Why Liberty: Your Life, Your Choices, Your Future


Tom G. PalmerSloane Frost - 2013
    "We are seeing an explosion among college students committed to the ideas of liberty -- there's no other word to describe it," says Palmer. "And today's students are not only interested in discussing these ideas, they want to do something about it. That's why this new book so strongly represents the voices of today's student leaders, some very impressive young people who have developed their own vision for freedom, one that transcends old political divides, and who know how to get organized and to do something constructive to make their vision happen." Dr. Palmer will be traveling the U.S. and internationally for book events and is available for interview upon request. As with previous editions in the same series, the books are not only recommended reading for students, many think tanks and business organizations host book events attracting politicos, professionals, academics, and journalists to discuss the ideas in the book. --The Atlas Economic Research Foundation

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left


Roger Scruton - 2015
    Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. In addition to assessments of these thinkers' philosophical and political contributions, the book contains a biographical and bibliographical section summarizing their careers and most important writings.In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton asks, What does the Left look like today, and how has it evolved? He charts the transfer of grievances, from the working class to women, gays, and immigrants, asks what we can put in the place of radical egalitarianism, and what explains the continued dominance of antinomian attitudes in the intellectual world. Can there be any foundation for resistance to the leftist agenda without religious faith?Writing with great clarity, Scruton delivers a devastating critique of modern left-wing thinking.

How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps


Ben Shapiro - 2020
    We can’t agree on what makes America special. We can’t even agree that America is special. We’re coming to the point that we can’t even agree what the word America itself means. “Disintegrationists” say we’re stronger together, but their assault on America’s history, philosophy, and culture will only tear us apart.Who are the disintegrationists? From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to the New York Times’ 1619 project, many modern analyses view American history through the lens of competing oppressions, a racist and corrupt experiment from the very beginning. They see American philosophy as a lie – beautiful words pasted over a thoroughly rotted system. They see America’s culture of rights as a façade that merely reinforces traditional hierarchies of power, instead of being the only culture that guarantees freedom for individuals.Disintegrationist attacks on the values that built our nation are insidious because they replace each foundational belief, from the rights to free speech and self-defense to the importance of marriage and faith communities, with nothing more than an increased reliance on the government. This twisted disintegrationist vision replaces the traditional “unionist” understanding that all Americans are united in a shared striving toward the perfection of universal ideals.How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps shows that to be a cohesive nation we have to uphold foundational truths about ourselves, our history, and reality itself—to be unionists instead of disintegrationists. Shapiro offers a vital warning that if we don’t recover these shared truths, our future—our union—as a great country is threatened with destruction.

Democracy: The God That Failed


Hans-Hermann Hoppe - 2001
    Revisionist in nature, it reaches the conclusion that monarchy is a lesser evil than democracy, but outlines deficiencies in both. Its methodology is axiomatic-deductive, allowing the writer to derive economic and sociological theorems, and then apply them to interpret historical events.A compelling chapter on time preference describes the progress of civilization as lowering time preferences as capital structure is built, and explains how the interaction between people can lower time all around, with interesting parallels to the Ricardian Law of Association. By focusing on this transformation, the author is able to interpret many historical phenomena, such as rising levels of crime, degeneration of standards of conduct and morality, and the growth of the mega-state. In underscoring the deficiencies of both monarchy and democracy, the author demonstrates how these systems are both inferior to a natural order based on private-property.Hoppe deconstructs the classical liberal belief in the possibility of limited government and calls for an alignment of conservatism and libertarianism as natural allies with common goals. He defends the proper role of the production of defense as undertaken by insurance companies on a free market, and describes the emergence of private law among competing insurers.Having established a natural order as superior on utilitarian grounds, the author goes on to assess the prospects for achieving a natural order. Informed by his analysis of the deficiencies of social democracy, and armed with the social theory of legitimation, he forsees secession as the likely future of the US and Europe, resulting in a multitude of region and city-states. This book complements the author's previous work defending the ethics of private property and natural order. Democracy - The God that Failed will be of interest to scholars and students of history, political economy, and political philosophy.

The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate


Scott D. Sagan - 2012
    The new edition, An Enduring Debate, continues the important discussion of nuclear proliferation and the dangers of a nuclear-armed world. With new chapters on the questions surrounding a nuclear North Korea, Iran, and Iraq and the potential for a world free of nuclear weapons, this Third Edition will continue to generate a lively classroom experience.

Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse


Thomas E. Woods Jr. - 2011
    Woods, Jr. offers the first critical analysis of the 2010 mid-term elections and answer the #1 question on conservatives’ minds: How do we roll back the liberal policies and big government programs that Obama/Pelosi/Reid rushed through Congress before the mid-terms? From getting rid of wasteful and inefficient federal agencies to abolishing the income tax to repealing health care reform and all of Obama’s "green” policies, Woods outlines a bold plan for dramatically overhauling the government and restoring our Founding Fathers vision for America.

It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes


Jeffrey Tucker - 2011
    Meanwhile, the public sector is systematically wrecking the physical world in sneaky and petty ways that really do matter. Jeffrey Tucker, in this follow-up to his Bourbon for Breakfast, draws detailed attention to both. He points out that the products of digital capitalism are amazing, astounding, beyond belief-more outrageously advanced than anything the makers of the Jetsons could even imagine. With this tiny box in hand, we can do a real-time video chat with anyone on the planet and pay nothing more than my usual service fee. This means that anyone on the planet can do business with and be friends with any other person on the globe. The borders, the limits, the barriers-they are all being blasted away. The pace of change is mind-boggling. The world is being reinvented in our lifetimes, every day. Email has only been mainstream for 15 years or so, and young people now regard it as a dated form of communication used only for the most formal correspondence. Today young people are brief instant messaging through social media, but that's only for now, and who knows what next year will bring. Oddly, hardly anyone seems to care, and even fewer care about the institutional force that makes all this possible, which is the market economy. Instead, we just adjust to the new reality. We even hear of the grave problem of "miracle fatigue"-too much great stuff, too often. Truly, this new world seems to have arrived without much fanfare at all. And why? It has something to do with the nature of the human mind, Tucker argues, which does not and This book will inspire love for free markets - and loathing of government.

Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto


Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. - 2014
    The cure is a radical one because, as the book incontrovertibly shows, the many problems that confront us today are no accident. They stem from the nature of government itself. Only peaceful cooperation based on the free market can rescue us from our present plight.Against the State is written by Lew Rockwell, the founder of the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com, and the closest friend and associate of Murray Rothbard, the leading theorist of anarcho-capitalism. Rockwell applies Rothbard’s combination of individualist anarchism and Austrian economics to contemporary America. The book shows how the government is based on war, both against foreign nations and against the American people themselves, through massive invasions of our liberties. Fueled by an out-of-control banking system, the American State has become in essence fascist. We cannot escape our predicament through limited government: the government is incapable of controlling itself. Only a purely private social order can save us, and Rockwell succinctly sets out how an anarcho-capitalist order would work.

The Income Tax: Root of All Evil


Frank Chodorov - 1954
    For the Amendment gives to the Federal Government first claim upon the earnings of the individual, and so infringes his natural right to own what he produces.With its graduated-tax provision, the Income Tax Amendment is a replica of that clause in the Communist Manifesto which provides for the confiscation of all property through the use of just such a tax.Not only is the individual citizen's liberty partitioned by the Amendment, but the several states are deprived of their Constitutional sovereignty, and the central Federal Government is overstrengthened at their expense. This growth of centralized power is a development which generations of Americans fought stubbornly to prevent.And the Federal Government, by the very nature of government itself, increases its "needs" in accordance with its means of revenue. Reduce Federal income, argues Frank Chodorov, and Federal "needs" will automatically be reduced.The author takes a forthright stand as he defines the immoral nature of income taxation and the fallacy of using to "level off" society. And finally he outlines what can be done to repeal the Income Tax Amendment, bearing in mind the Federal Government's legitimate need for revenue.

Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws


Andrew P. Napolitano - 2004
    In this sensational book, Napolitano sets the record straight, speaking frankly from his own experiences and investigation about how government agencies will often arrest without warrant, spy without legal authority, imprison without charge, and kill without cause.

The Conscience of a Conservative


Barry M. Goldwater - 1960
    Written at the height of the Cold War and in the wake of America's greatest experiment with big government, the New Deal, Goldwater's message was not only remarkable, but radical. He argued for the value and importance of conservative principles--freedom, foremost among them--in contemporary political life. Using the principles he espoused in this concise but powerful book, Goldwater fundamentally altered the political landscape of his day--and ours.

The Intellectuals And Socialism


Friedrich A. Hayek - 1998
    This was the warning which Friedrich Hayek, the great architect of the 20th-century revival of classical liberal ideas, issued in 1949 with this essay. Hayek described intellectuals as 'professional second-hand dealers in ideas', people who are in a position to become familiar with new ideas and to promote them through their writings and speeches.He believed the importance of this class had been ignoted by supporters of the free market, with serious consequences. For example, socialism had never, and nowhere, been at first a working-class movement. It adoption by policy makers had been preceded by a long period in which it had been of interest only to intellectuals, who had promoted it relentlessly. Hayek believe that the classical liberal ideal of liberty and free markets had lost its appeal for young, intelligent people: the challenge was to 'make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure'. Hayek ended the essay by asking: 'Will it be in time?' A foreword by Edwin J. Feulner, President of the Heritage Foundation, and an introduction by John Blundell, General Director of the IEA, testify to the impact of this essay, together with Hayek's other writings, in stimulating the backlash against socialism through the many institutes founded by those who were won over to classical liberal ideas - just in time.

The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class


Fred Siegel - 2013
    It shows that what we think of liberalism today – the top and bottom coalition we associate with President Obama - began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of the post-WWI disillusionment with American society. In the twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and the right. The aim of liberalism’s foundational writers and thinkers such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis and H.L Mencken was to create an American aristocracy of sorts, to provide a sense of hierarchy and order associated with European statism.Like communism, Fabianism, and fascism, modern liberalism, critical of both capitalism and democracy, was born of a new class of politically self-conscious intellectuals. They despised both the individual businessman's pursuit of profit and the conventional individual's pursuit of pleasure, both of which were made possible by the lineaments of the limited nineteenth-century state.Temporarily waylaid by the heroism of the WWII generation, in the 1950s liberalism expressed itself as a critique of popular culture. It was precisely the success of elevating middle class culture that frightened foppish characters like Dwight Macdonald and Aldous Huxley, crucial influences on what was mistakenly called the New Left. There was no New Left in the 1960s, but there was a New Class which in the midst of Vietnam and race riots took up the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rightsThe neo-Mathusianism which emerged from the 60s was, unlike its eugenicist precursors, aimed not at the breeding habits of the lower classes but rather the buying habits of the middle class.Today’s Barack Obama liberalism has displaced the old Main Street private sector middle class with a new middle class composed of public sector workers allied with crony capitalists and the country’s arbiters of style and taste.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right


Jennifer Burns - 2009
    Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought.Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968.One of the Denver Post's Great Reads of 2009One of Bloomberg News's Top Nonfiction Books of 2009Excellent.--Time magazineA terrific book--a serious consideration of Rand's ideas, and her role in the conservative movement of the past three quarters of a century.--The American ThinkerA wonderful book: beautifully written, completely balanced, extensively researched. The match between author and subject is so perfect that one might believe that the author was chosen by the gods to write this book. She has sympathy and affection for her subject but treats her as a human being, with no attempt to cover up the foibles.--Mises Economics Blog

No, They Can't: Why Government Fails-But Individuals Succeed


John Stossel - 2012
    Now, he dismantles the most sacred of them all: the notion that government action is the best way to solve a problem. From the myth that government can spend its way out of a crisis to the mistaken belief that labor unions protect workers, Stossel, a true libertarian, provides evidence that the reality is very different from what intuition tells us. His evidence leads to the taboo conclusions that: ·      Government already dominates health care—and that’s the problem·      The state keeps banning foods, but food bans don't make us healthier·      Government-run schools and teachers’ unions haven’t made kids smarterUtilizing his three decades in journalism, Stossel combines sharp insights, common sense, and documented facts to debunk conventional wisdom and challenge popular opinion about the role of our nation’s government.