Saturday, February 14, 2009

The Real Leonard Read

Jeffrey Tucker is out with a column today hailing Leonard Read as an Open Source adovocate. Ah, well, sort of.

Read ranks right up there with Lew Rockwell as a genius entrepreneur of free market ideas. I can see why Read would give away material or "pull" copyrights to bring more attention to his ideas. But Read was ALWAYS thinking about marketing his Foundation for Economic Education, ALWAYS. I heard him give a speech once, about how he struck up conversations about FEE, with those sitting next to him in first class on plane rides. It was a practiced and detailed approach, for the person sittng next to him on a plane!

But, don't think for a minute that Read in his open-source marketing philosophy didn't think there weren't rights attached to the a person's writings. Here's Gary North on the decidedly non-open way Read handled outside writing of his employees:


I could see that FEE was an appendage of Read, and he was not going to let FEE grow beyond what it already was: a place for him to schmooze and for Poirot to edit The Freeman. The week that I arrived in Irvington, Read informed me of his policy that FEE would receive every dime I would ever earn in my off-hours, such as fees for writing and lecturing, which were what I did best. I saw that this would hurt my career in the long run. At $18,000 a year, I had counted on outside income to enable me to compete with stockbrokers in the local real estate market, which was merely high priced then, rather than astronomical, which it is today – the main reason why FEE has not been able to hire full-time young scholars since 1973.

If Read had allowed a 50-50 split, I might have stayed, but FEE was too bureaucratic for my tastes.

Read's marketing abilities were pure genius, but his failure to allow true freedom for his employees cost him great talents such as North. Read may have not got this, or had a different agenda, but Mises clearly understood this when he wrote:

"It is unlikely that people would undertake the laborious task of writing such publications if everyone were free to reproduce them."--Human Action, chapter XXIII, part 6.

Much less, if you had to hand over all your initial earnings from a creation!

That was Leonard Read.

2 comments:

  1. Look, if you want to say, "Here's part of Leonard Reed's behavior that may make you doubt the vision painted by Tucker," OK fair enough.

    But you're being really sloppy in this argument. You said:

    But, don't think for a minute that Read in his open-source marketing philosophy didn't think there weren't rights attached to the a person's writings.

    And then you give the anecdote.

    But if we follow your logic through, it must mean that Read thought HE owned ideas generated by other people. Do you really think that was his view of rights?

    Or, do you think he was acting on the belief that as an employer, it was his MONEY (not his property in North's ideas) that gave him the right to make such an ultimatum?

    Disney stores won't hire girls who wear a lot of makeup etc. In fact, I think they aren't even allowed to have pierced ears, though that might be off.

    But if it were the policy, would you say the CEO of Disney clearly believes in the legitimacy of slavery?

    Seriously, that is exactly the argument you tried to use here.

    I'm not saying Kinsella et al. are correct on IP, but they are making very sophisticated arguments and they have devoted many pages to the worries about declining output from authors etc. You aren't addressing any of this, and repeatedly paint them as buffoons.

    I realize this is a blog and not a site for serious tomes, but you write as if you've "blown up" the dumb anti-IPers when you're not even dealing with the 2nd countermove in the debate.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob you write:


    Or, do you think he was acting on the belief that as an employer, it was his MONEY (not his property in North's ideas) that gave him the right to make such an ultimatum?


    But the only way it could be Read's MONEY is if he believed that a Read employee created something of value? How else could an employee generate money, if he doesn't create value?

    Read isn't saying, "If you inherit $100,000 from your dead uncle the money is mine." He is creating very specific definitions of what money belongs to FEE, i.e. money generated by the creation of a book a lecture, etc..

    Therefore, Read is creating a contract between FEE and any work done by his employees. "IF you create any writing outside of FEE, the money belongs to FEE."

    Open source advocates reject contracts on all writings, since writings according to Kinsella/Tucker are not property .

    Which leads to my point that Read's open source policy was a marketing decision, and not a belief, as Tucker would have us believe,that Read does not believe in contracts with regard to writings when in fact he had a very tight contract with his employees about writings "If you write something outside of FEE, the money you earn belongs to FEE."

    ReplyDelete