Paul Krugman's Illuminating Smear

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Wed Apr 25 13:49:56 PDT 2007


<http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=042307A>


TCS Daily


Paul Krugman's Illuminating Smear: How the Right and the Libertarians Diverged


By Brian Doherty : BIO| 24 Apr 2007


Paul Krugman was recently called on to smear the recently deceased
economist and libertarian polemicist Milton Friedman in the pages of the
New York Review of Books. Among the bill of particulars was that Friedman's
policy-commenter career began "under rather odd circumstances." That is,
under the aegis of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). As Krugman
quotes the liberal historian of the Goldwater movement, Rick Perlstein,
FEE, founded in 1946 and still around today, "spread a libertarian gospel
so uncompromising it bordered on anarchism."

That's scary enough for the NYRB reader. But it gets worse. The next
sentence points out, case closed, that "Robert Welch, the founder of the
John Birch Society, sat on the FEE's board."

Ironically, the very thing that made the Birchers such a long-lasting
symbol of right-wing nuttiness and evil was this very sort of
guilt-by-association. The very mention of this tenuous connection is
supposed to prove that Friedman's politics must be similarly eccentric or
sinister.

First of all, although Welch and FEE were part of a general community of
affinity centered around free markets, Welch was never actually a member of
FEE's board.  Still, the story of FEE, and Friedman's and Welch's role in
it, is more interesting than Krugman's quick smear would have it, and cuts
to the heart of some of the distinctions and conflicts over the years
between, and among, libertarians and conservatives.

Libertarians and conservatives have often been allied. Libertarianism is a
core part of the conservative zeitgeist. Indeed, it could be argued that
the libertarianism in them was the central appeal of such conservative
politician-heroes as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

But libertarians and conservatives are not the same. Why what started as a
mostly unified gang of opponents of Rooseveltism and the New Deal in the
late 1940s/early 1950s split into self-consciously libertarian and
conservative components is a complicated story. But one important aspect of
it revolved around a curious, but very American, man named Leonard Read,
FEE's founder, who ran it until his dying day in 1983.

Read was born and raised a Michigan farm boy, served his country during
World War I, and later sought his fortune among the perfumed fruit orchards
and rolling hills of California. By 1939 he had become general manager of
the Los Angeles branch of the Chamber of Commerce.

He had already been converted to a consistent modern libertarianism by a
Southern California Edison executive named William Mullendore, and over the
course of the 1940s Read adopted most of the movement's heroes and
influences as his own, particularly Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Rose
Wilder Lane. There was little room at the Chamber for such an
uncompromising libertarian. By 1945 Read quit, seeing no hope for a group
whose president had announced in 1943 that "the old-style capitalism of a
primitive, free-shooting period is gone forever."

FEE was a curious sort of ideological non-profit. Read would never
explicitly scrape for funds; none of these modern direct mail letters
warning of the imminent passage of this dreadful legislation or success of
this horrible politician if they didn't give generously, and by return
post! Read never directly asked anyone to give anything, he proudly
insisted, relying on the free choice of potential supporters to come their
way-which it did. While FEE would sell its pamphlets and magazine, The
Freeman, their material was also free to anyone who asked. FEE eschewed
specific controversies involving politicians and personalities, believing
that inculcating the proper principles about freedom was the most important
task for the future of American liberty.

Read had a winning, folksy style, strong on metaphor. He explained the
coordinative powers of the free market through the unusual, and true,
observation that no single human on earth could make a pencil, or could
even know all that one needs to know to make one, yet the market creates
them in such abundance we can lose them without a second thought. His
inspirational summation of what libertarianism was all about was "anything
that's peaceful." While he'd speak to big groups, he thought small
gatherings or even face-to-face talk was best for spreading the light of
liberty. Woe betide someone sitting next to Read on an airplane who wasn't
in the mood to hear about how coercion could never generate creative
activity, or how various government officials ought more properly be
called, say, secretary of external violence, or secretary of predation.

Krugman doesn't tell you that Friedman's pamphlet for FEE, written with
George Stigler, about rent control, created stress between Read and one of
his heroines, and until then his supporter, Ayn Rand.

Rand was outraged that the Friedman/Stigler pamphlet seemed to say that
rationing through government action was morally equivalent to rationing
through free markets, merely less efficient. The resulting foofewaw, in
which FEE added a footnote against Friedman and Stigler's wishes
disagreeing with them on some points, was a great encapsulation of the wars
between moral and prudential arguments that have run through the
libertarian movement ever since.

As for Welch, along with all his highly imaginative beliefs about the
extent of communist infiltration in the U.S., when it came to economics
they were pretty straight-line Misesian. The great Austrian economist's
books could be found in American Opinion bookstores across the land.

Welch's admiration for FEE, which was real, came from his love of free
market ideas, not because FEE was some adjunct of Welch's eccentric
anti-commie mission. "Communism....is a philosophy to be despised and
explained away," Read wrote. "It is not a military threat to be feared and
shot away." One of Read's homiletic pamphlets, Conscience on the
Battlefield, has him imagining himself dying in a bloody mire in Korea and
being visited by his conscience, who tells him murdering amid an army in
the name of the state does not absolve him of his sins. No overseas
communist military could really harm the U.S., so he should abandon any
"self-defense" excuse.

The appropriate response to communism, overseas or domestically, was a
major fault line between what became the "conservatives" and what became
the "libertarians" in that early 1950s coalition. Read explicitly
pooh-poohed Welch's conspiracy mongering in conversations and letters;
Welch, hearing of this, gentlemanly told fellow Birchers that Read's
economic education work should be lauded and supported regardless.

When it came to Buckley's nascent National Review, forger of the modern
conservative consensus, a onetime chairman of FEE's board, expressing
Read's attitude, admitted that he had "a little bit the fear that too much
attention may be paid to being anti-Communist and not enough to being
against communism." To Read and those who hewed to his libertarian line,
the warmaking powers of the state were one of the most horrible things
about it, and they did not believe it was a proper duty of the American
government to go abroad to destroy international communism, or to legally
crush domestic communism.

This became one of the clearest dividing lines between nascent conservatism
and libertarianism, with the Buckley side mocking libertarians' effete and
useless disengagement from the Cold War, scoffing at them for evading
serious geopolitics for little intellectual seminars on demunicipalizing
garbage service.

Despite these divisions and Read and FEE's role in them, FEE and its
monthly magazine, The Freeman, have remained a vital educational and
conversion experience for young libertarians and young conservatives in the
benefits and propriety of free markets. An iconic photo of Reagan has him
reading a copy on a plane with Nancy snuggled in his shoulder. As Reagan's
telegram of condolence on Read's death put it, "our nation and her people
have been vastly enriched by his devotion to the cause of freedom."

Reagan claimed his free-market leanings came from the likes of Mises and
Frederic Bastiat, heroes of FEE; for Reagan's contributions to economic
freedom, in either practice or merely ideology, we have Leonard Read and
FEE to thank. Robert Welch and Milton Friedman were fellow travelers and
supporters on his path; despite Krugman's insinuation, neither deserves
credit, or blame, for each other's contributions, or FEE's.

Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American
Libertarian Movement (PublicAffairs).

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'





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