Book picks similar to
The Rent-Seeking Society by Gordon Tullock


economics
econ
progressive
political-philosophy

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.

Property and Freedom


Richard Pipes - 1999
    He contrasts England, a country where property rights and parliamentary government advanced hand-in-hand, with Russia, where restrictions on ownership have for centuries consistently abetted authoritarian regimes; finally he provides reflections on current and future trends in the United States. Property and Freedom is a brilliant contribution to political thought and an essential work on a subject of vital importance.

What Social Classes Owe to Each Other


William Graham Sumner - 1883
    Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton PressClassic treatise on the importance of maintaining the rights of the individual in the face of expanding state control manipulated by organized pressure groups.

Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness


Joe Kennedy - 2018
    So-called illiberal democracy and authoritarian populism are in the political ascendant; the shelves of our bookshops groan with the work of attention-grabbing thinkers insisting that permissiveness, multiculturalism and 'identity politics' have failed us and that we must now fall back on some notion of tradition. We have had our fun, and now it's time to get serious, to shore our fragments against the ruin of postmodernist meaninglessness. It's not only the usual, conservative suspects who have got on board with this argument. Authentocrats critiques the manner in which post-liberal ideas have been mobilised underhandedly by centrist politicians who, at least notionally, are hostile to the likes of Donald Trump and UKIP. It examines the forms this populism of the centre has taken in the United Kingdom and situates the moderate withdrawal from liberalism within a story which begins in the early 1990s. Blairism promised socially liberal politics as the pay-off for relinquishing commitments to public ownership and redistributive policies: many current centrists insist New Labour's error was not its capitulation to the market, but its unwillingness to heed the allegedly natural conservatism of England's provincial working classes. In this book, we see how this spurious concern for 'real people' is part of a broader turn within British culture by which the mainstream withdraws from the openness of the Nineties under the bad-faith supposition that there's nowhere to go but backwards. The self-anointing political realism which declares that the left can save itself only by becoming less liberal is matched culturally by an interest in time-worn traditional identities: the brute masculinity of Daniel Craig's James Bond, the allegedly 'progressive' patriotism of nature writing, a televisual obsession with the World Wars. Authentocrats charges liberals themselves with fuelling the post-liberal turn, and asks where the space might be found for an alternative.

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic


David Wessel - 2009
    Brilliant but temperamentally cautious, Bernanke researched and wrote about the causes of the Depression during his career as an academic. Then when thrust into a role as one of the most important people in the world, he was compelled to boldness by circumstances he never anticipated.The president of the United States can respond instantly to a missile attack with America’s military might, but he cannot respond to a financial crisis with real money unless Congress acts. The Fed chairman can. Bernanke did. Under his leadership the Fed spearheaded the biggest government intervention in more than half a century and effectively became the fourth branch of government, with no direct accountability to the nation’s voters.Believing that the economic catastrophe of the 1930s was largely the fault of a sluggish and wrongheaded Federal Reserve, Bernanke was determined not to repeat that epic mistake. In this penetrating look inside the most powerful economic institution in the world, David Wessel illuminates its opaque and undemocratic inner workings, while revealing how the Bernanke Fed led the desperate effort to prevent the world’s financial engine from grinding to a halt.In piecing together the fullest, most authoritative, and alarming picture yet of this decisive moment in our nation’s history, In Fed We Trust answers the most critical questions. Among them:• What did Bernanke and his team at the Fed know–and what took them by surprise? Which of their actions stretched–or even ripped through–the Fed’s legal authority? Which chilling numbers and indicators made them feel they had no choice?• What were they thinking at pivotal moments during the race to sell Bear Stearns, the unsuccessful quest to save Lehman Brothers, and the virtual nationalization of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac? What were they saying to one another when, as Bernanke put it to Wessel: “We came very close to Depression 2.0”?• How well did Bernanke, former treasury secretary Hank Paulson, and then New York Fed president Tim Geithner perform under intense pressure? • How did the crisis prompt a reappraisal of the once-impregnable reputation of Alan Greenspan? In Fed We Trust is a breathtaking and singularly perceptive look at a historic episode in American and global economic history.

The Woke Supremacy: An Anti-Socialist Manifesto


Evan Sayet - 2020
    There simply could not be a more important book at a more important juncture in American -- and world -- history.

Socialism Is Evil: The Moral Case Against Marx's Radical Dream


Justin Haskins - 2018
    But the most significant danger posed by socialism isn’t that its implementation would lead to greater poverty and fewer property rights, it’s that socialism would create numerous moral problems, including the limits it would place on individual liberty and religious freedom. In Socialism Is Evil: The Moral Case Against Marx’s Radical Dream, conservative columnist and think tank research fellow Justin Haskins examines the moral perils of Marx’s socialism and explains why if socialism were to be imposed in its fullest form, it wouldn’t just damage people’s freedoms, it would obliterate them. Haskins argues it would be dangerous to attempt to create Marx’s utopian socialist world, and even more importantly, that such an attempt would be so highly immoral that it could reasonably be called “evil.” In Socialism Is Evil, Haskins makes the moral case against socialism and also describes in detail what socialists believe, the differences between socialism and communism, why Marx’s socialism will never be completely adopted, and why even the more moderate European-style socialism, called “democratic socialism” by some, is highly immoral and anti-American. Many socialists are kind, generous people with good intentions, but sometimes, good intentions can create devastating results. Socialism Is Evil briefly tackles some of the most important moral controversies surrounding Marx’s socialism, providing supporters of individual liberty with the tools they need to stop the rise of socialism in its tracks.

From Shadow Party to Shadow Government: George Soros and the Effort to Radically Change America


John Perazzo - 2011
    Since David Horowitz wrote “The Shadow Party” in 2007, there has been a major breakthrough in the progression of Soros’ plan to racially change American institutions – he has succeeded in subverting and taking over the Democratic Party itself. Though Soros has carefully hidden his goals under the cloak of his philanthropy, Horowitz and John Perazzo expose Soros’ radical agenda in this booklet and show how his philanthropies actually work to advance his leftwing causes. Understanding the Soros agenda is critical for understanding and defeating the Obama agenda, because they have, in effect, become one in the same.

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets


Michael J. Sandel - 2012
    Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets?In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

Fiat Money Inflation in France (How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended)


Andrew Dickson White - 1933
    I shall give it in the exact words of that thoughtful historian from whom I have already quoted: "Before the end of the year 1795 the paper money was almost exclusively in the hands of the working classes, employees and men of small means, whose property was not large enough to invest in stores of goods or national lands.

Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich


Kevin Phillips - 2002
    His bestselling books, including The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) and The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), have influenced presidential campaigns and changed the way America sees itself. Widely acknowledging Phillips as one of the nation's most perceptive thinkers, reviewers have called him a latter-day Nostradamus and our "modern Thomas Paine." Now, in the first major book of its kind since the 1930s, he turns his attention to the United States' history of great wealth and power, a sweeping cavalcade from the American Revolution to what he calls "the Second Gilded Age" at the turn of the twenty-first century.The Second Gilded Age has been staggering enough in its concentration of wealth to dwarf the original Gilded Age a hundred years earlier. However, the tech crash and then the horrible events of September 11, 2001, pointed out that great riches are as vulnerable as they have ever been. In Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips charts the ongoing American saga of great wealth–how it has been accumulated, its shifting sources, and its ups and downs over more than two centuries. He explores how the rich and politically powerful have frequently worked together to create or perpetuate privilege, often at the expense of the national interest and usually at the expense of the middle and lower classes.With intriguing chapters on history and bold analysis of present-day America, Phillips illuminates the dangerous politics that go with excessive concentration of wealth. Profiling wealthy Americans–from Astor to Carnegie and Rockefeller to contemporary wealth holders–Phillips provides fascinating details about the peculiarly American ways of becoming and staying a multimillionaire. He exposes the subtle corruption spawned by a money culture and financial power, evident in economic philosophy, tax favoritism, and selective bailouts in the name of free enterprise, economic stimulus, and national security.Finally, Wealth and Democracy turns to the history of Britain and other leading world economic powers to examine the symptoms that signaled their declines–speculative finance, mounting international debt, record wealth, income polarization, and disgruntled politics–signs that we recognize in America at the start of the twenty-first century. In a time of national crisis, Phillips worries that the growing parallels suggest the tide may already be turning for us all.From the Hardcover edition.

Killing America: A 100 Year Murder: Forty Historical Wounds That Bill O'Reilly Didn't Write About


M.S. King - 2015
    You may not be able to put your finger on it, but you sense it instinctively.How can you not sense it? For the first time ever, both the majority of the younger and the older generations of America now believe that future generations will not be as prosperous as their parents’ generation was. And that’s only the economic pessimism. On the social and cultural fronts, how many of us can truly say that we are proud are what our society has degenerated to?Make no mistake; the America we once knew has indeed been murdered. How did we arrive at this point of perpetual debt, perpetual inflation, massive taxation, chronically high unemployment, disintegrating families, massive dependency on the state, perpetual war, and ever-worsening moral degeneracy, mass psychological depression, and cultural degradation?Who did it? Why did they do it? How did they do it? How was the ‘murder’ concealed from the American people?Through the use of 40 clear, concise and very easy-to-digest illustrated ‘blurbs’ (The 40 Wounds), Killing America: The 100 Year Murder will answer those questions for you. This is a mass-distribution booklet designed for ‘crash-course’ simplicity. Please share it with others.

The Price of Prosperity: Why Rich Nations Fail and How to Renew Them


Todd G. Buchholz - 2016
    W. Bush explores exposes the economic, political, and cultural cracks that wealthy nations face and makes the case for transforming those same vulnerabilities into sources of strength—and the foundation of a national renewal.America and other developed countries, including Germany, Japan, France, and Great Britain are in desperate straits. The loss of community, a contracting jobs market, immigration fears, rising globalization, and poisonous partisanship—the adverse price of unprecedented prosperity—are pushing these nations to the brink. Acclaimed author, economist, hedge fund manager, and presidential advisor Todd G. Buchholz argues that without a sense of common purpose and shared identity, nations can collapse. The signs are everywhere: Reckless financial markets encourage people to gamble with other people’s money. A coddling educational culture removes the stigma of underachievement. Community traditions such as American Legion cookouts and patriotic parades are derided as corny or jingoistic. Newcomers are watched with suspicion and contempt. As Buchholz makes clear, the United States is not the first country to suffer these fissures. In The Price of Prosperity he examines the fates of previous empires—those that have fallen as well as those extricated from near-collapse and the ruins of war thanks to the vision and efforts of strong leaders. He then identifies what great leaders do to fend off the forces that tear nations apart. Is the loss of empire inevitable? No. Can a community spirit be restored in the U.S. and in Europe? The answer is a resounding yes. We cannot retrieve the jobs of our grandparents, but we can embrace uniquely American traditions, while building new foundations for growth and change. Buchholz offers a roadmap to recovery, and calls for a revival of national pride and patriotism to help us come together once again to protect the nation and ensure our future.

It's All Politics: Winning in a World Where Hard Work and Talent Aren't Enough


Kathleen Kelley Reardon - 2005
    You cannot afford to be apolitical at work if you have any aspirations for advancement. The only way to avoid politics is to avoid people—by finding an out-of-the-way corner where you can do your job. Of course, it’s the same job you’ll likely be doing for the rest of your career.In any job, when you reach a certain level of technical competence, politics is what makes all the difference with regard to success. At that point, it is indeed all politics. Everyday brilliant people take a backseat to their politically adept colleagues by failing to win crucial support for their ideas. Sometimes politics involves going around or bending rules, but more typically it’s about positioning your ideas in a favorable light, and knowing what to say, and how and when to say it.…Keep in mind that people benefit from perpetuating the image of politics as something you either know or you don’t. Ignore them. Political acumen is largely learned from observation. And then it’s a matter of practice, practice, practice. When a journalist suggested that golfing great Gary Player was very lucky, he replied: “It’s funny, but the more I practice, the luckier I get.” The same is true of politics.An indispensable guide to mastering the ins and outs of office politics—the single most important factor in getting ahead in your careerAs management professor and consultant Kathleen Reardon explains in her new book, It's All Politics, talent and hard work alone will not get you to the top. What separates the winners from the losers in corporate life is politics.As Reardon explains, the most talented and accomplished employees often take a backseat to their politically adept coworkers, losing ground in the race to get ahead—sometimes even losing their jobs. Why? Because they’ve failed to manage the important relationships with the people who can best reward their creativity and intelligence. To determine whether you need a crash course in Office Politics 101, ask yourself the following questions:Do I get credit for my ideas?Do I know how to deal with a difficult colleague?Do I get the plum assignments?Do I have a mentor?Do I say no gracefully and pick my battles wisely?Am I in the loop?Reardon has interviewed hundreds of employees, from successful veterans to aspiring hopefuls, examining why some people who work hard and effectively at their jobs fall behind, while those who are adept at “reading the office tea leaves” forge ahead. Being politically savvy doesn’t mean being unethical or devious. At heart, it’s about listening to and relating to others, and making choices that advance everyone’s goals. Like it or not, when it comes to work, it’s all politics. And politics is all about knowing what to say, when to say it, and who to say it to.

Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War for Europe's Money


Bernard Connolly - 1995
    Book by Connolly, Bernard