I really want to make this week’s show fun – it’s hard to have a show on news and politics and not have it always be depressing, but I’m doing my best! This week I’m talking libertarianism from A to Z and am compiling a few lists…some my own, some from other sources (such as reason magazine’s 5 most and least libertarian TV shows). One list I get asked for a lot is a reading list. I post reviews and blurbs on my site (see the “read & watch” tab above), but this list is just the ten books I would recommend for different reasons… a great read (the Heinlein book is scifi! His wife was an individualist anarchist and you can see her influence here)…sublime (Nock & Bastiat)…interesting take on an under-studied subject (secession)…an insight into what derailed the American experiment (Neill)…I know lots of people would choose other books (The Road to Serfdom, For a New Liberty, even perhaps Free to Choose or Capitalism by Milton Friedman), and I want listeners (and readers) to hear about it all…so tell me, what books would you recommend to fellow libertarians or to the lib-curious? Here are my picks…perhaps best called, “thought-samples from my personal libertarian journey”
- Human Action, by Ludwig von Mises
- Our Enemy the State, by Albert Jay Nock
- Democracy: the God that Failed, by Hans Hermann Hoppe
- The First & Last Freedom, by Jiddu Krishnamurti
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
- The Law, by Frederic Bastiat
- A Constitutional History of Secession, by John Remington Graham
- The Church and the Market, by Thomas Woods
- Makers of the Modern Mind, by Thomas Patrick Neill
- Money, Bank Credit & Economic Cycles, by Jesus Huerta de Soto
The colored titles click through to reviews I’ve written. The other titles have blurbs I’ve written on my “recommended fiction” or “recommended non-fiction” pages
We were fed such a load of crap in school, weren’t we?
Ha! Funny you should point that out – not one of those books was on any of my reading lists…I went to Catholic elementary school, public high school, community college, Harvard with an economics concentration and Stanford business school AND law school and I feel like not only did I not learn any of the deeper truths found in this list of books, I didn’t even really learn the gobbledy gook they were actually trying to teach me! (It’s hard to really “learn” stuff that doesn’t hold together or ring true, IMO.) [Makers of the Modern Mind listed above has some insights about gobbledy gook and education for starters.]
Just got a note to include I, Pencil in the list.
and Etienne de la Boetie, http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Obedience-Discourse-Voluntary-Servitude/dp/1162705175
John Jasper likes Lysander Spooner http://www.amazon.com/No-Treason-Constitution-Authority/dp/1938357000/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1434651273&sr=1-1&keywords=lysander+spooner