Indeed, since the advent of Sputnik, one is more likely to hear that it is free societies which are deficient in mobilizing intellectual resources, though the speaker usually mumbles something about the sacrifices which freedom merits. The Sputnik-worshippers notwithstanding, man's intellectual progress is the fruit and the reward of economic liberty. The reasons supporting such a conclusion are not unduly tortuous. Life itself requires that. What I am suggesting is that because certain intellectual activities depend on the disposal of economic goods, the right to those activities depends on the right to dispose of property.
Intellectual freedom depends on economic rights because it is a species of economic rights.
It is a particular way of disposing of property. For this same reason, one cannot have economic rights where no intellectual rights exist. If one may dispose of property as he will, he may dispose of it in the form of speeches, printings, or mass meetings, and the curtailment of these is equally the curtailment of an economic process. Thus, when a state becomes the sole proprietor, men and their activities, including intellectual activities, live or die by the permission and pleasure of government officials. In suppression, at least, he who controls the body, controls the mind.