Introduction
Leonard Learn just isn’t a family identify; in truth, not many People even acknowledge it. That’s unlucky, as a result of, in accordance with his biographer, Mary Sennholz, “Leonard Learn was one of the notable social philosophers of our time. His identify will without end be related to the rebirth of the liberty philosophy” (Sennholz 1996). Largely due to his efforts, as noticed by Bettina Bien Greaves, “the liberty philosophy and free markets at the moment are extra broadly mentioned and extra respectable” (Greaves 1998). Or, extra succinctly, in Gary North’s phrases, “the libertarian motion . . . may be traced to Learn and Learn’s imaginative and prescient” (North 2002).
This ebook just isn’t a biography of Leonard Learn. There’s already a superb one accessible—Mary Sennholz’s Leonard E. Learn: Thinker of Freedom (Sennholz 1993)—for many who want to perceive Learn extra absolutely. My objective is to introduce or reintroduce a few of Learn’s finest sustained arguments, on behalf of what he referred to as the liberty philosophy, to an viewers that may be receptive to the ideas of liberty.
Nonetheless, a really temporary biographical background is to be able to set the stage. Learn was born September 26, 1898, in Hubbardston, Michigan. He grew up poor and intensely hardworking, partially as a result of his father died when he was ten. His laborious work and expertise led him to turn out to be supervisor of the Western division of the US Chamber of Commerce in 1932 and normal supervisor of the Los Angeles department—the biggest within the nation—in 1939.
Leonard Learn vigorously represented the Chamber of Commerce’s insurance policies. In 1933, he met with W.C. Mullendore, government vice chairman of Southern California Edison, who had been crucial of the Chamber’s positions. Learn provided his protection of the Chamber’s strategy and rationale, however Mullendore eviscerated it. He then taught Learn “his finest lesson ever”—the core of the philosophy that Learn would promote for the remainder of his life.
Learn, who was largely self-educated, wrote a ebook to specific his philosophy. The Romance of Actuality, revealed in 1937, made the case for liberty—that’s, self-ownership and the voluntary preparations it enabled—that he would proceed to develop for greater than 4 many years.
Throughout his time on the Chamber of Commerce, Leonard Learn turned a crusader for freedom. However he couldn’t wholeheartedly promote his campaign throughout the Chamber resulting from its positions. So, Learn left at a sizeable monetary price to himself—“placing all the things on the road, and risking all the things” (Gresham 1968), as Henry Hazlitt put it in his contribution to What’s Previous Is Prologue, a group honoring Learn’s seventieth birthday—in 1946, a time when the prospects for freedom on this planet have been bleak, to create his personal group to advertise freedom. It was named the Basis for Financial Training (FEE), which Gary North referred to as “the granddaddy of all libertarian organizations” (North 2002) and which impressed the formation of many different free-market organizations (such because the Mont Pelerin Society, shaped in 1947) and suppose tanks which have since arisen all through the world. Lawrence Fertig, then vice-chair of FEE, describes Learn’s resolve: “When Leonard Learn heeded the decision of conscience in 1946 and arranged the Basis for Financial Training, even his libertarian supporters and buddies took a dim view of his possibilities of success. At the moment it was plain that the tide of Statism was solely starting to rise. Pessimism was rife and lots of feared that freedom could be engulfed by the advance of Socialism in the USA. . . . However Leonard Learn . . . stored a flicker of the liberty philosophy alive in what appeared to be the darkish age of statist advance” (Gresham 1968).
In accordance with Bettina Bien Greaves, Learn’s objective was “to counteract, by way of FEE, the anti-freedom, pro-socialist New Deal philosophy of submit–World Struggle II America. The issue was to reawaken within the individuals a perception within the morality of freedom. Since individuals can’t be pressured to be ethical, their concepts have to be modified—by way of training. Learn’s complete life turned dedicated to this job, to free-market training within the broadest sense of the phrase” (Greaves 1998).
Years later, Learn found that his strategy mirrored an perception from Albert Schweitzer’s 1923 Civilization and Ethics:
Civilization can solely revive when there shall come into being in quite a lot of people a brand new tone of thoughts impartial of the one prevalent among the many crowd and in opposition to it. A brand new public opinion have to be created. . . . The prevailing one is maintained by the press, by propaganda, by group, and by monetary and different influences at its disposal. . . . This unnatural approach of spreading concepts have to be opposed by the pure one, which fits from individual to individual and depends solely on the reality of the ideas and the hearer’s receptiveness for brand spanking new fact. (Schweitzer 1923)
Within the position of not solely FEE’s founder and chief but in addition its coronary heart and soul, Learn traveled broadly, giving speeches, producing an array of pamphlets selling freedom, and taking part in lots of of seminars to defend and advance particular person liberty. As Gary North put it, FEE’s flagship publication, The Freeman (which I’m proud to have written many articles for), “was the printed incarnation of Learn’s philosophy.”
At FEE, Leonard Learn wrote prolifically. Along with speeches, displays, and pamphlets, he wrote not less than twenty-seven books (twenty-nine by some experiences, relying on what’s counted as a pamphlet and what’s counted as a ebook). In actual fact, if there have been a top-ten listing for what number of phrases somebody had dedicated to the reason for liberty, Leonard Learn would possible be on it. The core of his message is described properly by Bettina Bien Greaves:
Learn was an ethical thinker, not an economist, although his ideas made him a fairly good free-market economist. He reasoned that whether it is ethical to respect the life and property of people, then it’s immoral to violate their rights to life and property; whether it is ethical to deal peacefully with others, then it’s immoral to make use of pressure, fraud, or risk of pressure to impose one’s needs on others; if voluntary transactions amongst private-property house owners are ethical, then to hinder or forestall voluntary transactions amongst keen merchants is immoral. Nobody, neither non-public particular person nor public company, ought to take property by pressure or coercion from one individual for the advantage of one other. These ideas led Learn logically to imagine within the morality of private-property rights, a free-market financial system, and free commerce, and to the conviction that authorities intervention that violates non-public property, hampers free markets, and interferes with free commerce is immoral. His proverbial reply when requested the way to clear up any financial drawback was: “Get the federal government out of it.” (Greaves 1998)
For Learn, the distinction between what was permissible and what was not was easy. Something that’s peaceable (additionally the title of one among his many books) was permissible. The voluntary approach was not solely proper however helpful. However the usage of pressure to coerce others towards their will was mistaken and immoral.
This ebook is an try to assemble an intensive assortment of Leonard Learn’s finest, strongest sustained arguments on behalf of liberty, edited for brevity, with temporary introductory remarks, organizational additions, and commentary connecting them to present points. The arguments come from his books, articles, notes, and speeches, and a few span a number of sources. They cowl a large gamut of topics, together with the rhetorical and logical abuses which are used to misrepresent liberty, the which means of excellent authorities, the central significance of integrity (which Learn seen because the foremost advantage), the need of recognizing what’s unknown, the significance of markets in revealing info that’s in any other case unknowable in a fancy world, the variations between desires and rights and between justice and social justice, whether or not immoral means can obtain ethical ends, how the redistributive state harms each participant, and lots of extra.
Learn believed that nothing ought to stand in the way in which of freedom’s energy to alter minds, together with the morality and efficacy of “the free market and its miraculous performances” because the precept of social group. This assortment displays, all through, Jacob Hornberger’s description of him: “Leonard Learn took a fully uncompromising strategy to the ideas of freedom. He argued that man’s objective on earth, no matter it’s, requires the widest doable ambit for human progress and maturation. Due to this fact, he believed, an individual ought to be free to do no matter he desires in life so long as it’s peaceable” (Hornberger 1991).
The alternatives right here don’t by any means exhaust Learn’s insights or his skill to show a phrase. They’re meant to stimulate critical thought and additional studying and, I hope, to start “infecting” extra individuals at the moment together with his deep-seated dedication to liberty. That, in spite of everything, was one among Leonard Learn’s objectives: to plant seeds of liberty, in order that people, and thereby society, might blossom to their fullest potential. Hornberger even describes Learn and his associates as “freedom’s ‘Johnny Appleseeds.’”
Learn’s actions took actual braveness. Dan Sanchez just lately wrote about how US Consultant Frank Buchanan’s Choose Committee on Lobbying investigated FEE with a fine-tooth comb in 1949, just a few years after its founding, spending per week “rummag[ing] by way of FEE’s workplaces” and summoning Learn to seem earlier than the committee (quoted in Sanchez 2023). FEE had criticized big-government insurance policies, which Buchanan backed, for violating People’ liberties. Buchanan stretched mightily the definition of lobbying to incorporate criticism and thus carry the problem below his committee’s sway.
Learn’s phrases in entrance of the committee demonstrated his unwillingness to again down from defending liberty, even within the face of highly effective opposition. Quite than be cowed, he famous that to name FEE’s work lobbying would require calling all the things lobbying: “‘Lobbying’ . . . turns into synonymous with communication of thought—all thought. The Bible communicates concepts that may have an effect on laws. The phrases of each instructor, each minister of the gospel, of each individual right here or elsewhere, are communicated ideas having doable results on laws. The listing is infinite” (quoted in Sanchez 2023).
Learn proceeded to put out how FEE was not a political lobbying group by any smart definition: “The group which I symbolize is a non-profit analysis and academic establishment. Its sole objective is a seek for fact in economics, political science and associated topics. It’s that, and nothing extra—an establishment for studying” (quoted in Sanchez 2023).
The assault on Learn and FEE for standing up for liberty didn’t consequence within the intimidation and silence Buchanan meant. As Bettina Bien Greaves summarized it, “The Buchanan hearings interrupted however didn’t deter FEE from its instructional objective. The Basis went quietly on its approach making an attempt to erode the rock of pro-government opinion with the written and spoken phrase” (Greaves 1996).
W.C. Mullendore, the supply of Learn’s “finest lesson ever” and a trustee of FEE, wrote a letter to Buchanan which clearly laid out a recognition of what was actually afoot and the way essential the problem continues to be at the moment: “Those that search to increase the ability of Authorities attempt to shut the mouths of residents who dare to oppose or inform public opinion on the risks concerned, and one of the efficient technique of undertaking this subversive goal is to intimidate, by way of harassing investigations and smearing innuendos, the efforts of residents to defend themselves. Your inquisitional and intensely burdensome demand for info which you haven’t any ethical proper to demand is a most alarming instance of the usage of this implies of intimidation” (96 Cong. Rec. H8339 (1950)).
Leonard Learn’s insights are each priceless and sturdy. They tackle points that also bedevil liberty and the blessings that are available its wake. Friedrich Hayek, in What’s Previous Is Prologue, might have offered probably the most highly effective endorsement of Learn and his efforts that I’ve seen:
I imagine that what the Basis for Financial Training, with Leonard Learn at its head, and all his co-fighters and buddies are dedicated to is nothing extra nor lower than the protection of our civilization towards mental error. . . .
. . . There’s hardly anybody who on the identical time sees the nice problems with our time as mental issues and likewise is so aware of the considering of the sensible man that he can put the essential arguments in a language which is significant to the person of the world.
If Leonard Learn’s place might be distinctive at the moment, it’s exactly as a result of he possesses each colleges. . . . I discovered not solely that he knew rather more than a lot of the remainder of us in regards to the opinions governing present insurance policies, and was subsequently rather more efficient in assembly the errors in them. . . . However I discovered additionally that he was a profound and authentic thinker who disguised the profundity of his conclusions by placing them into homely on a regular basis language. (Gresham 1968)
Ben Rogge supplies an extra “amen” to Hayek’s appreciation of Learn’s central position in each the protection and advance of liberty (mirrored by the engraving on a silver bowl on the commemoration of his seventieth birthday: “Thinker and Chief of the Free Society”): “Nicely might we be irritated when Leonard Learn tells us time and again and nonetheless once more that we should all the time look to ourselves, to self-improvement, to not reforming others, if we want to serve the reason for freedom . . . however . . . someplace on this world any individual is considering or talking or writing a phrase or taking an motion below the direct or oblique affect of the life and teachings of Leonard Learn. Could the remainder of us be one half as efficient and the world will once more flip its face to freedom” (Gresham 1968).
I hope my try to determine and lay out Leonard Learn’s insights right here is one half as efficient as he was in advancing freedom. However given how far he’s from public consciousness at the moment, I’m positive that anybody who prizes liberty will discover right here a lot new knowledge, though it’s in truth not so new.
Gary Galles
Camarillo, CA
