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Media Infiltrations: Of Interventions and Conservative Principles  National Review Online September 23, 2008 Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line The Washington Post September 14, 2008
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Books and Media
Intellectual ammunition to arm your mental militia. Both non-fiction and fiction -- current favorites are at the top of the page, and the classics are toward the bottom. BTW, when you click on the links to order these through Amazon.com, you support this site!
If had not been written in such a serious tone, Bob Kohn's book could almost have been called Liberal Bias for Dummies. It's a beautifully documented and reasoned field guide that reveals the precise workings of the interjection of liberal lies into America's so-called "newspaper of record." Order it now!
The Economic Way of Thinking
Many readers have asked if I know of an introductory college level text on economic principles -- one that isn't soaked in the prejudices of statist politics. Finally, I can say "yes." This one by the late Paul T. Heyne with Peter J. Boettke and David L. Prychitko is just what the counter-conspiracy ordered. It focuses very much on first principles -- economics as the study of human organization. It treats institutional applications of the principles with so much skepticism that you could almost come away at the end of this book thinking that economics is barely a science, and that it has almost no real-world application except for supporting the dictum "hands off!" -- and all that's exactly true. Order it now!
Public Intellectuals: A Portrait of Decline
Judge Richard Posner offers a scathing indictment of the banality and inefficacy of America's pundits in and out of academia. No, Paul Krugman is not spared the rod. The best thing that Posner can say about the political, cultural and economic elite is that nobody (except themselves) is foolish enough to take them seriously. Reduced to entertainers or, at worst, preachers to the converted, they are pretty harmless. Order it now!
The Force of Finance: The Triumph of the Capital Markets
Economic historian Reuven Brenner writes that free and open capital markets are the indispensible institutions of freedom and growth. For Brenner, capital markets are the means by which decision-making is dispersed among the broadest democracy, and by which authority is automatically vested in the most competent and qualified. Order it now!
The Vision of the Anointed
Thomas Sowell's penetrating critique of the failure of policy initiatives advocated by America's academic, political and media elite. Sowell dissects the dysfunctional cycle of self-congratulation in which empirical evidence of policy failure is ignored, or -- worst -- used as justification for even stronger application of the same faulty ideas. Only a handful of Sowell's examples have to do directly with the economy or the markets -- but it all has to do with markets, since the policies being examined all have in common that they replace bottom-up market forces with top-down elitist policy visions. Order it now!
Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall St.
Peter Bernstein has written perhaps the single best book about investing for the mainstream audience. This book shows in clear and simple terms the major findings of academic finance have been put to work by the most sophisticated investment managers -- any investor who doesn't bother to at least become superficially familiar with these concepts has chosen to play the game with only half a deck. Order it now!
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe's searing and hiliarious novel of the war on capitalism and capitalists perfectly captures the spirit of the late 1980's, when the Conspiracy was mobilizing to squash the revolutionaries who were using capital markets to restructure the leadership of the American economy. Wolfe captures all the intensely personal manias and powerlusts that drive the war on capitalism, all disguised of course beneath a public veneer of do-gooding. Order it now!
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Robert Heinlein's science-fiction/adventure story of the lunar colonies' struggle for independence from imperialist Earth in 2076 is an exciting read -- and a great lesson in libertarianism and laissez-faire capitalism. The motto of Free Luna is "TANSTAAFL" -- There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Could there be a better single statement of the moral and pragmatic underpinnings of economic freedom and responsibility? Order it now!
It's a Wonderful Life
Frank Capra's classic film is often misunderstood as a bleeding-heart class-war manifesto, but quite the contrary. It's the portrait of a free enterprise entrepreneur fighting the unholy alliance of big business and big government. It also shows the fundamental scientific emptiness of economic policy interventions -- its plot device of showing an alternate world in which the principle character had never been born describes the one and only experimental modality that could ever prove the efficacy of any policy intervention. Order it now!
Henry and Beezus
If you have a child in your life to whom you want to teach the basics of economics, try this book in Beverly Cleary's delightful "Ramona" series. Young Henry Huggins finds a carton of bubble-gum, and tries to make money by selling it to his friends at school -- and what his hilarious mishaps will teach you about how markets work is more real and more vivid than anything you'll get from any textbook by Samuelson. Order it now!
The Way the World Works
When Jude Wanniski met Arthur Laffer, and Laffer sketched on a cocktail napkin a diagram plotting the relationship between tax rates and economic growth, Jude dubbed it "the Laffer Curve." He made it the centerpiece of his vision of the way the world works -- and the Reaganomics revolution was born. The world still works just the way Jude says, but sadly the world seems to have forgotten how it works (which is why it hasn't been working lately). The world ought to re-read Jude's book -- the ideas here are as exciting and as important as ever. Order it now!
Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise
This is George Gilder's finest work, free of both the policy obsessions of Wealth and Poverty and the technophiliac mania of Microcosm and Telecosm. It focuses on the struggles and triumphs of entrepreneurs -- the mind-sets that set them on their paths, and the environments that in turns hindered them and helped them. This is more than just Horatio Alger stuff -- this gets inside the heart and mind of the innovator and shows the what makes it all possible. Order it now!
Capitalism and Freedom
My education as a laissez-faire capitalist began in high school when my self-avowedly communist history teacher (whose name, appropriately enough, was Mr. Taxerman) said that he'd written his masters thesis refuting Milton Friedman's classic. He was delighted with his own wit in calling his thesis "Capitalism Au Freidman" -- I read it and discovered that Taxerman should have been only half delighted. To be sure, Friedman has made some errors in his policy adventures in Washington, but this manifesto connecting the dots between the economic system of capitalism and the political realization of human freedom makes up for them. Order it now!
Simple Rules for a Complex World
Richard Epstein condenses a career of libertarian legal scholarship into just six rules that could -- and should -- form the basis for all laws. His simple rules are a core set of basic rights and correlative duties, including rules for dealing with ownership and exchange of property that should form the basic groundrules of a capitalist economy. In a time when the number and complexity of laws is growing exponentially, Epstein reminds us of how simple it could be, and how our complex world would be better served if it were this simple. Order it now!
Anarchy, State and Utopia
The late Robert Nozick built the foundation for the resurgence of libertarianism as an intellectual force with this masterful book. Solidly in the tradition of formal philosophy, it explains the moral basis of a minimal state, the immorality of anything more than the minimal, and why the minimal is the closest we'll ever get to utopia. While not explicitly about economics, it borrows from the intellectual apparatus of economic thought in novel ways, and adduces many fundamental rules of property and exchange. Order it now!
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Ayn Rand's classic anthology of polemical essays makes the moral case for laissez-faire capitalism even more convincingly and rigorously than her novels -- because she can't lean on the rhetorical crutch of fiction. Contains classic essays by Alan Greenspan on the gold standard and antitrust. Order it now!
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand's magnum opus lacks the narrative punch and mythic characters of her masterpiece The Fountainhead. But it makes a compelling case for the morality of capitalism as the only political system consistent with individual liberty, and it offers a terrifying portrait of a decaying world in which free capitalism and free capitalists are driven underground -- and it shows what would happen to the world if it didn't have capitalists around to keep everything running. Order it now!
The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand's first major novel is her best -- and it stands more than half a century later as the most eloquent, powerful and romantic statement of individualism ever made. It avoids the overt political didacticism of Atlas Shrugged, and instead makes the argument for freedom and capitalism by example, through the lives of mythic characters who represent the forces of creativity and growth -- and their enemies. Order it now!