Editors Note: September 26, 2013 is the 115th anniversary of the birth of Leonard E. Read

Why are unattainable utopian visions attractive and inspirational to so many while the promises of liberty, under which a vastly-improved society can actually be attained, are so often disregarded? Leonard Read, among Americas most prolific defenders of liberty in the 20th century, considered that question.

In Let Freedom Reign, Read argued that libertys failure to gain more adherents than utopian statism derived in substantial measure from the fact that the ends envisioned, rather than the means involved, often motivate people. Unlike the utopian visions, the freedom philosophy recognizes that a system of free markets is an amoral servant that does not claim to generate no objectionable results to anyone. For this reason, liberty faces an inspirational disadvantage.

A good illustration of utopianisms advantage over freedom is the utopians assertion that he can deliver equality of results (implicitly assumed to be equality at a high level of prosperity). This in turn leads to rationalizations for cutting freedom off at the knees. Yet some forms of inequality are inseparable from astounding social benefits, particularly the massive gains from specialization among people with differing abilities and circumstances, coordinated through voluntary market arrangements.

As Read noted in Having My Way, rather than bemoaning any inequality of results, it would be more accurate to say, inequality exists, fortunately! as long as it is combined with freedom, which he called our working handmaiden.

[F]reedom and equality are ... mutually antagonistic. The equality idearests on the antithesis of freedom: raw coercion. It is ... impossible to be free when equality is politically manipulated ...

Not our likenesses, but our differences, give rise to the division of labor and the complex market processes of production and trade ... it is to our advantage to specialize and to trade with other specialists. ... By thus serving others and becoming ever more skilled and outstanding (unequal) in the process he best serves his own interest.

Read recognized that inequality among individuals was a fact and that the working handmaiden of voluntary arrangements allowed the members of society to better achieve what they desired. As a result, Read also saw that attributing disliked results, such as deviations from an idealized equality, to voluntary arrangements, misplaced the blame. Those deviations are rooted in an underlying reality utopians simply assume away. Therefore, restricting voluntary arrangements, beyond preventing force and fraud, cannot solve the real problems that arise from scarcity. However, the attempt to do so hobbles the markets ability to coordinate the productive plans of people with vastly different skills and circumstances, causing harm in the misguided attempt to accomplish good.

Read saw that libertys defenders must face the fact that markets are amoral servants which enable people to do whatever they want better. They cannot be relied upon with certainty to only do good and inspirational things. But whenever they enable doing ill, they only reflect the desires individuals have. If we reformed ourselves, markets could do no harm. In contrast, coercively reforming ourselves by law does not eliminate the cause of such harm and so does little to actually stop it. Moreover, the restrictions on markets adopted in the process throw out the amoral servant that allows us to accomplish greater good than achievable via any other known means.

This brought Read to focus on the crucial distinction between inspirational utopian ends and the means such ends necessarily entail. The collectivist means, backed by force, that utopias require are immoral, so such systems cannot be moral.

Original post:

Liberty Delivers a Better World While Utopians Promise a Perfect One