Modern Era
Leonard Read
1898–1983 · Free-market education
I, Pencil: nobody knows how to make a pencil, and it gets made anyway.
Read's essay I, Pencil told the story of a simple object to show that the cooperation behind it came from no central director and could not have been commanded by any. As founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, he spent thirty years circulating that argument to students, workers and businessmen on the principle that freedom is won by understanding before it is won by voting.
Why it matters for freedom
He spent fifty years explaining the difference between voluntary exchange and political compulsion to people who had never heard it named.
Who they stood against
the bureaucracy and the idea that government can give what it must first take