with the very arbitrary rule they are designed to avoid).

Thanks to the work of Professor Teresa Serra, who has carefully studied Leoni’s early works, we now know that in the second half of the 1930s, he was already entertaining thoughts that foreshadowed his later, flamboyant individualism. But back then, Leoni wasn’t acquainted with the Austrian School of economics (of Menger, Mises, Hayek, etc.), the major influence on the subsequent development of his thought.

On July 25, 1943, Mussolini was deposed by a plot of the Fascist party leadership and the supporters of the monarchy in a desperate attempt to withdraw from the war and avoid an impending catastrophe. On September 8, the caretaker government led by Marshall Badoglio announced an armistice: Italy was de facto broken into two parts: the South, which was loyal to the monarchy, and the North, which was occupied by the Germans. Soon, the country was beset by civil war, with Mussolini playing the last act of his political life as the head of a puppet government on Lake Garda in the North.

In that same year, Bruno Leoni made a momentous choice which changed his life. Up until 1943, Leoni was an artillery officer who served in the Italian-occupied Balkans. But in those difficult days after September 8, he crossed the lines and placed himself at the service of the Allies. He reached out to the British and helped them in rescuing prisoners-of-war behind enemy lines.

He pledged his allegiance to the Anglo-Saxon world, fighting for a certain vision of individual liberty as well as for national liberation.

Tommaso Piffer, a brilliant historian of the Italian resistance movement, is currently working on a paper about Leoni’s considerable achievements on behalf of the Allies. Thanks to Dr. Piffer, now we know that Leoni operated over the entirety of the German-occupied Italian territory, contributing brilliantly to many hazardous rescue operations. On March 30, he was caught by the Germans. Luckily, the liberation of Northern Italy happened on April 25, and he was left behind in the Nazi retreat.

Leoni practiced his English as he sent dispatches, working to make himself understood by his new comrades. English soon became very important to him. It became sort of the language of liberty, as it allowed him to master the literature of classical liberalism and take part in the international classical liberal conversation after the war.

A famous comic strip by Giovannino Guareschi (the author of the worldwide bestseller “Don Camillo”) pictured millions of Italians becoming “anti-fascists” overnight and claiming impeccable credentials as opposers of the regime after having served it silently. In post-war Italy, anybody who fought in the resistance wrote or spoke endlessly on the subject. Leoni was parsimonious of words on the subject, probably because he actually did fight in the field. He preferred to consider that chapter of his life closed and worked hard for reconstruction.

Life as an Educator and Author

In the 1950s, Leoni became dean of the Department of Political Science of the University of Pavia. He lectured on Political Philosophy (then called, with a label that smelled of fascism, “Doctrine of the State”) and the History of Political Thought. He kept himself current on new developments in his field as he built friendships and alliances all around the Western world.

But he was an institution-builder, too. He founded the journal Il Politico, still a point of reference for political scientists in Italy. If you look at the table of contents of the issues of Il Politico under Leoni’s editorship, you’ll quickly recognize a veritable hall of fame of classical liberalism: contributors included D.H. Robertson, F.A. Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, Gordon Tullock, Helmut Schoeck, and Jim Buchanan.

For Il Politico, Leoni wrote a continuous stream of book reviews. One is easily astonished by what he read and reviewed: history, philosophy, current affairs—particularly on events behind the Iron Curtain—and even works on art and tourism and dictionaries, too. He was a curious man and a committed learner.

The Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Hayek in 1948, allowed Leoni to befriend scholars he immensely admired (Hayek and Mises, in particular) and to partake in contemporary debates. He was to be Secretary and, briefly, President of the Society in the very year he died.

Simultaneously with his scholarship, he ran a successful legal practice and wrote extensively for newspapers. It is surprising that this busy a man found time to fall in love and eventually marry his lovely wife Silvana, who passed away just last year (in 2017) fifty years after him. She was a dashing beauty he met on a business trip to Piacenza. They settled in a beautiful villa in Turin, where Leoni, a veritable renaissance man, had personally designed (or at least substantially inspired) some of the rooms.

Leoni died young, at only 54, in 1967, murdered by a tenant. A man who survived many acts of bravery during the war ended up a victim of human evil of the most banal kind. Leoni was a dynamo who, had he lived longer, may have become a point of reference for the liberty movement, rejuvenating it in his native country. Italian classical liberalism never recovered.

Leoni’s Legacy

When he died in 1967, Leoni’s ideas were quickly forgotten in Italy. Soon, one-third of the voters were freely choosing the Communist Party at the ballot. It was a season of intense political fights culminating in the terrorism of the 70s and 80s. The country didn’t have a taste for economic rationality. Nonetheless, Leoni’s major contributions possess a relevance that surpasses national boundaries today.

Thinkers in the classical liberal tradition have long argued that law could be considered a “spontaneous order,” but they were a bit vague on the subject. Norms could be understood as evolving naturally over time. Indeed, the best legislation could be traced back to conventions that preceded explicit agreement and the gathering of assemblies. This way of reasoning, however, seemed to place the “spontaneous” origin of norms at the dawn of times. The higgling of the market could produce positive, unintended consequences, like the emergence of standards. Law from government bodies, however, seemed all-powerful and remote: an artifact of legislatures, something that government should enforce, above and before “petty” market transactions.

Leoni advanced two great research projects, although he couldn’t bring either to completion, given its untimely death. They were of the highest importance, particularly given the historical context in which they were developed. After WWII, a few thinkers attempted to rediscover the origins of law as the safeguard of human liberty against arbitrary government. They reopened the venerable book of reflections over the best constitutional arrangements.

But Leoni knew the experience of Italy, where Mussolini established a dictatorship without formally amending or repealing a liberal constitution. For this reason, Leoni was not persuaded that the old-style constitutionalism could be good grounds to secure individual liberty. He was equally unimpressed with the newly-minted republican Constitution that, promulgated in 1948, was essentially conceived as a fungible document, that could be good either for a liberal or a then-called “popular” (populist) democracy.

His reflections on “freedom and the law” offer a broader view.

First, he established a link between legislation and economic interventionism, and, by contrast, between the common law system and market interactions. Planning and regulation were not “economic” phenomena: they needed statutes, laws, rules to be approved and enforced by states. Such rules may fit the requisite of being “general,” aiming homogeneously at all kind of situations (think, for example, of price controls over rents), and yet they jeopardize economic activity, even if they are “general” and uniformly applicable.

Leoni deeply admired Hayek, but he thought Hayek was wrong when, in his Cairo lectures (that formed the core of The Constitution of Liberty), he argued for the rule of law as being the product of general norms.

For Leoni, the rule of law offered legal certainty, but that wasn’t necessarily the result of uniformly applicable laws, or even of “written” laws.

He distinguished between short-term and long-term legal certainty. The first is secured by the fact that norms are written and accessible. “But the legislative process is not something that happens once and for all. It takes place every day and is continually going on,” he wrote.

Long-term legal certainty goes back, according to Leoni, to the Romans, who had “a concept of the certainty of the law that could be described as meaning that the law was never to be subjected to sudden and unpredictable changes.”

This was what Leoni found in the British common law, that he understood as law discovered by judges. The complex fabric of precedents was in sharp contrast with the possibility for legislators to change law by fiat. In a system in which “if you can do harm, I can sue you,” judge-discovered law may better fit the concrete needs of individuals, and act far less as a brake on innovation.

On top of that, the judicial process by which judges venture to discover what’s harmful and what’s not is a “discovery procedure” far more similar to the market process than decrees issued by a Parliament.

We don’t know how Leoni would have reacted to contemporary judicial activism nor to the growth of the administrative state where regulation-making becomes a specialized activity of unaccountable agencies. But he claimed that even ostensibly accountable bodies such as national assemblies were, in fact, politicizing the law and prone to subordinate it to very contingent needs.

His second great, and far less explored, contribution was his attempt to come to a general theory of the law. This goes by the overtly obscure name of “law as individual claim.”

In a 1964 essay, aptly reprinted as an appendix in the Liberty Fund edition of his book Freedom and the Law, Leoni argues that:

The legal process always traces back in the end to individual claim. Individuals make the law, insofar as they make successful claims. They not only make previsions and predictions, but try to have these predictions succeed by their own intervention in the process. Judges, juris-consults, and, above all, legislators are just individuals who find themselves in a particular position to influence the whole process through their own intervention.”

The essence of the law thus lies in human interactions, not in government holding the power of lawmaking. People do “make law” by mutually pretending “respect” for certain claims of theirs: their property, their autonomous sphere of action. This view, economist Todd Zywicki pointed out, makes for the idea that

the common law is a ‘spontaneous order’ similar to the market—there is sort of back and forth between individuals making individual claims, judges resolving those claims and improving the law to better meet individual demands, and that coming back in as an input into people’s decision-making, as well as an ongoing conversation among different judges.”

The last few years show a resurgence of Leoni’s scholarship. The Institute that bears his name, established in 2004, is now publishing, in eBook form, his collected works: a total of 11 volumes. Another anthology of his essays has been published in English, together with numerous translations of Freedom and the Law around the globe.

Leoni proved a lasting influence on scholars such as Randy Barnett, Richard Epstein, and Todd Zywicki. The late Henry Manne always recognized him as an inspiration for the burgeoning law and economics movement. He was, indeed, one of the first scholars who considered the economists’ toolkit relevant to understanding the law.

Leoni’s work was the object of careful monographs such as Antonio Masala’s and Carlo Lottieri’s, so far only available in Italian. But, outside the circle of specialists, Leoni’s name bounced back in blockbuster books as in Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital and Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.

Had Leoni lived longer, his legacy may have been even more conspicuous. But it is still impressive how many seeds he planted in his short, frenzied, brave life.

Alberto Mingardi is Director General of Istituto Bruno Leoni, Italy’s free-market think tank.

Originally published at FEE.org on May 17, 2018.

Turgot: The Man Who First Put Laissez-Faire Into Action

Jim Powell

The story of this chapter’s hero, originally published by FEE in August 1997, and is about the brilliant French economist and statesman of the 18th Century, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. The author is the Cato Institute’s Jim Powell.

—Lawrence W. Reed

By the mid-eighteenth century, a number of authors had expressed the liberating vision that came to be known as laissez-faire. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot put it into action.

As regional administrator and later comptroller-general of France, a nation which had succumbed to absolute monarchy, he took giant steps for liberty. He spoke out for religious toleration. He granted freedom of expression. He gave people freedom to pursue the work of their choice. He cut government spending. He opposed inflation and made a case for gold. He abolished some onerous taxes and trade restrictions. He abolished monopoly privileges. He abolished forced labor.

Turgot was respected by leading thinkers for liberty, including the Baron de Montesquieu, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Benjamin Franklin. Referring to Turgot, Adam Smith wrote that “I had the happiness of his acquaintance, and, I flattered myself, even of his friendship and esteem.” After meeting Turgot in 1760, Voltaire told a friend: “I have scarcely ever seen a man more lovable or better informed.” Jean Baptiste Say, who inspired so many French libertarians during the 19th century, declared, “There are hardly any works which can yield to the journalist and to the statesman an ampler harvest of facts and of instruction than may be found in the writings of Turgot.” Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, a French champion of laissez-faire and founder of the American industrial family, paid his friend Thomas Jefferson the supreme compliment by calling him the American Turgot.

Turgot displayed remarkable vision. For instance, he predicted the American Revolution in 1750, more than two decades before George Washington and Benjamin Franklin saw it coming. In 1778, Turgot warned Americans that slavery is incompatible with a good political constitution. He warned that Americans had more to fear from civil war than foreign enemies. He predicted that Americans are bound to become great, not by war but by culture. Turgot warned French King Louis XVI that unless taxes and government spending were cut, there would be a revolution which might cost him his head. Turgot warned about the dangers of fiat paper money, and when it was resorted to during the French Revolution, the result was ruinous runaway inflation and a military coup. Turgot showed how people could make the transition from absolutism to self-government.

Although few of Turgot’s writings were published in his lifetime, he was ablaze with ideas for liberty. Turgot was much too able a man to write anything insignificant, observed intellectual historian Joseph A. Schumpeter. Commenting on his most important work, a slim volume, Schumpeter noted that it “contains a theory of barter, price, and money that, so far as it goes, is almost faultless . . . comprehensive vision of all the essential facts and their interrelations plus excellence of formulation.”

Early Life

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot was born in Paris on May 10, 1727, the third and youngest son of Michel-Etienne Turgot and Madeleine Francoise Martineau. His father was a government official who helped build the Paris sewage system. An awkward child, Turgot didn’t seem to get along with his mother, who reportedly cherished fine manners above all. The family, which had Norman roots, lived comfortably.

Early on, Turgot acquired a love for learning. He attended the College du Plessis where he discovered the theories of English physicist Isaac Newton. It was traditional for the youngest son to become a priest, and accordingly, Turgot enrolled at the Saint-Sulpice Seminary, where he earned his bachelor of theology and became known as Abbé de Brucourt. He then enrolled at the Sorbonne.

A fellow student named Morellet remarked that “The remembrance of Turgot is sweet to all who have known him personally. Already his mind announced all the qualities it afterwards unfolded of sagacity, penetration, and profoundness. He had the simplicity of a child, yet it was compatible with a kind of dignity.” Despite a striking physical appearance, Turgot was shy around women. He never married.

Turgot learned English, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Latin. He translated into French works by Caesar, Homer, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Virgil, and other classical authors, as well as writings by 18th-century authors like Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and Alexander Pope. He translated David Hume’s essay “On the Jealousy of Trade.”

Turgot’s first writing on economics was an April 7, 1749, letter to his friend Abbé de Cice. He attacked the doctrines of the Scottish financier John Law, who moved to France and, in 1716, began promoting what became a disastrous inflation. Defending gold, Turgot wrote:

It is ridiculous to say that metallic money is only a sign of value, the credit of which is founded on the stamp of the king. This stamp is only to certify the weight and the title. Even in its relation to commodities the metal uncoined is of the same price as that coined, the marked value is simply a denomination. This is what Law seems to have been ignorant of in establishing his bank.

It is then as merchandise that coined money is (not the sign) but the common measure of other merchandise, and that not by an arbitrary convention, founded on the glamour of that metal, but because, being fit to be employed in different shapes as merchandise, and having on account of this property a saleable value, a little increased by the use made of it as money and being besides suitable of reduction to a given standard and of being equally divided, we always know the value of it. Gold obtains its price from its rarity.

While at the Sorbonne, in December 1750, Turgot wrote a Latin dissertation (“On the successive advances of the Human Mind”) which provided an early view of human progress.

Turgot hailed American optimism:

Let us turn our eyes away from those sad sights, let us cast them on the immense plains of the interior of America. . . . The soil, hitherto uncultivated, is made fruitful by industrious hands. Laws faithfully observed maintain henceforth tranquillity in these favoured regions. The ravages of war are there unknown. Equality has banished from them poverty and luxury, and preserves there, with liberty, virtue and simplicity of manners; our arts will spread themselves there without our vices. Happy peoples!

By this time, Turgot had second thoughts about entering the priesthood. He confided to his friend Du Pont de Nemours (1739–1817) that “it is impossible for me to give myself up, all my life, wearing a mask.” Turgot obtained his father’s permission to pursue a law career, and he left the Sorbonne.

With his obvious intelligence and learning, he met many of the leading thinkers of the day, including political philosopher Charles Louis de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu), philosopher Claude Adrien Helvetius, and mathematician Jean Le Rond D’Alembert. In January 1752, Turgot secured an appointment to a minor government post, deputy counselor of the procurator-general. The following year, he was appointed—presumably after having paid a consideration—to the royal parliament, which functioned as a court. There wasn’t any elected legislative assembly.

Early Work

Turgot’s first published work, Le Conciliateur, appeared in 1754. It was a pamphlet protesting plans to renew religious persecution. As a Catholic addressing Catholics, he wrote:

I know of how many wars heresies have been the source, but is not this because we have persisted in persecuting them? The man who believes earnestly believes with still more firmness if we would force him to change his belief without convincing him; he then becomes obstinate, his obstinacy kindles his zeal, his zeal inflames him; we wish to convert him, we have made of him a fanatic, a madman. Men, for their opinions, demand only liberty; if you deprive them of it, you place arms in their hand. Give them liberty, they remain quiet, as the Lutherans were at Strasburg. It is then the very unity in religion we would enforce, and not the different opinions we tolerate, that produces trouble and civil wars.

He continued:

If the prisons of the Inquisition were terrible, France itself has had only too many which have echoed the cries of the oppressed conscience. If the former were unjust, why should the latter be authorized? We who condemn with horror the minister of the Church who, by torture, compelled the mind, should we give to our king the right still to subjugate it? We regard with indignation the inflictions which, in Italy and in Spain, obstruct the rights of conscience; the least reflection should prevent our feeling less for the conscience of our own citizens.

Meanwhile, Turgot had befriended Jacques Claude Marie Vincent, Marquis de Gournay (1712–1759), whom intellectual historian Joseph A. Schumpeter called one of the greatest teachers of economics who ever lived. Widely traveled throughout Europe and especially knowledgeable about English and Dutch business practices, the Marquis de Gournay was a follower of Richard Cantillon, the author of Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général, which offered perhaps the first comprehensive view of free-market operations.

In 1748, Gournay had come into an inheritance, retired from business, and bought himself a government position as inspector of factories. Between 1753 and 1756, he invited Turgot to join him as he visited companies in Anjou, Bourgogne, Bretagne, Dauphine, Languedoc, Lyonnais, Maine, and Provence. Turgot could see that commerce was crucial. Moreover, Gournay’s free-trade principles had an impact on Turgot.

The year Gournay died, Turgot wrote his loge de Gournay [Elegy for Gournay] in which he explained why government officials couldn’t run an economy. For instance:

If the Government limits the number of sellers by exclusive privileges or otherwise, it is certain that the consumer will be wronged and that the seller, made sure of selling, will compel him to buy dearly bad articles. If, on the other hand, it is the number of buyers which is diminished by the exclusion of foreigners or of certain persons, then the seller is wronged, and if the injury be carried to the point when the price cannot cover his expenses and risks, he will cease to produce the commodity, its regular supply will thus be endangered, and a famine may be the consequence. The general liberty of buying and selling is therefore the only means to insure on the one side to the seller a price sufficient to encourage production; on the other side to the consumer the best merchandise at the lowest price.

To desire that government should be obliged to prevent fraud from ever occurring would be to desire it to provide head pads for all children who might fall. To assume, by regulations, successfully to prevent all the possible malversations of this nature, is to sacrifice to a chimerical perfection the whole progress of industry.

The Physiocrats

Turgot defended economic liberty in Fondations [Foundations] and Foires et Marchés [Fairs and Markets], articles for Denis Diderot’s famous and widely influential 17-volume Encyclopédie (1751–1772). Somewhere along the line, Turgot had become familiar with the views of the Physiocrats. Economist, editor, and government official Du Pont de Nemours (1739–1817) coined the term from the Greek words physis [let nature] and kratein[rule]. His book Physiocratie appeared in 1768. The brash, bold Du Pont de Nemours became a close friend of Turgot, who was godfather to his third son and suggested the name of this boy—Eleuthere Irénée (freedom and peace)—destined to launch the family colossus, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Cie.

Physiocrat referred to ideas popularized by Francois Quesnay (1694–1774), a nobleman’s son who made himself a surgeon and bought his post as physician to King Louis XV and his influential courtesan Madame de Pompadour. Historians Will and Ariel Durant wrote that although Quesnay was a self-confident dogmatist in his works, he was in person a kindly soul, distinguished by integrity in an immoral milieu.

Quesnay attacked taxes and trade restrictions in his articles for the Encyclopédie (1756), his own little book Tableau économique (1758), and elsewhere. “There will be prosperity,” he insisted, “if each person is free to cultivate his in fields such products as his interests, his means, and the nature of the land suggest to him.”

According to historians Will and Ariel Durant, Louis XV asked Quesnay what he would do if he were king. “Nothing,” answered Quesnay. “Who, then, would govern?” “The laws”—by which the physiocrat meant the “laws” inherent in the nature of man and governing supply and demand.

On September 17, 1754, the king issued an edict abolishing all restrictions on trade in wheat, rye, and corn, but a subsequent crop failure led to higher prices, and there was a clamor for restoring controls. The edicts were rescinded on December 23, 1770.

The political philosophy of the Physiocrats was perhaps best expressed in the 1767 book L’ordre natural et essentiel des sociétés politiques [The Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies] by Pierre-Paul Mercier de la Riviere (1720–1793).

Do you wish a society to attain the highest degree of wealth, population, and power? Trust, then, its interests to freedom, and let this be universal. By means of this liberty (which is the essential element of industry) and the desire to enjoy—stimulated by competition and enlightened by experience and example—you are guaranteed that everyone will always act for his own greatest possible advantage, and consequently will contribute with all the power of his particular interest to the general good, both to the ruler and to every member of the society.

On August 8, 1761, Turgot was appointed an intendant (chief administrator) for the provinces of Angomois, Basse-Marche, and Limousin, a region in central France later known as Limoges. As the 19th-century historian and thinker Alexis de Tocqueville explained, “The intendant was in possession of the whole reality of Government.” All the powers which the Council of State itself possessed were accumulated in his hands. Like the Council, he was at once administrator and judge. He corresponded with all the Ministers, and in the province was the sole agent of all the measures of the Government.

Limoges was among the poorest regions of France. Almost all of the approximately 500,000 people were peasants who lived on chestnuts, rye, and buckwheat. According to the Physiocrat Marquis de Mirabeau (1715–1789), peasants dressed in rags and lived in huts made of clay with a thatch roof, and the most prosperous Limoges farmers could afford to slaughter only one pig a year. Historian Hippolyte Taine, who gathered a tremendous amount of material on living conditions, reported that many peasants used plows which were no better than those of ancient Rome. Turgot remarked, “I have seen with pain that in some parishes the curate alone has signed, because no one else could write.”

Peasants in Limoges, as elsewhere, were crushed by taxes. Economic historian Florin Aftalion reported there were some 1,600 customs houses throughout France to collect traites as goods passed various points along roads and rivers. For instance, explained Cornell University scholar Andrew Dickson White, on the Loire between Orléans and Nantes, a distance of about two hundred miles, there were twenty-eight custom-houses; and that between Gray and Arles, on the rivers Saone and Rhone, a distance of about three hundred miles, the custom-houses numbered over thirty, causing long delays, and taking from twenty-five to thirty percent in value of all the products transported.

There were a host of other taxes, including one on salt. The taille amounted to about a sixth of the income of peasants. This came on top of feudal duties and church tithes. Peasants got to keep about a fifth of their income. The taille, from which some 130,000 clergymen and 140,000 aristocrats were exempted, was based on a tax collector’s estimate of a peasant’s ability to pay, which meant appearances. Du Pont de Nemours observed:

they [the peasants] did not dare to procure for themselves the number of animals necessary for good farming; they used to cultivate their fields in a poor way so as to pass as poor, which is what they eventually became; they pretended that it was too hard to pay in order to avoid having to pay too much; payments that were inevitably slow were made still slower; they took no pleasure or enjoyment in their food, housing, or dress; their days passed in deprivation and sorrow.

Turgot focused on the most obnoxious taxes, starting with the taille. It wasn’t within his power as a regional official to abolish the taille, but he did what he could. Traditionally, national government finance officials had guessed how much money they were going to spend on wars, maintaining Versailles, bureaucrats, and other things, which determined the amount of tax revenue needed. They demanded about the same portion of taxes from each district as they always had, even though there had been an economic decline in some districts, which effectively meant higher tax rates.

Turgot attributed the economic decline of Limoges to high taxes. He asked that his district’s tax quota be cut by 400,000 livres. It was cut 190,000. Year after year for the 13 years that he was an intendant in Limoges, he pleaded for tax cuts.

Turgot did have the power to abolish the corvée—forced labor—which was the most hated tax on peasants. A remnant of serfdom, this originated as a feudal obligation for peasants to perform a certain amount of labor without pay. The corvée became a demand that peasants work as much as 14 days a year on the king’s roads, breaking, carting, and shoveling stones. Often this came at the worst time, such as when peasants were busy with their harvest. Landlords, who stood to gain more from roads, contributed nothing. As might be expected, forced labor resulted in poor work, and the roads were terrible.

Turgot hired competent contractors to build and improve roads, and some 450 miles of roads were built in Limoges. He defrayed the costs with a moderate tax. Clergymen and aristocrats remained exempt, but at least peasants were free to work their land. Limoges became known as a district with superior roads—the wonder of all travelers, as Turgot biographer W. Walker Stephens put it.

Turgot did much to help improve agriculture. Because tons of grain were lost to the grain moth and corn weevil, he helped the Limoges Society of Agriculture find better storage methods. To help diversify food sources, he urged that peasants grow potatoes. As the Marquis de Condorcet observed in his biography of Turgot,

The people at first regarded the potato with disdain and as beneath the dignity of the human species, and they were not reconciled to it till the intendant [Turgot] had caused it to be served at his own table, and to the first class of citizens, and had given it vogue among the fashionable and rich.

Turgot was in touch with others who embraced ideas of liberty. He dined with the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith when he visited Paris in 1765, and later Turgot helped supply Smith with books for his work on The Wealth of Nations. But as intellectual historian Peter Groenewegen has shown, Turgot had little impact on Smith’s writing since Smith had already formed his principal views. Like the Physiocrats, both men believed in economic liberty, and unlike the Physiocrats, they recognized the importance of commerce.

In 1766, Turgot wrote an 80-page summary of his views for two Chinese students in Paris. This became Réflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses [Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches]. It explained much about how free markets work and made a case for laissez-faire policy. Although Turgot wasn’t a Physiocrat, he shared their commitment to economic liberty. Du Pont de Nemours published Réflexions in the November and December 1769 issues of Ephémérides du Citoyen, the Physiocratic journal. But without consulting Turgot, Du Pont de Nemours made a number of changes, and Turgot wasn’t pleased.

Turgot made clear his opposition to slavery: “This abominable custom of slavery has once been universal, and is still spread over the greater part of the earth.”

He affirmed the importance of sound money:

Thus, then, we come to the constitution of gold and silver as money and universal money, and that without any arbitrary convention among men, without the intervention of any law, but by the nature of things. They are not, as many people have imagined, signs of values; they have themselves a value. If they are susceptible of being the measure and the pledge of other values, they have this property in common with all the other articles that have a value in Commerce. They differ only because being at once more divisible, more unalterable, and more easy to transport than the other commodities, it is more convenient to employ them to measure and represent the values.

Turgot banished the ancient dogma that interest was immoral. “The price of borrowed money is regulated,” he wrote, “like that of all other merchandise, by the balance of supply and demand: thus, when there are many borrowers who need money, the interest of money becomes higher; when there are many holders of money who offer to lend it, interest falls. It is, therefore, another mistake to suppose that the interest of money in commerce ought to be fixed by the laws of Princes.”

During the famine of 1769–1772, he mortgaged his estate to get money for famine relief. He organized relief efforts financed almost entirely by voluntary contributions. French treasury officials claimed taxes were due from Turgot’s relief organization because its records weren’t written on stamped paper. He issued an ordinance suspending the stamp tax laws in Limoges. The bakers’ guild of Limoges moved to raise bread prices, and Turgot responded by suspending their monopoly privileges. He encouraged people to bring bread from other towns, and they did. He insisted that the best remedy for famine was free trade.

Turgot further defended laissez-faire by writing Lettres sur le commerce des grains, seven letters to Comptroller-General Abbé Terray. Turgot warned that government is incapable of guaranteeing economic security. He declared:

Government is not the master of seasons, and they should be taught that they have no right to violate the property of the agricultural labourers or the dealers in corn.

Terray was deaf to Turgot’s appeal. In December 1770, the Comptroller-General ruled that grain could be sold only in government-controlled marketplaces. Speculation was outlawed. A subsequent measure outlawed grain trading by any merchant who didn’t have a license. Grain monopolists regained their power.

Abbé Terray asked Turgot for help protecting iron smelters, and Turgot replied with a letter known as Sur la Marque des Fers [On the Mark of Iron]. The title referred to the stamp on iron indicating that it was smelted in France, part of the effort to keep out iron from other countries.

“I know no other means of quickening any commerce whatever than by granting to it the greatest liberty,” Turgot wrote, “and the freedom from all taxes, which the ill-understood interest of the Exchequer has multiplied to excess on all kinds of merchandise, and in particular on the fabrications of iron.”

Then, talking about how trade retaliations backfire: “The truth is, that in aiming at injuring others, we injure only ourselves.”

Conscription

Turgot had to deal with the consequences of military conscription. The repugnance to service in the militia, he wrote the Minister of War in January 1773, was so widespread among the people, that each drawing was the signal for the greatest disorders throughout the country, and for a kind of civil war between the peasantry; the one party seeking to escape the drawing, taking refuge in the woods, the other, with arms in hand, pursuing the fugitives, in order to capture them and subject them to the same lot with themselves. Loss of life and minor outrages were common. Depopulation of many of the parishes, with cultivation abandoned, often followed.

When the time came to assemble the battalions, it was necessary for the syndics of the parishes to lead on their militia-men escorted by the horse-police, and sometimes bound with cords. Turgot let people voluntarily contribute cash to a pool for those conscripted, and many enlisted for the money.

There was much resentment against the practice of forcing local people to provide room and board for soldiers, and Turgot took action. He rented some buildings as barracks and spread the cost among all the taxpayers. Military discipline reportedly improved.

On May 10, 1774, King Louis XV died of smallpox. He was succeeded by his awkward, timid 19-year-old grandson, who became Louis XVI. His queen was the 19-year-old Marie Antoinette, a beautiful and frivolous daughter of the arrogant Austrian Empress Maria Theresa.

At the time, France had the biggest government in Europe except for Russia. The French government was in desperate shape, having incurred massive debts during the Seven Years War (1756–1763) with Britain. The royal palace of Versailles was an enormous drain. On the payroll were eight architects, 47 musicians, 56 hunters, 295 cooks, 886 nobles with their wives and children, plus secretaries, couriers, physicians, and chaplains, and some 10,000 soldiers who guarded the place. Almost every week, there were two banquets, two balls, and three plays held at Versailles.

Marie Antoinette aggravated the public by her extravagance with taxpayer money. Married to an impotent king, she squandered large sums at card tables and lavished costly gifts on her court favorites. She spent hundreds of thousands of livres on dresses. Austrian ambassador Mercy d’Argentau warned her mother, Maria Theresa:

Although the King has given the Queen, on various occasions, more than 100,000 écus’ worth of diamonds, and although her Majesty already has a prodigious collection, she nevertheless resolved to acquire . . . chandelier earrings from Bohmer. I did not conceal from her Majesty that under present economic conditions it would have been wiser to avoid such a tremendous expenditure, but she could not resist.

The Parlements of Paris protested taxes. This body, whose members bought their way in, was the most influential of 13 French parliaments. It had acquired the prerogative of approving royal edicts on taxes before they could go into effect. If the Parlement opposed a tax edict, there would be a lit de justice: members would meet the king in his throne room, and he would make a final decision which everyone must obey. But this proceeding was widely resented.

Louis named the 73-year-old Count de Maurepas as his chief adviser. He had held a number of official positions until 1749 when he was dismissed on suspicion of having written some lines critical of courtesan Madame de Pompadour. But Maurepas knew how to pull strings. As royal playwright and historian Jean Francois Marmontel described him, “he possessed a lynx-eye to seize upon the weak or ridiculous in men, and an imperceptible art to draw them to his purposes . . . he made sport of everything, even of merit itself.”

Maurepas knew that with his scandalous reputation, he needed some respected figures in the government, and his wife recommended Turgot. On July 20, 1774, Turgot was nominated to a minor post, Minister of Marine.

In Limoges, as biographer Leon Say reported, the aristocrats could not forgive Turgot for having broken with traditions which had “hitherto been favourable to them . . . it was not the same with the peasantry.” His departure was announced publicly from the pulpit by all the curés of the province, who celebrated mass everywhere on his account. The countrymen suspended their work in order to be present, and all cried: “It is wisely done by the king to have taken M. Turgot, but it is very sad for us that we have lost him.”

During the few weeks that Turgot was Minister of Marine, he spoke out for taxpayers against the politically powerful French shipbuilding industry. He recommended that the government buy ships in Sweden rather than France, which would cut costs 40 percent. Turgot countered protectionist objections by observing that the Swedes drank French wines and wore French clothes.

On August 24, 1774, Louis met with Turgot and discussed the country’s economic situation. Prodded by Maurepas, the king named Turgot as Comptroller-General. Turgot recognized that the kind of spending and tax cuts he envisioned would encounter ferocious opposition, and he had to have the backing of the king, so he sought an interview.

The king promised his support, and afterward, Turgot sent him this memo:

I confine myself to recall to you these three words—

No Bankruptcy.

No Increase of Taxes.

No Loans.

No bankruptcy, either avowed or disguised by illegal reductions.

No increase of taxes; the reason for this being in the condition of your people, and still more, in that of your Majesty’s own generous heart.

No loans; because every loan diminishes always the free revenue and necessitates at the end of a certain time, either bankruptcy or the increase of taxes. In times of peace it is permissible to borrow only in order to liquidate old debts, or in order to redeem other loans contracted on less advantageous terms.

To meet these three points there is but one means. It is to reduce expenditure below revenue, and sufficiently below it to insure each year a saving of twenty millions, to be applied in redemption of the old debts. Without that, the first gunshot will force the State into bankruptcy.

The question will be asked incredulously, ‘On what can we retrench?’ and each one, speaking for his own department, will maintain that nearly every particular item of expense is indispensable. They will be able to allege very good reasons, but these must all yield to the absolute necessity of economy.

It is, then, of absolute necessity for your Majesty to require that the heads of all the departments should concert with the Minister of Finance. It is indispensable that he should discuss with them, in presence of your Majesty, the degree of necessity for all your proposed expenses. It is above all necessary, as soon as you, Sire, shall have decided upon the strictly necessary scale of maintenance of each department, that you prohibit the official in charge of it to order any new expenditure without having first arranged with the Treasury the means of providing for it. . . .

Turgot’s top priority was to establish freedom of the grain trade, as he had done in Limoges. On September 13, 1774, Turgot issued an edict and wrote:

it shall be free to all persons whatever to carry on, as it may seem best to them, their trade in corn and flour, to sell and to buy it, in whatever places they choose throughout the kingdom.

Voltaire was incredulous:

I learned that a Minister of State who was neither a lawyer nor priest had just published an edict by which, in spite of the most sacred prejudices, it was permitted to every Perigourdin to sell and buy wheat in Auvergne. . . . I saw in my canton a dozen of labourers, my brethren, who read the edict. ‘How then?’ said an old man; ‘for sixty years I have been reading these edicts which, in unintelligible language, have always stripped us of natural liberty; now here is one that restores us our liberty, and I can understand every word without difficulty. This is the first time a king reasons with his people.’

France had long penalized foreigners, and in November 1774, Turgot overturned some of the worst laws. For instance, the law which held that the property of a deceased foreigner would revert to the government. “Such laws,” observed Du Pont de Nemours, “debarred the settling in France of a great number of clever men and industrious artists, of capitalists, and useful merchants, who would have desired nothing more than to make France the centre of their affairs, and which debarred even retired foreigners of wealth attracted by the pleasures of society and the agreeableness of the climate.”

Du Pont emphasized that Turgot proceeded without demanding reciprocity since the good of its operation would be certain for France, and the evil would be but for those countries which did not imitate her.

In January 1775, Turgot suffered an attack of gout which involved inflammation and severe pain in his legs. During the next four months, he was carried in a chair to the king’s working quarters. From there, he directed a quarantine of regions devastated by cattle-plague. The king agreed to pay a third of the value of diseased animals which were slaughtered and buried, and this frustrated efforts to control government spending.

Turgot set new standards for integrity. For instance, it had long been the custom for the Farmers-General, the private firm which collected a substantial amount of tax revenue, to give the Comptroller-General about a 100,000-livre bribe upon signing a new contract. Turgot declined the bribe and abolished the practice.

Turgot worked to curtail the rapaciousness of bureaucrats. “People complain also,” he wrote,

of the embarrassments they are thrown into by the extreme severity of the penalties, often for the slightest faults. It is indispensable to remedy this, as well as the inconveniences manufacturers suffer from the contradictions in the regulations, and to shield them from the abuse of the authority by the Bureaux of Inspection. Then issuing orders: You are not to seize anything belonging to them [workers and small manufacturers], any stuff or merchandise, on the pretext of its faultiness. You will confine yourselves to exhorting these poor artificers to make the things better, and to indicate to them the means of doing so.

On April 20, 1775, corn riots erupted in Dijon, reflecting fears that grain produced in that region might be sold elsewhere—and wouldn’t be available to relieve hunger in Dijon. Rioting quickly spread to other cities. Mobs stormed through the countryside, yelling Monopoly! and Famine! They broke into markets, demanding corn and flour for less than what merchants were charging. By May 2, mobs marched on Paris, and an estimated 8,000 people raided flour stores around Versailles. The Parlement of Paris issued a decree and posted notices urging people to petition the king for lower bread prices, and he gave in. Turgot advised the king that violence must be put down swiftly, and he was given command of a 25,000-man force which protected an orderly flow of grain to the markets. He had parliament’s notices removed. His rivals at the royal court weren’t pleased.

Between June and August 1775, Turgot issued edicts abolishing duties imposed by major towns like Beaune, Bordeaux, Dijon, and Pontoise.

Freedom of Speech

Turgot practiced freedom of speech. For instance, financier and politician Jacques Necker wrote a pamphlet Sur la Législation et le Commerce des Grains which criticized laissez-faire views and defended government restrictions on the grain trade. Turgot let it be published.

Although Turgot never challenged the legitimacy of a monarchy, he became convinced that people should prepare for self-government. Together with Du Pont de Nemours, he outlined a plan for parish assemblies, village assemblies, district assemblies, provincial assemblies, and a General Assembly. Participation would be open to those who owned land (any amount) and earned at least 600 livres per year. Individuals earning less than 600 livres would have fractional votes. Unfortunately, with everything else going on, this plan was never presented to the king.

The king’s coronation brought Turgot into conflict with the establishment. Traditionalists wanted the coronation at the magnificent cathedral of Rheims, and the clergy wanted the king to take the oath for intolerance, “I swear . . . to exterminate . . . entirely from my States all heretics . . . condemned by the Church.”

Church officials insisted,

It is reserved for you to deal the last blow to Calvinism in your kingdom. Order the schismatic assemblies of the Protestants to be dispersed; exclude the sectaries without distinction from all the branches of public administration. Your Majesty will thus assure among your subjects the unity of the Catholic worship.

Because the government was deep in debt, Turgot wanted a much cheaper coronation in Paris, and he objected to the oath. He wrote a memo to the king, Sur la tolerance, saying the oath was a bad idea even if nobody seriously contemplated a murderous Inquisition. “The prince who orders his subject to profess a religion he does not believe,” Turgot wrote, “commands a crime; the subject who obeys acts a lie, he betrays his conscience, he does an act which, he believes, God forbids. The Protestant who through self-interest or fear makes himself a Catholic, and the Catholic who by the same motives makes himself a Protestant, are both guilty of the same sin.”

The king decided to throw budgetary considerations to the wind and be coronated at Rheims. He agreed to the dreaded oath, but he mumbled it, and nobody could make out the words.

There seemed to be a favorable omen for Turgot when the king followed his recommendation and appointed Chrétien Lamoignon de Malesherbes as Maison du Roi (Minister of the Royal Household), a post which put him in a position to influence the king and help curb extravagance at Versailles.

The budget was a bitter battleground. At the beginning of 1775, the government had revenue of 337 million livres, but only 213 million was left after interest on the debt. The costs of government would be 235 million—hence, a deficit of 22 million livres. Turgot cut many expenses, including sinecures for idle aristocrats.

Meanwhile, Turgot had become convinced that the severity of his country’s problems required decisive action. He conceived what became known as the six edicts.

Two were of monumental importance. Turgot would abolish the jurandes—guilds—which monopolized various trades. Like modern labor unions, they enforced barriers to entry for the enrichment of members. Consequently, there were few skilled workers, and they concentrated on making luxury goods. Turgot would permit anyone, including foreigners, to enter any trade except barbering and wig-making. The reason for exceptions was that Turgot offered to compensate people for the loss of their special privileges, and because of the government’s financial situation, it wasn’t possible to compensate members of these two professions.

Turgot’s second crucial edict would abolish the corvée, the practice of forcing peasants to work on roads without pay. He proposed that all property owners, the primary beneficiaries of road improvements, pay a tax which would provide money for hiring road contractors.

Turgot thought of making these explosively controversial proposals more politically palatable by presenting them with four other proposals which had more support. He proposed abolishing restrictions on the grain trade within France. He wanted to discharge officials who imposed restrictions on the operation of Parisian markets, ports, and docks. He recommended abolishing the Caisse de Poissy, a tax on the cattle and meat industry. Finally, he proposed to cut the tax on suet.

During the last several months of 1775, Louis XVI weighed the compelling case for these edicts and the firestorm of opposition they would surely provoke. Turgot suffered another attack of gout and was absent as opposition intensified. Malesherbes cautioned Turgot to go slow, but Turgot, then 48, replied: “The needs of the people are enormous, and in my family, we die of gout at fifty.”

Over the objections of his brothers and all of his advisers except Turgot and Males-herbes, Louis XVI endorsed the six edicts, and on February 5, 1776, he presented them to the Parlement of Paris. They resisted, and the king declared, “My Parlement must respect my wishes.”

The Parlement supported guilds because many of the members were red-robed lawyers, and guilds were a lucrative source of litigation. One notorious case between the guild of tailors and the guild of used-clothes dealers had dragged on for more than 250 years. Led by the Prince de Conti, who expected to lose about 50,000 livres annually if the guilds were abolished, local officials went on the attack to protect their special privileges.

As if these six edicts weren’t enough of a challenge for the establishment, Turgot presented another which would abolish laws restricting the wine trade. In Bordeaux, for instance, it was illegal to sell and drink wine from another district. Wines from Languedoc couldn’t be shipped down the Garonne River before St. Martin’s Day. Wines from Périgord, not before Christmas. Turgot declared:

It is the interest of the whole kingdom we have to consider, the interests and the rights of all our subjects, who, as buyers or as sellers, have an equal right to find a market for their goods and to procure the object of their needs on the terms most advantageous to them.

Lawyers, noblemen, monopolists, clergymen—all were against Turgot. Maurepas, who had appointed Turgot, criticized him in public and maneuvered behind his back. As biographer Douglas Dakin explained,

Merely by refraining from defending Turgot, and merely by confirming Louis’s growing suspicions with a word here and there, he was bound in the long run to achieve his object. For everything that came to Louis’s ears—facts endlessly distorted, fortuitous happenings which in normal times would have had little significance, the fatuous lies concocted by Turgot’s detractors—all came to assume a unity and to take on the character of incontrovertible evidence. . . .

Marie Antoinette, outraged at Turgot’s efforts to sack incompetents and cut spending by the royal household, schemed against him. She had no interest in ideas. “I must admit I am lazy and dissipated when it comes to serious things,” she told her mother.

“I cannot conceal from your Majesty,” Turgot wrote the king on April 30, “the deep pain I have suffered by your cruel silence towards me on Sunday last, after I had in my preceding letters described to you so distinctly my position, your Majesty’s own position, the danger that your authority and the glory of your reign were incurring, and the impossibility of my continuing to serve you unless you give me your firm and steady support. Your Majesty has not deigned to reply to me. . . . Your Majesty gives me neither assistance nor consolation. How can I believe that you any longer esteem me? Sire, I have not deserved this. . . .”

The king didn’t reply.

On May 12, 1776, Turgot was dismissed. He reportedly warned Louis XVI: “Remember, sire, that it was weakness which brought the head of [England’s King] Charles I to the block.”

Voltaire expressed the feeling of many who hoped for reform. “Ah, mon Dieu, what sad news I hear! he wrote three days after Turgot’s fall. France would have been too fortunate. . . . I am overwhelmed in despair.”

The Marquis de Condorcet wrote: “Adieu! We have had a beautiful dream.”

Government spending zoomed out of control. Guilds regained their monopoly power. Restrictions again throttled trade. The regime brought back forced labor.

Turgot had probably achieved as much as any human being could without organizing popular support to buck special interests. His experience revealed how fragile were reforms which depended on the goodwill of a ruler. Edicts, it turned out, were no substitute for the education of the people.

Turgot moved to a house on the rue de Bourbon, Paris, and he quietly studied science, literature, and music. For Benjamin Franklin, representing American interests in Paris, he wrote Mémoire sur l’impot to explain his laissez-faire economic policy.

In one of his last surviving writings, a controversial March 22, 1778, letter to English radical minister Dr. Richard Price, Turgot expressed his support for American independence, although he didn’t think the French government could afford to provide financial help. Turgot criticized American state constitutions for establishing a strong executive—“an unreasonable imitation . . . of the usages of England”—rather than lodge all power in a legislature.

Turgot denounced chimerical state taxes and tariffs. He urged that Americans reduce “to the smallest possible number the kinds of affairs of which the Government of each State should take charge. . . .” He declared that “The asylum which America affords to the oppressed of all nations will console the world.”

The letter provoked John Adams to make his case for a separation of powers, writing the three-volume Defense of the American Constitution which wasn’t published until 1787, after Turgot’s death. Adams, prickly pear that he was, liked Turgot and described him as grave, sensible, and amiable.

Turgot suffered more attacks of gout, and after 1778, he could walk only with crutches. His situation became critical in early 1781. He died at home around 11:00 P.M., March 18, 1781. He was 53. His friends Mme. Blondel, the Duchesse d’Enville, and Du Pont de Nemours were by his side.

Having rejected Turgot’s peaceful reforms, the French government stumbled from one crisis to another. By 1788, military spending took a quarter of the budget, and half the budget was needed for payments on the national debt which had soared to 4 billion livres. There were riots against taxes. The government was broke, and the king and queen were a pitiful sight as they handed over their silverware to the royal mint.

Desperate for funds, the king agreed to summon the Estates-General, an assembly of nobles, clergy, and taxpayers, which hadn’t met for one-and-a-half centuries. This became the National Assembly, to which Du Pont de Nemours had been elected. It rebelled against the nobles, and the king made the fateful decision to back the nobles.

The National Assembly abolished guilds and some of the worst taxes, and it confiscated church properties. Hatred bred of oppression boiled over, as Turgot had anticipated. On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was led to a Paris guillotine and beheaded. Marie Antoinette—ridiculed as Madam Deficit—followed him to the guillotine on October 16, 1793. The French people suffered through runaway inflation, the Reign of Terror, and the military takeover by Napoleon Bonaparte who plunged the country into more than a decade of war.

Turgot’s steadfast friend Du Pont de Nemours, who had been scheduled for the guillotine the very day the Reign of Terror ended and was later rescued by Madame Germaine de Stael, made sure he wouldn’t be forgotten. After emigrating to America, Du Pont de Nemours edited a nine-volume edition of Turgot’s works (1808–1811). Another French edition of Turgot’s works appeared in 1844. And there was G. Schelle’s Oeuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant (1913–1923), with many documents from the Turgot family. More than a dozen books about Turgot were published during the 19th century.

Turgot inspired the economist Jean-Baptiste Say who, in turn, helped inspire the resurgence of libertarian writings in Europe. Leon Say, Jean-Baptiste’s grandson, wrote in his 1887 biography of Turgot: “if he failed in the 18th century, he has in fact dominated the century following. He founded the political economy of the 19th century, and, by the freedom of industry which he bequeathed to us, he has impressed on the 19th century the mark which will best characterize it in history.”

In recent years, Turgot’s most ardent admirer has been intellectual historian Murray N. Rothbard who affirmed that “If we were to award a prize for ‘brilliancy’ in the history of economic thought, it would surely go to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot.”

He had a liberating vision. He told the truth. He pursued justice. He was fearless in challenging special interests who everywhere capture government power. He showed why liberty is absolutely essential if the poorest among us are to improve their lives. He displayed the courage and compassion to help set people free.

Jim Powell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is an expert in the history of liberty. He has lectured in England, Germany, Japan, Argentina and Brazil as well as at Harvard, Stanford and other universities across the United States. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Audacity/American Heritage and other publications, and is author of six books.

Originally published at FEE.org on April 26, 2018.

John Bright Was the Voice of Victorian Liberalism

Nicholas Elliott

For this chapter’s hero, we dust off an oldie from the FEE archives, a 1988 article on the great 19th Century classical liberal and free trader, John Bright. At the time he wrote this, author Nicholas Elliott, a graduate of the University of York, was a regular contributor to the publications of London’s Institute of Economic Affairs.

—Lawrence W. Reed

John Bright did more than anyone else to bring about the great advances for liberty in 19th-century Britain. A leading orator and agitator, he was considered by many to be the best political speaker of the century. His voice contained a quiet passion which captivated fellow members of Parliament and roused the many thousands he addressed at public meetings.

Born in Rochdale (a town north of Manchester) in 1811, Bright was raised in the individualistic tradition of the Society of Friends. From the faith of his family, he learned that there is a natural equality of mankind and that any individual can communicate with God. He later recognized this connection between his religion and his politics:

We have no creed which monarchs and statesmen and high priests have written out for us. Our creed, so far as we comprehend it, comes pure and direct from the New Testament. We have no thirty-seven articles to declare that it is lawful for Christian men, at the command of the civil magistrate, to wear weapons and to serve in wars.[1]

For many years, Nonconformists—those who did not conform to the established Church of England—had been persecuted and forced to finance the state church. Because of this, they also tended toward political individualism. John’s father, Jacob Bright, was liberal in his politics, and a supporter of the radical Member of Parliament Joseph Hume. He was also one of the many Nonconformists who refused to pay the church rate—a local tax to finance the state religion—and as a result, had silver spoons taken from his house by church officials.

As a young man, John worked in his father’s cotton mill, he kept a collection of books in a room above the counting-house, and in spare moments went there to expand his knowledge. His favorite writer was the poet and liberal scholar John Milton. At the same time, John was tutored in politics by his fellow workers, supporters of the Chartist movement, which called for universal male suffrage and the elimination of property qualifications for members of Parliament.

Bright established his reputation in an 1840 debate over church rates, an issue close to his heart. In his hometown of Rochdale, he led a rebellion against the local vicar. A large gathering was held in the local churchyard, at which John mounted a tombstone to denounce the “foul connection” of church and state.

The Campaign Against the Corn Laws

Bright is most famous for his part in the successful campaign for the repeal of the corn laws. During the Napoleonic War, English landowners had enjoyed a monopoly in the production of food. At the end of the war, they instituted the corn laws—a form of import control—to protect their domestic monopoly from competition. The laws kept the price of grain high, and since bread was the primary sustenance for most families, the laws created particular hardship for the poor. The issue had been brewing for some time. Charles Villiers had proposed corn law repeal in Parliament every year, and the Anti-Corn Law League was formed in Manchester in 1839. Richard Cobden and John Bright were instrumental in its founding.

The campaign gathered impetus in the “hungry forties” with a succession of poor harvests. The poverty was very real—observers reported seeing people with “withered limbs” in Manchester. Cobden was elected to Parliament from Stockport, and Bright was elected in 1843 to represent Durham. The League developed into a highly efficient political machine with mass support. They distributed millions of leaflets, held gatherings up and down the country, and published their own newspaper, The League. In addition, they gained the support of the fledgling Economist. In 1845, when Ireland was struck by a potato blight, pressure for repeal grew even stronger.

Bright and Cobden embarked upon a hectic speaking tour. The climax was a meeting in the Covent Garden Theatre, where Bright railed against the protectors of upper-class privilege:

The law is, in fact a law of the most ingeniously malignant character . . . The most demoniacal ingenuity could not have invented a scheme more calculated to bring millions of the working classes of this country to a state of pauperism, suffering, discontent, and insubordination. . .[2]

Leading Whigs and Tories were convinced of the need for repeal, and on June 25, 1846, a bill for repeal was carried. The elimination of other import duties followed, and a 70-year era of British free trade began; in the popular mind, free trade now signified cheap bread.

The event was also a momentous one for the landscape of British politics. Division in the Tories was irreconcilable. The landowning interests had stubbornly resisted repeal, and Prime Minister Robert Peel, who had supported repeal, was forced to resign. The division excluded the conservatives from government for the next twenty years.

In his activity in support of free trade, Bright was motivated above all by a concern for the plight of ordinary people. From the same motive, he opposed all the legislation which regulated working conditions in factories. The Factory Act of 1847 was in part a retaliation by the landowners for the corn law repeal: regulation of factories was a means of penalizing manufacturers. Bright was certain that it would make people worse off by reducing the number of hours in which they could earn money.

Opposition to the Crimean War

In their campaign against the corn laws, Bright and Cobden rode a wave of public adoration. But in their opposition to the Crimean War, the contrast could not have been greater, for they had to endure derision from a jingoistic public. Despite this, they produced some of the most lucid statements of non-interventionist foreign policy ever made, and Bright contributed some of his most memorable oratory.

For Bright, Cobden, and other leaders of the “Manchester School,” free trade was inseparable from a pacific foreign policy. Trade is based on mutual cooperation and evokes goodwill among nations. They rejected the argument that foreign alliances were needed to enforce a “balance of power” in Europe, and warned that such alliances would drag Britain into future conflicts. The only people who would benefit from war were the “tax-eating” class—government bureaucrats. Common people would suffer from the burden of taxes to fund foreign adventures. Bright and Cobden reserved no cordiality for Liberal Party Prime Minister Palmerston, a notorious interventionist whose policies attracted the description of “gun-boat diplomacy.”

As the war continued, Bright became deeply distressed by the loss of life: 22,000 British soldiers died, but only 4,000 in action; the rest died from malnutrition, exposure, and disease. His passionate speeches left a lasting impression on the House of Commons. His most famous words were these:

The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the first-born were slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and the two sideposts of our doors, that he may spare and pass on; he takes his victims from the castle of the noble, the mansion of the wealthy, and the cottage of the poor and lowly.[3]

India and the American Civil War

At the end of the Crimean War, Bright suffered a nervous collapse and was unseated in the general election. However, it was not long before he was returned as member for Birmingham, and with renewed energy, he sought better government for India. Bright argued that the mutiny of 1857 was caused by the ineptitude of colonial government. Capable Indians were excluded from the administration of their own country, positions being allocated instead by personal favor.

Bright assailed the economic management which imposed onerous taxes on the Indian peasantry, stunting development to maintain a vast, inefficient Indian civil service. He was ahead of his time in recognizing that Britain would not rule India forever. He also saw the potential for conflict in a country of “twenty nations, speaking twenty different languages,” and argued for a confederacy of smaller states.

For many years, Bright had been an admirer of the United States—he was sometimes known in the House of Commons as the Honourable Member for the United States. He thought that the free and democratic style of government in America should be a model for Britain. When civil war erupted, Bright was concerned for the future of the republic but allied himself with the cause of the North.

English liberals weren’t unanimous in supporting the North. Cobden initially inclined toward the South, and The Economist sympathized with the South throughout. A humanitarian always, Bright supported the North because of the issue of slavery, which appalled him. In the early part of the war, when military intervention on the side of the South seemed likely, Bright urged neutrality. He also maintained a correspondence with the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Charles Sumner. He encouraged caution and diplomacy; some of the letters he wrote to Sumner were read to President Lincoln.

It was always a matter of regret for Bright that he never visited North America. He maintained his admiration for the United States and saw in it the potential of a great world power.

Parliamentary Reform

Before 1867, only 16 percent of British adult males had the right to vote. In the 1860s, Bright led a vigorous campaign for full manhood suffrage, secret ballots, and equal representation for industrial cities like Birmingham and Manchester.

He rested his case upon two principles. First, since working people must pay taxes and bear the impact of legislation, they should also have a voice in government. Second, he expressed faith in the decision-making ability of ordinary people. A frequent claim of reactionary conservatives was that common people are incapable of making important decisions. Bright reversed this and argued that progress had been achieved only by enforcing working-class opinion. He was somewhat naive in supposing that a mass franchise would lead to low taxes, free trade, and a non-interventionist foreign policy.

With his ability to rouse passions, Bright’s efforts in the campaign for electoral reform made him a formidable adversary of the Conservative government. Previous campaigns had often suffered from having the support of only one class, whereas Bright rallied the middle and working classes into unity. Ironically, in the same way as corn law repeal, reform was introduced by a Conservative prime minister. Benjamin Disraeli presided over the 1867 Reform Act, which enfranchised two million additional men, and cleared the way for later reforms.

Later Years: Cabinet and Ireland

As a parliamentary back-bencher, Bright had been enormously influential. Nearing the end of his campaigning career, he entered William Gladstone’s cabinet in 1868. He never was happy in assuming collective responsibility, and soon had cause to disagree with his government colleagues.

The Forster Act of 1870 laid the foundations of state education, and it incorporated the teaching of state religion which was anathema to Bright. He wrote to Gladstone that it had done a “tremendous mischief” to the party.[4]

After the 1880 election, Bright was again invited into government. Soon after, Britain initiated a war with Egypt, and Bright’s objection was so great that he felt compelled to resign.

Ireland was another longstanding interest. Bright had been a personal friend of Irish reformer Daniel O’Connell, who had supported the Anti-Corn Law League. Bright took up the grievances of the Irish and, after O’Connell’s death in 1847, was often their most persistent representative in Parliament. He rejected all attempts to impose the Church of England upon the native Catholics; instead, he called for the withdrawal of this “symbol of conquest.”

The other issue was land policy: Irish agriculture had always been weak because large-scale English owners maintained idle lands and because tenants scratched a precarious existence with no legal right of tenancy. Bright offered three solutions: an end to the law of primogeniture which ensured the continuation of concentrated ownership; compensation for evicted tenants and loans for those who wanted to buy land; and land purchase from English owners, to be sold at a discount to Irish buyers.

Some of these proposals were implemented, as Gladstone had been taking note of Bright’s suggestions. But in Parliament, the Irish Nationalist representatives became increasingly militant. They used disruptive techniques which led, in response, to the rules of procedure which still are with us today. Bright deplored all this, and it significantly changed his attitude.

In 1886, Gladstone introduced a land purchase scheme to buy out the English landlords, along with a proposal for Irish home rule. By this time, Bright was so disgusted with the activities of the Nationalists in Parliament that he opposed the land purchase scheme, and he regarded home rule as a policy which would endanger the “Protestant and loyal people of the north.”[5]

As a figure of importance among the Liberals, Bright’s opposition was very damaging to Gladstone. Home rule was defeated, and the Liberals were hopelessly divided on the issue. It pained Bright to speak out against Gladstone because they had been good friends.

In an essay of this length, it isn’t possible to describe all of Bright’s arguments. He was also a committed opponent of capital punishment, spoke on many aspects of colonial government, and addressed a variety of issues involving religious freedom. His speeches are a pleasure to read, and one can imagine the impact they made on listeners.

Bright lived from 1811 to 1889, and when looking at the political events during those years, the advance of liberal principles is quite momentous. In 1819, when demonstrators protested against the corn laws and the lack of parliamentary representation, they were cut down by a cavalry charge. As late as 1859, Queen Victoria expressed her concern to Lord Palmerston that John Bright was attempting to undermine British institutions. Yet by 1868, when Bright became the first Nonconformist to hold a cabinet post, he was respected, as were the principles he enunciated.

In the campaign against the corn laws, he helped to establish free trade as a popular principle which no politician would dare to interfere with for years to come. His stand with Cobden against the Crimean War inspired a later generation of liberals to follow the idea of non-intervention. Opening up Parliament to the scrutiny of ordinary people marked an end to the high-handed government of earlier times. In these, as in many other issues, John Bright, as a consistent and principled defender of individual liberty, imparted a widespread and lasting acceptance of liberal politics.

Mr. Elliott is a financial journalist in London, England.

Originally published at FEE.org on April 5, 2018.

[1] William Robertson, The Life & Times of John Bright (London: Fisher Unwin. 1912), p. 203.

[2] Speech at Covent Garden Theatre, December 19, 1845, in J. E. Thorold Rogers (ed.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy (London: Macmillan, 1878), pp. 419–420.

[3] Speech to the House of Commons, February 23. 1855. in Rogers, p. 251.

[4] Quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 409.

[5] Quoted in Keith Robbins, John Bright (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 256.

Australia

The Farmer Who Freed Australia’s Economy

Andrew Pickford

This chapter’s hero is a man I was fortunate to meet in person in Perth, Australia, in March 2017. His name is John Hyde. His story, related here by Mannkal Economic Foundation executive director Andrew Pickford, reminds me of the famous statement that adorned the Oval Office desk of President Ronald Reagan: “There’s no limit to how far a man can go if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.”

—Lawrence W. Reed

If you aspire to leadership in the Australian Parliament and meet John Hyde to get an insider’s advice, you will likely trigger a discussion about the “greasy pole.” You can climb that greasy pole and move upwards, he’ll advise you, or you can take a principled stand, forcefully argue for free markets and classical liberal positions, and give up on political advancement. It’s one or the other.

John was very much in the latter camp—principled, eloquent, and focused on what was right, not cutting corners for power or personal gain. Despite considerable skill, intellect, and capability, as Federal member for Moore for nine years, he was never to hold an official position while his party was in power. Yet he achieved much more than any senior minister and most Prime Ministers. John moved the direction of the country and its economy for the better.

True leaders take risks and promote ideas and positions, not simply the acquisition and maintenance of power. They also have a longer perspective than most. They see beyond media and election cycles, with little concern about how the crowd feels at the moment. That’s John.

In Australia, “hero” is a term often overused. It has become common in sports and across many other fields. For John Hyde, who turned 82 on February 2 (2018), it is an entirely suitable description even if he would strongly resist its application to himself, which he always does. The main reason John deserves this label is his central role in helping dismantle the “Australian Settlement.”

The Australian Settlement

When the six British colonies federated in 1901 to become Australia, the new nation adopted a set of policies which would define it for most of the 20th Century. The political elite at the time agreed on what has become known as the “Foundation” or the “Australian Settlement.”

In his 1992 book, The End of Certainty: Power, Politics and Business in Australia, the prominent Australian political journalist Paul Kelly identified five key pillars of the Australian Settlement. They included “White Australia” (restrictive immigration policies); “Industry Protection,” “Wage Arbitration,” “State Paternalism,” and “Imperial Benevolence”—all of which were entrenched through laws, institutional structures, and political conventions. A key aspect of this Settlement (especially the economic policies) was that for most of the 20th Century, they were accepted by all mainstream political parties. Few people thought they could ever be undone.

As early as 1930, in a book titled Australia, historian Keith Hancock described the prevailing attitude of these arrangements and how deeply they permeated the culture:

“Protection in Australia has been more than a policy: it has been a faith and dogma. Its critics, during the second decade of the twentieth century, dwindled into a despised and detested sect suspected of nursing an anti-national heresy.”

The policies that formed the Australian Settlement resulted in a closed and inward-looking economy. The nanny state, especially for protected industries, became integrated into the psyche of the business elite and the political class, who enjoyed a cozy and mutually beneficial arrangement at the expense of everybody else.

Within these tariff walls and restrictive regulations, it was possible for some to work within the system and live a relatively comfortable life. For those who were ambitious and entrepreneurial, or simply wanted to succeed or fail based on their own abilities, the system was an intellectual and economic straitjacket.

The Lonely Fight

Enter John Hyde, a man who objected to the system and wanted to do something about it.

Born on February 2, 1936, John experienced the stifling impact of the Australian Settlement early on in his working life. Growing up in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia, he became a successful wheat and sheep farmer.

His first involvement in politics came when he became a councilor of the Shire of Dalwallinu, the deputy-President. John lost his right arm in a farming accident and survived due to the actions of his wife, Helen. Throughout his time in politics, and later in think tanks, during the many ups and downs of policy battles, Helen worked side-by-side with John.

After time in local government, John was elected to the federal seat of Moore in 1974 as a member of the center-right Liberal Party. At that time, the Liberal Party still followed the parameters of the Australian Settlement. The preference by the overwhelming majority of elected Liberal members for the status-quo of tariffs, industry protection, and cartel-like arrangements would be the cause of numerous intra-party clashes which John was inevitably involved in.

When he arrived in Canberra (our capital) and began learning the ropes of being a politician, John was not the first Liberal Party member in Parliament who championed free markets and deregulation. The only other person in that very lonely camp was Bert Kelly, another farmer, who was the federal member for the South Australian rural seat of Wakefield 1958–1977. As an agricultural producer, Bert had experienced the costly government restrictions that made machinery and other imports more expensive.

John would only overlap in Canberra with Bert for three years. However, the influence of Bert was significant. When John veered away from principled, free-market positions, Bert would quietly chide him for “saying things he did not really believe.” Being plainspoken farmers and unlike most modern politicians, schooled in practical businesses, both were able to easily convey to the general public their views and positions on needed economic reforms. Bert and John wrote 898 and 745 articles, respectively, for various state and national papers over their careers. In the era before the internet, this had a significant impact on the public understanding of economic reform and the parameters of what would occur during the pivotal 1980s.

The Dries

In Parliament, John formed and led a small backbench group that included Peter Shack, Ross McLean, Jim Carlton, Murray Sainsbury, Lloyd Lange, David Hamer, and Don Hayward. While few in number, they carried on the efforts of Bert Kelly, who retired from politics in 1977. They were known as “the Dries.” This informal collection of like-minded individuals frequently reached out to sympathetic academics and commentators, as well as others who would help amplify their message. John was the driving force of this group, even if he was not always its most publicly-visible member.

Within Parliament and through the media, the Dries promoted free-market policies, sound public finances, and smaller government. They vigorously opposed many of the socialist economic policies of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s center-left Australian Labour Party. Those socialist policies were soundly rejected with the Whitlam government’s loss in the 1975 elections. But under the succeeding Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, the Dries were routinely disappointed with timid and paltry economic reform. So they focused their attention on shifting the views of fellow party members.

In his speeches, articles, and general advocacy of economic reform, John worked hard to end the two-airline duopoly as well as the numerous subsidies to aircraft, shipping, and car industries. The sheer perseverance of these efforts helped change what policy analysts now refer to as the “Overton Window.”

The “moderate” Fraser government lost the next election, but such was the change in general attitudes that in 1983, many of the very substantive economic reforms John and the Dries were advocating occurred under a center-left government. Floating the Australian dollar (replacing the fixed-rate regime), deregulating the economy, privatizing assets, and implementing other aspects of the “Dry” agenda occurred in large part due to the quiet work of John Hyde and his colleagues. Their persuasiveness and perseverance changed the country, and it didn’t matter to them which party was the one to get the job done.

John Hyde’s success was due to his focus on ideas rather than political affiliation. For example, when the opposition Labour Party under Whitlam cut tariffs 25 percent across the board, he supported the move though it was unpopular with a large section of his own party. Good policy and sound economics were always more important to him than petty partisan politics, and he made many friends on both sides of parliament.

Pursuing a moral position at odds with tribal loyalties is a rare phenomenon amongst elected officials. It normally places one on the outs with colleagues and limits one’s advancement in the power structure. But that’s what John did as a matter of course. It’s his nature.

Post-Politics

After his service in Parliament, John created the Australian Institute for Public Policy in Perth, Western Australia, to continue promoting the benefits of freer markets and less government involvement in the economy. It later merged with the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs in 1991. Always respectful, John’s good nature meant that while many would disagree with his views, few could ever fault him for being nasty or condescending.

Instead of following the well-worn path of a political memoir, John wrote a guidebook for the next generation of economic reformers. Published in 2002, Dry: In Defence of Economic Freedom emphasized the key battles during the Fraser years which were pivotal in dismantling the Australian Settlement. John understood that his experience may help someone in the future because the battle of ideas is as much an art as it is a science.

In 2002, John joined the board of the organization where I now serve as Executive Director, Mannkal Economic Education Foundation. We are a Perth-based think tank that develops future leaders who will defend and advance freedom and free markets. Founded by Australian businessman Ron Manners, Mannkal enjoys a close partnership with the Foundation for Economic Education, sending students to FEE events and interns to work at FEE’s Atlanta, Georgia, headquarters. FEE president Lawrence Reed dedicated his 2016 book, Real Heroes to Ron and his wife Jenny as well as the late Wisconsin businessman Edwin Gallun and his wife Elfie.

In discussing pivotal moments in his career, John is extraordinarily humble. He downplays his role. But because of what he did to change Australia, I and many others think of John Hyde as a hero, even though he will never call himself that.

We at Mannkal will launch a new project this year to archive and catalog John’s papers. Capturing the insights of this real hero, who never held an executive position in government, will hopefully inspire the next reformer who decides to avoid the greasy pole.

Andrew Pickford is the Executive Director of Mannkal Economic Education Foundation. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Project WA: A Growth and Productivity Agenda for the Next Government, which he co-wrote with John Hyde.

Originally published at FEE.org on February 8, 2018.

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