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[Walkedaway]

Greetings. I currently live in Rockland County NY but I plan on moving to NH in about 5 or 6 years after my youngest leaves for college. I am completely disgusted with what is going on in our great country and am alarmed at what I am hearing from the American people. It now seems that allot of people actually believe that the government is here to "take care of us" , I find that frightening... Politically I'm not sure what party represents me anymore. I have been a registered Conservative since about 94 or 95, before that I was registered as Republican. Lately I have become intrigued by what Ron Paul has to say but don't yet call myself Libertarian (not quite sure what the tenets of Libertarianism are!). Any Libertarian reading list recommendations would be appreciated.

[rossby]

Try The Law. It's a classic.

[BigJoe]

wiki is always a good place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism


some important ideas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

Negative rights: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights


some bare bones:

Pro:   gun rights, Free Trade, personal responsibility, Decentralization of power (i.e. State's rights)
Anti: war, taxes, welfare, bailouts, regulation, drug war

Here is the Platform of the Libertarian Party:  http://www.lp.org/platform


here is a 40 min audio talk titled "an introduction to Libertarianism"   :  http://mises.org/media/1618


Thomas Paine's  "The Rights of Man"  :  http://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/index.htm

Here is a pdf of Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty:   http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics.pdf

The Mainspring of Human Progress:  http://mises.org/books/mainspring.pdf

FA Hayek's the Road to Serfdom:   http://www.iea.org.uk/files/upld-publication43pdf?.pdf

[Walkedaway]

Outstanding. I just ordered "The Law" on Amazon and Tom Paine's Right of Man already sits on my desk at work. Thanks!

[rossby]

Outstanding. I just ordered "The Law" on Amazon and Tom Paine's Right of Man already sits on my desk at work. Thanks!

The Law, being very old now, is freely available online. However, nothing beats having a paper copy. I've gone through a good number. They always seem to be loaned out and never returned...

There's a decent book titled Free to Choose by Milton Friedman. Worth checking out too.

And, of course, read the classics...

[elkingrey]

Honestly, anything by Ron Paul and you can't lose. If you're not in love with Ron Paul right now, then you should definitely read one of his books and I guarantee you will be. Seriously, Ron Paul.

[maybesomeday]

Try The Law. It's a classic.

Thanks for the link.  It was a good read with a lot of great ideas.  Bastiat talks about law being the result of the right to defend oneself.  This justification for the existence of a collective force against injustice seems plausible,  but does he address in any of his other works how the force ought to be provided/funded?

[BigJoe]

another relatively short 'classic' is Leonard Read's I, Pencil  :  http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil

Read later founded the Foundation for Economic Education  :   http://fee.org/

Some other notable Libertarian Think Tanks:

The Future of Freedom Foundation (Fairfax, Virginia):  http://www.fff.org/
Hoover Institution (Stanford):  http://www.hoover.org/
The Fraser Institute (Canada): http://www.fraserinstitute.org/
Reason (LA): http://reason.org/
The Independent Institute (Oakland):  http://www.independent.org/
Cato (DC): http://www.cato.org/
Pacific Research Institute (San Fran): http://www.pacificresearch.org/

Ludwig Von Mises Institute (Auburn):  http://www.mises.org/


Some other good resources:

http://www.econlib.org/

http://libertarianpapers.org/

[BigJoe]

Some more reading:

good intro and 'essential' stuff:

Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson :  http://jim.com/econ/

Rothbard's  What Has Government Done to Our Money? : http://mises.org/books/whathasgovernmentdone.pdf





Some more current and 'pop' libertarian writing:

Peter Schiff's How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes : http://www.amazon.com/How-Economy-Grows-Why-Crashes/dp/047052670X

Tom Wood's Meltdown : http://www.amazon.com/Meltdown-Free-Market-Collapsed-Government-Bailouts/dp/1596985879

And Ron Paul's  End the FED and The Revolution :

http://www.amazon.com/End-Fed-Ron-Paul/dp/0446549193

http://www.ronpaul.com/books/the-revolution-a-manifesto/

[Floridian]

Richard Maybury: What Ever Happened to Penny Candy? and  What Ever Happened To Justice?

[rossby]

Try The Law. It's a classic.

Thanks for the link.  It was a good read with a lot of great ideas.  Bastiat talks about law being the result of the right to defend oneself.  This justification for the existence of a collective force against injustice seems plausible,  but does he address in any of his other works how the force ought to be provided/funded?

Off-hand, the only thing I recall him writing was that the only a "common police force" was necessary. Now, I might disagree with that somewhat. But the scarcity of treatment shows he didn't really treat the how to do it, so much as why you should not mess around with so many taxes. If there is anything more on the topic, I'm not currently aware of it.

Bastiat was a legislator and his writings exist largely to criticize the contemporaneous explosion of socialism in France. He was not one of the French writers who was trying to craft the "ideal society" from the ground up.

[CurtHowland]

B.D., you reminded me of a blog posting which I think might become a good introduction to the basic philosophies involved:

http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-we-got-here-is-failure-to.html

Being a blog post makes it some what more "entertaining" than a pure philosophical text.

There's also the YouTube channels for Mises and the Future of Freedom Foundation,

http://www.youtube.com/user/FutureFreedomF

http://www.youtube.com/user/misesmedia

Can't over-state the benefits of seeing these people give their presentations live, for the body language (except for Dough French who doesn't seem to have any). :^)

[rossby]

B.D., you reminded me of a blog posting which I think might become a good introduction to the basic philosophies involved:

http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-we-got-here-is-failure-to.html

I had a post a while back--I think here--about the usage of constrained and unconstrained. Notably, that it's a false dichotomy introduced for simplification only. And, just like that blogger does, it becomes very easy to forget that it's just a simplification, and it's not so easy to lump every person on every issue into Column A or Column B.

... and, if Sowell could do it over, I wish he would've named the categories something more like Realistic and Aspirational. Largely, because the self-described adherents of the unconstrained vision, well, delight in the fact that they are "enlightened", their vision of humanity unconstrained by the barbaric unpleasantries that constrain all those cave-man-like thinkers.

[CurtHowland]

Notably, that it's a false dichotomy introduced for simplification only.

That is very interesting, because I've noticed that those to whom I "simply cannot get through", like this TZ character on YouTube,

http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments=1&v=9MEKyJEn0Wk

...have invariably been textbook cases of "unconstrained" thinking.

Thanks for the correction, though, I will take some time and get to know the idea better.

[rossby]

For every person in the world, it is not so easy to put them in one column or the other Even though some people might be very easy to pigeonhole.