This professionally prepared ebook is an electronic edition of the book that is designed for reading on digital readers like Nook, Kindle, iPad, Sony Reader, and other products including iPhone and Android smart phones. The text reflows depending on your font preferences and it contains links from navigation.
Written in 1951, this is one of Leonard Read’s earliest pamphlets on what he called “the philosophy of freedom.”
As was often the case in Read’s essays on spreading the message of liberty, Read notes that the first step is evaluating one’s own thinking.
Communism and socialism, Read contends, are not ideologies that exist somewhere out there among foreigners and shady agents of conspiracy. In America, the ideas of communism and socialism are alive and well among the supporters of public schooling, social security, the post office, and other tools of the state.
In the end, whoever contends that the use of force is the proper method to attain “social performance” is spreading the ideas of socialism and communism.
He who wishes to spread ideas of freedom and free markets, Read explains, must first rid himself of his own socialistic thinking, and only then may he turn to spreading the ideas to others.
But even then, the task at hand is a qualitative battle, and not one of numbers or of “setting straight the ‘millions who have votes,’” or educating “th...