Politics

Leonard Read, Libertarian Movement Founding Father, Gets Digitized

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The Mises Institute is beginning to place online the complete works of Leonard Read, founder of the first modern American libertarian educational institute, the Foundation for Economic Education. Read had a winning and peculiar homiletic style in his attempts to convince us all to live in a world in which "Anything That's Peaceful" can flourish–one of my favorite three word explanations of libertarianism.

Read is gone, but his foundation is still going strong.

I wrote a short piece about Read's role in creating a distinctively libertarian movement in the 1940s and '50s for TechCentralStation. Read's full story is told in my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.