Reading A File Without cat

I have been trying to find ways to avoid useless use of cat but could never come up with a method of reading a file that did not involve creating an entire for or while loop. This problem crossed my mind yesterday and, after a quick google search, I found a neat way to avoid this in a single small command:

# contents of 'hi.txt'
cat hi.txt
hi
hello
ok

# reading hi.txt without 'cat'
echo $(<hi.txt)
hi hello ok

Unfortunately, the command does not preserve new lines but for those times when you only need to read from a single line file, this does the trick.