59. What Liberty Has Meant To Me

59

LAWRENCE W. REED

WHAT LIBERTY HAS MEANT TO ME

I WAS BORN IN CHIPPEWA TOWNSHIP, outside a little Western Pennsylvania town called Beaver Falls on September 29, 1953. That’s where I grew up and lived for the first 24 years of my life, until I moved to Michigan to start teaching at Northwood University in 1977.

I went to two Pennsylvania colleges for my B.A. and M.A. degrees: Grove City College and Slippery Rock State University. Western Pennsylvania was home to the Whiskey Rebellion, and I think my English and Scotch-Irish ancestors who were a part of that must have passed on some authority-questioning genes to me. I’ve never regretted not going on to “earn” a Ph.D. in the traditional sense, though in 1994 I was both stunned and honored to accept an honorary doctorate in Public Administration (I guess that makes me a Doctor of Bureaucracy) from Central Michigan University.

During the seven years I taught at Northwood University, I designed a unique four-year dual major in Economics and Business Management, founded an annual “Freedom Seminar” that is celebrating it’s still thriving, and won the “Faculty Excellence Award” from Northwood students five times. In 1983, when Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) passed away, I was chosen by a search committee of the FEE board to succeed him. Leonard was a big influence on me both as an author and a friend. I wrote my first of more than a hundred articles for FEE’s journal, The Freeman (changed to Ideas on Liberty) in 1977 and I regard it as a singular honor to have served from 1994–2002 as a member of FEE’s board and as its chair for three of those years. Leonard’s persona—his optimism and his gentle persuasiveness in particular—left a very large and permanent imprint on me.

But instead of assuming the FEE position back in 1983, I went in a different direction: I went to Idaho to direct a small think tank and simultaneously began a part-time career as a freelance journalist that would eventually take me to dozens of countries. Some of my most memorable experiences have been behind the Iron Curtain, covering anti-communist and libertarian movements in the late 1980s. I was arrested in Nicaragua and Poland and in the case of the latter, I was also strip-searched, interrogated, and expelled by the communist regime—a badge of honor I’m proud of to this day.

Since at least 1900, as far as I can tell, no one on either my father’s side or my mother’s side of the family ever had much interest and even less involvement in political, economic, or current affairs. But my father imparted some basic, no-nonsense, anti-authoritarian and pro-freedom instincts that I nurtured in the late 1960s and which really blossomed in 1968.

One of my first encounters with government was when I was in the third grade and my father wanted to take me to Florida for a week in January to visit relatives. The public-school officials protested. They called my dad and said he couldn’t take me out of school just for a vacation. He told them in no uncertain terms that I was his kid, not theirs, and while he was taking me to a warm place, they could pack their bags and go someplace a lot hotter.

My father’s instincts planted the seeds, but my mother took my sister and me to see The Sound of Music in 1965, and that proved to be a powerful catalyst. I was only 12 and I didn’t want to go, but the movie really had an effect on me. State oppression vs. people who just wanted to be left alone—that’s the way I saw it. It prompted me to do a lot of reading on pre-World War II history, especially the Nazi takeovers of Austria and Czechoslovakia.

When the “Prague Spring” blossomed in early 1968, I was glued to the TV set and the newspapers. When Warsaw Pact troops crossed the border in August, I was angry and wanted to do something. Within days, I saw a newspaper story about a group called Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) who were organizing an anti-Soviet demonstration in downtown Pittsburgh. I went to it, helped burn a Soviet flag in Mellon Square, and joined YAF. In those days, YAF sent all new members copies of books like Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Bastiat’s The Law, and Weaver’s The Mainspring of Human Progress. I devoured them, gained an appreciation for economics, and my life was forever altered as a result.

I don’t know how many people in our movement can trace their intellectual beginnings to a movie, and maybe it sounds corny to some, but that’s what happened with me.

Though I was experiencing the inner rumblings of a freedom philosophy before 1968, because of the subtle influences of my father and the more tangible impact of that movie and my reading, it all came together for me in that tumultuous year. I date my formal start in this whole movement from 1968, so I guess that means I’ve been at it since high school. In August of 2003, I commemorated the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia by meeting with Czech president Vaclav Klaus in Prague.

Dr. Hans Sennholz, one of four scholars to earn a Ph.D. under Ludwig von Mises, was my teacher at Grove City College and I can hardly talk about formative intellectual years without citing his profound influence. His eloquence and passion for liberty were huge inspirations. I learned of him in 1971, as a senior in high school, when I attended a YAF convention in New Jersey at which he spoke.

Largely because of the influences of people like Leonard Read and Hans Sennholz, I have ever since been absorbed with and motivated by the philosophy of liberty. Since 1968, it has been the single most powerful focus of my life and, I suspect, that’s the way it will always be. There is no earthly cause more noble. In my belief, more of the good things about life depend on it than on any other single thing. Without it, life has little meaning.

On a less lofty note, I am passionate about animals—animals, mind you, not animal “rights”—of almost all kinds, dogs in particular. I’m passionate about history—in fact, virtually all my pleasure reading is in British, American, ancient Roman, military, or Christian history. I devour biographies of great men and women who have appreciated and advanced liberty, or who persevered in the face of great odds—like Gladstone, Wilberforce, and Livingstone in Britain, for example. I’m passionate about foreign travel, seeing the world, and getting to know foreign peoples and cultures. And I love writing, public speaking, tennis, hiking, skydiving, and even weight-lifting which, unfortunately, I didn’t really get into in a big way until the age of 48. I especially love fly fishing because it’s totally absorbing and the very activity itself makes me think of liberty. I figure when I hook ’em, I’m giving the fish a taste of what socialism is all about. Then when I throw ’em back, hopefully they’ve learned something about steering clear of that seductive free lunch.

I am often asked to describe my political philosophy. I cringe at labels because too often they conjure up misimpressions, stereotypes, and simplistic conclusions. I’d rather talk about ideas. But if you have to attach a label to my political philosophy, I suppose “classical liberal” would do just fine. I believe in limited, minimal government, though I don’t pick fights with my anarcho-capitalist friends. More power to ’em. I have enough faith in freedom that I respect those who argue that given certain conditions and an enlightened climate of opinion, there’s not an aspect of life that civil society can’t handle better than politics and politicians.

I regard myself as a patriot and patriotic, but maybe with a twist that isn’t always a part of conventional patriotism these days. You can read what I mean about that in my essay entitled, “The True Meaning of Patriotism.”

Many people who believe in liberty didn’t start out that way, and may even have been socialists at one time. In fact, one of the signs of maturation, of shedding infantile and anti-social behavior and becoming a thinking, civilized adult is learning the superiority of voluntarism and the free and civil society over political coercion and redistribution. Well, I was never a statist of any kind. From my earliest awareness of political philosophies and social systems, I understood that the only thing socialism has ever really done for poor people is give them lots of company.

When I’m asked who my favorite people in history are, I can go on for hours but I’ll just mention a few here. Grover Cleveland is my personal favorite among U.S. presidents, and a hero to me. He vetoed more bills than all the previous 21 presidents combined, and was a rock of honesty and integrity. He was staunchly for free trade, sound money, limited government, balanced budgets, and free enterprise. I had the privilege of spending an evening with his son Francis in August 1995, just two months before he passed away at the age of 92. He was the oldest living child of an American president at that time. A year later, I spent an afternoon with John Coolidge, son of another president I admire.

William Ewert Gladstone, four times British Prime Minister, is a hero to me because unlike most politicians, he only got better with age and tenure in office. He started out a statist and protectionist, came to appreciate liberty, and did more to liberate the spirit of enterprise in Britain than any other PM in the country’s history.

While I have my favorite politicians, they are still eclipsed in my mind by the nonpolitical people who invent, create, and build—and who improve the lot of us all in the process. Risk-taking entrepreneurs who do it all in the marketplace without resort to favors from government are all heroes to me, and America has produced them by the boatloads.

I myself ran for office once, in 1982. I was the Republican nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in my district here in Michigan, running against an incumbent Democrat. Though I lost, I made a lot of friends and pretty much killed off whatever political ambitions may have been stirring within. I learned firsthand that politics is not for me. If you want to know why, see my essay entitled, “Don’t Expect Much From Politics.”

I deal with heroes every day of the week as a part of my job. They included my hardworking staff during my tenure at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. I could name them all but I’ll cite just one here for reasons of space—senior vice president Joe Overton. There’s no more talented or dedicated genius in our movement than Joe, and probably not a single organization of our kind that wouldn’t love to hire him away. He’s not an attention-seeker, but people who know him understand that we all owe him a great debt for his leadership and innovative ideas for advancing liberty. He was my right-hand man and best friend for almost 20 years and I was privileged to be Best Man at his wedding. I cannot imagine our success at the Mackinac Center without him. I also was ably assisted by many others, such as assistant Kendra Shrode and the indomitable executive vice president, Joe Lehman. You can read about these people at www.mackinac.org.

My heroes also include the leaders within our sister think tanks in state after state. Many of them work at a big missionary discount because they believe in liberty. I wish I could cite them all, but I’ll name just a few: Darcy Olson at the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, Bob Williams at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, Alex Chafuen and Jo Kwong at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Bridgett Wagner at the Heritage Foundation, Chip Mellor at the Institute for Justice, Chris Derry at the Bluegrass Institute in Kentucky, and Tracie Sharp at the State Policy Network are all good examples. So is Peter Holle, who heads up the Pioneer Centre for Public Policy up in Winnipeg, Canada, and Linda Whetstone who helps free market groups all over the world from her home in England. My good friend James Shikwati of Kenya, who has started East Africa’s first free market think tank, is another. (Let me put a plug in for him by referring to his website, at www.irenkenya.org.)

I’ve met hundreds of fascinating people over the years but the activists in the Polish freedom underground in the late 1980s will always be among the most interesting to me because of their perseverance in the face of the Soviet empire. I remember visiting with a couple in 1986, Zbigniew and Sofia Romaszewski, who had just gotten out of prison for running an underground radio. They were active once again on behalf of freedom because it meant everything to them. I asked them many questions including, “When you were broadcasting, how did you know if people were listening?” I’ve recounted Sophia’s reply hundreds of times to audiences all over the country, and my eyes still well up every time I think of it. She said, “We could only broadcast a few minutes at a time and then had to go off the air to avoid detection, but one night we asked people to blink their lights if they were listening and were supportive of freedom for Poland. We then went to the window and for hours, all of Warsaw was blinking!”

It’s largely because of people like Zbigniew and Sofia that millions once behind the Iron Curtain are free today.

I’ve met Margaret Thatcher several times and had breakfast with President Reagan in the White House. I admire them both very much.

I once interviewed the Finance Minister of Haiti in the year after Duvalier was ousted. His name was Leslie Delatour and he was accomplishing amazing things—privatizing and freeing up the economy. Too bad he was gone in a year, replaced by another batch of statist demagogues.

I was a good friend of Dr. Haing Ngor, Academy Award-winning actor from The Killing Fields. In 1989, I accompanied him on his first trip back to his native Cambodia since his escape from the Khmer Rouge a decade before. Now there’s a guy who knew what freedom was and how costly it is to lose it. The supreme tragedy of his life was that after going through an unbelievable hell under a communist dictatorship, he was later killed by common street thugs in downtown Los Angeles.

Foreign travel has been a large part of my life since my first visit to the old Soviet Union in March 1985. I’ve visited more than 59 countries on six continents, many of them several times. When I was doing anti-communist work in the 1980s and early ’90s, I went to the Soviet Union five times, China three times, Nicaragua five times, Poland twice, and even Cambodia. After I befriended the leader of the rebel opposition in Marxist Mozambique in 1991, a colleague and I made an incredible, surreptitious trip to that country and lived with the rebels at their bush headquarters in the midst of a devastating civil war. That was unlike just about any other trip I’ve ever made anywhere.

I’ve studied hyperinflation in Bolivia (1985), voodoo in Haiti (1987), and underground movements in the old East bloc. There are few places in the world that I don’t want to go to some day. Foreign travel is an enriching experience but after awhile, it’s a killer trying to keep up correspondence with friends you’ve made all over the place.

What have I learned from all that travel? I’ve learned that the planned economy—socialism in all its preposterous and destructive manifestations—is a cruel joke that never works. Socialists have said that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, but as I’ve written in a number of places, socialists never make omelets. They only break eggs. You can read about that in an essay I wrote entitled, “Where Are The Omelets?”

I’ve learned that the prism of individualism is the only way to see the world. Stereotyping a people or a nation is always a false, ignorant, and dangerous way to view them.

I’ve learned that individuals are often phenomenally enterprising in the face of enormous, artificial, politically-erected roadblocks. I saw so much in the way of black markets and private enterprise in places where such things were repressed that I’ve come to regard much of what government does in the way of pushing people around to be utterly futile. If it’s a peaceful activity with no real victims, leave it alone.

And I’ve learned that the two main obstacles that pull people apart and provoke hatred and conflict are: (1) stupid, brainless, know-it-all ideologies of power and control, and (2) the incompetent, venal governments that make those ideologies into policy.

I worked for 20 years at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. I was its president from the time it opened its doors in January of 1988 until 2008. I’m enormously proud of what was built. Within half a dozen years, the Mackinac Center became the largest and one of the most prolific and effective of some 40 state-based free market institutes.

In 2008 I did become president of the Foundation for Economic Education after turning the position down in 1983.

The case for liberty is intellectually airtight. What we’re really battling to overcome is ignorance and corruption. We’re winning the battle, slowly but surely. Think about the people who have undergone philosophical transitions in recent years. I know of lots of former statists, interventionists, coercion-worshippers—whatever you want to call them—who used to put all their faith in the state but have wised up. I know of almost no former free market advocates who have come to the view that central planning is the way to go. The drift is almost entirely in our direction.

Pessimism, moreover, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You don’t work as hard for anything if you don’t think it will prevail, which only assures its defeat. I never feel as though I have to win over every hard-core statist. If they are incorrigible, I just smile and tell them that they’re on the losing side and it’s only a matter of time before they jump ship. Just explain to them that liberty will ultimately prevail and there’s no point in believing otherwise.

That doesn’t mean, however, that those of us who believe in liberty can just sit back and let history take its course. We must devote maximum time and energy on its behalf. What a person can do in this regard comes under two headings: (1) Introspection and Improvement and (2) Outreach.

Each person needs to start by honestly assessing his own personal set of skills, talents, resources, and knowledge base. Get your own life in order, be a burden to no one, seek nothing from others through the political process except that they leave you alone, be a model in everything you do that will lead and inspire others by example. Take charge of your life, accept all your responsibilities at home and elsewhere without hesitation. And get your mental attitude in shape—by which I mean things like have a healthy sense of humor, a good feel for both your strengths and weaknesses, a bubbly optimism. Be a good citizen who respects the lives and property of others. You can’t expect to be free if you support making others less free. Make your life a nonstop learning journey—read and become as informed about freedom in all its aspects as you can possibly be.

Take care of that and then you’re in good shape to engage in Outreach. It starts by recognizing that liberty depends on its believers becoming teachers of liberty. Once you’ve assessed what you do best—whether it be writing, speaking, encouraging others in one-on-one, intimate settings, or just writing checks and providing advice to others who do these things on behalf of liberty, then get off your duff and do it.

The single greatest threat to liberty is ignorance. Most people who don’t support liberty have not come to that view because they’ve read the literature extensively and decided against it. They’ve just never been exposed to a coherent, persuasive case for it. They’re certainly not getting it from the government schools or the establishment media. Education is still the number one challenge we liberty advocates face. We simply must reach more people, and develop more clever and attractive appeals.

In a policy sense, the greatest threats to liberty are these: the government school monopoly, blind support of the state in every “emergency” (in the wake of 9/11, we’re seeing growing encroachments on liberty with little to show for it), and a large segment of the population that would rather vote for a living than work for one, and that includes lots of corporations as well as university professors and ordinary welfare recipients.

There’s only one thing to do about it: educate, educate, educate. And don’t take no for an answer. William Wilberforce worked for 46 years to get Britain to abolish slavery and lost dozens of votes along the way. It never deterred him. He just learned to get better and better at making his case.

How we make our case is almost as important as the case itself. Rarely is it appropriate to come across in a hostile, confrontational, or condescending manner. It’s never fitting to be arrogant, shrill, or self-righteous. We should convey these ideas in the most judicious, inviting, helpful, and persuasive fashion possible. We should be magnets for every open-minded person willing to learn. We can have all the facts and passion in the world but if we lack people skills, we’ll just be talking to ourselves.

I’ll close this autobiography with a few of my favorite quotes, and why each is important to me:

“Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is force. Like fire, it can be either a dangerous servant or a fearful master.” ~ George Washington. I like that one because it makes it plain that even the smallest and best of governments that are genuine servants of the people are still dangerous.

“He’s honest, but you’ve got to watch him.” ~ Groucho Marx referring to his brother Harpo. I like this one because it’s got part of the same message as the Washington quote above, except it’s more succinct. Again, even the most honest of governments you’ve got to keep your eye on every waking moment. I’m a long-time Groucho Marxist.

“Ideas are more powerful than all the armies of the world. Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” ~ Victor Hugo, paraphrased. This is another reason why I’m an optimist. We are creatures of free will and we can learn from our mistakes. We can change the course of history by changing the ideas that drive it.

“It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.” ~ From the Declaration of Arbroath, issued by Scots in 1320 as they sought to expel English invaders. That about sums it up, doesn’t it?

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” ~ Edmund Burke. I don’t think I need to say anything more about that one.

Lawrence W. Reed was named president of the Foundation for Economic Education in 2008.