Hello. My name is Lawrence Reed, and I'm president of The Foundation for Economic Education or FEE. I'm very excited, as are all my colleagues at FEE about an emerging partnership between our organization and the Christian Leaders Institute headquartered here in Michigan. At FEE, we produce content aimed primarily but not exclusively at young people in high school and college. But many people of all ages find our content extraordinarily valuable. Over the nearly 70 years that we've been producing commentary and articles even now a course in the economics of entrepreneurship, people from all over the world have found our perspective refreshing. We combine a combination of liberty, ideas of liberty, and the concepts of personal character to paint a picture of how free and prosperous the world could be if people practiced both solid character and a free market economy.

We have much in common with the Christian Leaders Institute and look forward to working together in the composition of new courses and other collaborative activities. I want to share a little bit with you of the core philosophy of my organization, The Foundation for Economic Education. I mentioned already that liberty and character are key ingredients in what we do. We advocate that these two concepts - liberty in a political, economic, social sense - and personal character are really two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other. Another way to put it is, no people who have ever lost their character kept their liberties. Yet, another way to explain it is that no people will become free and sustain their freedom if they are not people of strong character.

By liberty, I should say a few words about the concept and what I mean by that. In very general terms, liberty is an environment in which people because of the rule of law, because of limited constitutional government, because of laws that protect private property and the freedom of contract, people are free to go about their business in peace so long as they do no harm to other people, so long as they respect the equal rights of all people, to themselves, to their property, and to their choices that are positive and beneficial for all involved.

That's liberty in a nutshell. Although, there is so much more involved in it, it is really based upon certain institutions that are indispensable to its maintenance - things like civil society, people solving problems working together peacefully, not necessarily having to call the government in to do everything for them.

It also rests upon people respecting the right of others, to live their lives as they choose, to accumulate property, to start businesses, to move wherever they'd like, and to engage in free and mutually beneficial associations and contracts with other people.

Now, by character, I mean a cluster of personality traits that most people, if you really pressed them, would say, "Yeah, they're pretty important, and I know that I fall short. But I would love to live in a world where more people practiced those kinds of traits."  What am I talking about? Well, I'll give you several examples, several traits that I think are key to strong character and indispensable to a free society based on liberty.

One of them is honesty. I cannot imagine a free society, a society rooted in liberty of largely dishonest people. I just can't imagine it. Can you think of a society or imagine a society where people cannot be trusted, where people lie at the drop of a hat, where they cut corners and prevaricate and do harm to others in terms of the truth because they think, at least for the moment, it may give them some special advantage.

I think such a world would quickly descend into chaos. Historically, we’ve seen this time and again. A chaotic situation usually gives rise to the strong man, to somebody who will ride in with a white horse and knock heads together and try to bring order out of that chaos and then on we go down the path towards tyranny and total government. Honesty is critical to the emergence and the sustaining of a free society.

Another important character trait to a free society, I think, is intellectual humility. That may be a mouthful, but it's really a simple and important concept. Intellectual humility means that you recognize that as much as you know, there is still a universe of knowledge out there that you don't know. Now, this is a very humbling thing to finally understand that you may have half a dozen PhDs, you may have studied for decades and know everything that anybody knows about a particular subject or many subjects. But there is still a universe of knowledge out there you don't know and probably will never know.

Places like Washington D.C. are full of unhumble people, people who don't practice intellectual humility and are just the opposite of the kind of characters that I'm urging you to consider here.

Places like Washington D.C. are full of people who think they can plan the lives of others, who are full of schemes that they want to use political power to impose upon other people. I think they lack basic intellectual humility. Perhaps the best story that I've ever come across that dramatizes intellectual humility in a compelling and memorable way is an essay written by the founder of FEE, Leonard Read (no relation), way back in 1958. That famous essay, which is on our website, FEE.org, is entitled I, Pencil.

In this essay, it's the pencil that's doing the talking, explaining how he came into being and he points out that the eraser material came from a particular tree in a certain part of the world. The graphite that forms the so-called lead that we write with, actually, that makes the image, that comes from deep beneath the ground only in certain places of the world. You'd have to be a miner, you'd have to be a tree specialist, you'd have to be a logger, you'd have to be lots of things that no one person in the world is if your job was to create a pencil from scratch. If somebody told you, you could not rely upon the contributions or the knowledge or the participation of any other person, that you had to create a pencil from scratch entirely on your own, think of the skills you'd have to come to possess in order to do that. You'd have to be a miner, a logger. You'd have to know how to grow the coffee that you'd serve to those who might assist you at some point along the way.

Every little aspect of creating a pencil rests upon the unique knowledge of particular people who come together like magic in the market place to produce something as simple as a pencil. But the lesson of that essay is that no one person in the world knows how to make a pencil entirely from scratch on his own. Yet, pencils come into being in super abundance without any central dictator, no talk down mandate, no master mind who's going to order all these people with various skills come together to produce it. They just happen because of the profit motive, incentive, people coming together to produce this ubiquitous item we know as a pencil.

That's very humbling. To me, that says, if I don't know how to make a pencil entirely from scratch based on my own knowledge or what I could acquire in the way of knowledge, that tells me, how could I possibly, by myself, make a jet airplane? How could I possibly even with the brightest people on the planet plan an economy of several hundred million people?

Intellectual humility - recognizing how much you don't know and that life is a never-ending search for knowledge is really an important aspect of freedom. If you're busy improving yourself and adding to your own knowledge, hopefully you don't have time to try to plan the lives of other people.

Another aspect of strong character is patience. You can't always get people to do the things you hoped they would do immediately. Sometimes you simply have to be more persuasive over time. So you've got to be patient in the process and not be quick to call the cops or direct government to come in and order people to accomplish things.

Another aspect of character, in my view, is responsibility. The idea that you step up to the plate and recognize sometimes your decisions don't produce good results. You should own up to them and change your ways or change your thinking. An irresponsible person is one who blames everybody else for the consequences of his own poor judgments. An irresponsible person is one who says, "The world owes me a living." Or, "Don't hold me accountable for my poor judgments. I'm going to blame somebody else." Or, "Give me a bailout, because I'm in trouble in some way," rather than to bear the consequences of his own mistakes.

I can't imagine a free society of largely irresponsible people. We'd all be in each other's pockets. We'd all be pointing the finger of blame at everybody else and never owning up to our own shortcomings.

Self-reliance is another important aspect of character. Not everybody is capable of it. Because of handicaps of various kinds, some people must rely upon the goodwill and the care of others. But most people, to a considerable degree, can be and should be self-reliant. The more self-reliant you are, the better able you are going to be to satisfy your own desires and ambitions and needs, but the better position you'll be in to help others achieve theirs as well.

So responsibility's important. So is courage. Why is courage important as a character attribute in a free society rooted in liberty? I think if you look at world history, you'll find very quickly that the world is always full of people who would be happy to take your liberty from you if you ever give them the chance. And they're not just from overseas. They are within our own midst as well. So people who believe in freedom or liberty have to rise to the occasion to defend it, to speak out on its behalf, to take risks, and sometimes even put their lives on the line on its behalf.

Those are some, but certainly not all of the character attributes that are important to a free society - honesty, intellectual humility, patience, courage, responsibility, self-reliance.

I want to give you a quick example of somebody I regard as a great Christian leader who exemplified all of those traits in one person, an admirable woman who barely a century ago was well-known to Americans all over the country. She, in fact, was probably the most revered woman, the most admired and respected woman for decades, the latter part of the 19th century and for the first decade or so of the 20th. Her name was Fanny Crosby. Fanny Crosby had several things about her that are worth note all these decades later. She passed away in 1915 at the age of 95. Born in 1820, she lived a long life of 95 years until she passed away in 1915.

In the 1870s, she gained a national reputation for her work in New York City at the time of a cholera epidemic. Thousands were fleeing the city to avoid catching the dreaded disease. Fanny Crosby was one of those who stayed behind and chose to work with, to nurse, and to minister to the sick. She contracted cholera herself but recovered. If that's all she ever did, she would surely have earned at least a prominent footnote in American history. But there's so much more to this remarkable woman.

Fanny Crosby, as far as we know, holds the record for having met more presidents of the United States than anybody else in our history, living or dead. We've had 44 presidents in America, and she personally knew 21 of them - almost half. She met every president, some of them after they served in the White House, every president from John Quincy Adams through Woodrow Wilson. Now, that tells you something. Why did men of such high standing and influence and position tend to seek her out? There's much more to her that I'll tell you in just a moment.

Fanny Crosy also holds the record for having written the lyrics to more songs than anybody in the history of the world. Nearly every song she wrote was a hymn, almost 9,000 hymns. On any given Sunday today in America, all these decades later, there may be several million Americans still singing hymns written by Fanny Crosby such as Blessed Assurance, To God be the Glory. That's a remarkable thing that surely should keep her name famous for a long time to come.

She also was the first woman to address the United States Congress. But the most remarkable thing about Fanny Crosby, I've saved for last. Fanny Crosby had no memory, no recollection of ever having seen a thing. She was completely blind from the age of six months. When she spoke to Congress, she had a simple message. It was not, "I have a handicap. Where's my check?" Or, "Do something for me." Her message was, "We are all called to be the best we can be at anything and everything that we do. To be a solid Christian and a person of influence, we must use whatever skills we have to overcome whatever handicaps we face in order to be the best people and the best examples we can be."

What an inspiring message. She truly was a Christian leader who understood liberty and its connection to character. She lived them both.

Finally, I want to share with you a story from more recent times. It's a very personal story. It goes back to 1986. I spent time in November of that year in Poland, which was still governed by a communist regime. This was nearly three years before the big changes in 1989 when eastern Europe was liberated and the Soviet Union began to collapse. In 1986, I spent those two weeks with people who were active in the anti-communist underground in Poland resisting the tyranny of the communist regime, taking great risks. Their lives were frequently on the line as they spoke out or worked with the underground to undermine the communist regime and to promote a free Poland.

One evening, I was taken to a home of a very special couple. I'd never heard of them before. Their names were Sabigniov and Sophia Romashefski. I learned that they had run the underground radio for the Solidarity Organization from December of 1981 until the middle of 1982.

This was a dark time for Poland. In December of '81, martial law was declared, and the communist government jailed people by the thousands. People who simply didn't want communism. They wanted freedom. And that was their only crime. They were rounded up, jailed, tortured, in many cases, imprisoned in some cases for years. There I was in their apartment. They had not been out of prison long, either of them, because they were detected in the middle of '82 and arrested because of that underground radio. Here they were active again with the underground resistance. Not on the radio, but doing other things.

I asked them many questions that evening about the time they were running the illegal radio. One in particular was, "How did you know, when you were broadcasting, if people were listening?" After all, this was an illegal radio.

Sophia answered first this way. She said, "We could only broadcast eight or ten minutes at a time. To avoid being traced," which they ultimately were, "we had to go someplace else and set the radio up elsewhere." They had to do that multiple times in a single evening in order to broadcast just a few minutes at a time.

Then she said, "We wondered, ourselves, if we were having any impact and how many people were listening. One evening, we asked people, while we were broadcasting, if you believe in liberty for Poland, please blink your lights, call your friends who believe the same way and ask them to do the same, to blink their lights." Then she said, "Then we went to the window and for hours, all of Warsaw was blinking."

I'll never forget that. She is still living. He passed away about two years ago. Any time I have a temptation to become pessimistic about the future, to wonder if one or two  or a handful of people can make a difference for the better, I think of the Romashefskis and all the other people behind the iron curtain who stood strongly for liberty, men and women of character, who in spite of the odds, in spite of oppressive communist regimes that seemed to have all the tanks and the guns worked night and day to liberate their countries and ultimately prevailed.

So to those of you listening to this address, I hope you will think of yourselves as blinking lights - blinking lights on behalf of liberty, liberty for the individual, and also the character traits that make liberty possible. Never ever let your light go out.

Thank you.


Last modified: Tuesday, May 28, 2019, 3:37 PM