The Fight For Liberty - Critical Lessons From Liberty's Greatest Champions Of The Last 2,000 Years

If we cherish the blessings of liberty for us, our children and grand-children, don’t we need to understand how liberty develops, how it becomes endangered and how it can be protected? The Fight For Liberty is perhaps the most comprehensive, readable resource ever published on liberty. It abounds with stirring stories about the achievements of liberty’s greatest heroes and heroines. For example: * The American Revolution was started by bankrupt Quaker corset-maker Thomas Paine whose pamphlet Common Sense sold 500,000 copies and persuaded Americans to pursue independence. * Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 17 days. He worked at a dining table in a Philadelphia house that belonged to a bricklayer. * William Wilberforce led the first successful campaigns to abolish the British slave trade and slavery, despite opposition from slave-holders, slave ship owners, outfitters, bankers, politicians. * Milton Friedman was proudest of helping to abolish U.S. military conscription. Nobody did more to persuade the public, generals and the president. An all-volunteer military began in 1973. * Ayn Rand fled from a monstrous Soviet tyranny, learned a second language, worked as a waitress and wrote books that sold over 20 million copies -- making a moral case for capitalism. * In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan cut taxes and steadfastly supported Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, to stop inflation cold and promote prosperity – annual growth up to 8 percent. * With a bold warning to a Nazi general, in December 1944, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg helped stop a planned massacre of 70,000 Jews in the Budapest Central Ghetto. * Antislavery orator Frederick Douglass campaigned with Elizabeth Cady Stanton (equal rights), Daniel O’Connell (Irish Emancipation) and Richard Cobden & John Bright (free trade). * As Japan started opening up in the 1850s, after centuries of isolation, impoverished samurai Fukuzawa Yukichi made a fortune educating people to help themselves and start businesses. * During the mid-1800s, William Ewart Gladstone, who served as Britain’s prime minister (four times) and chancellor of the exchequer (four times), cut the income tax to just 1.25 percent. * Benjamin Franklin was credited with many inventions, but his most important was the American Dream. He helped young entrepreneurs start businesses throughout the colonies. * The Dutchman Hugo Grotius, a champion of peace, was sentenced to life imprisonment but escaped in an empty trunk that workmen used to return books he borrowed from friends. * The American journalist Rose Wilder Lane thought Russia was a socialist paradise until she went there not long after the Revolution, and peasants told her about the oppression and famine. * When Dr. Martin Luther King campaigned to end compulsory racial segregation, he was stoned, stabbed and jailed, and his home was bombed before he was assassinated. * General George Washington wasn’t sure how to win the American Revolutionary War, but he figured out how to make it unwinnable for the British. * Scottish thinker Adam Smith mischievously remarked, “I had almost forgot I was the author of the inquiry concerning the wealth of nations” – after more than 10 years’ work on it. * John Adams’ wife Abigail warned: "If attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebellion and [won’t be bound] by Laws in which we have no Representation." * In 1946, the Nazi defeat was celebrated when 26 theatrical companies toured Germany, performing works by the libertarian playwright Friedrich Schiller who had inspired Beethoven. * Apparently no university in America would pay a salary for Road to Serfdom author F.A. Hayek. But Kansas City businessman Harold Luhnow paid Hayek who won a Nobel Prize.