I took the journey from political ignorance to liberty through several books. I will share them with you on this page. I hope that these books will guide other people to understanding liberty as they guided me:
Economic Facts and Fallacies
Thomas Sowell surveys several economic fallacies that dominate our political discussions and contrast them with facts. You will learn about five fallacies:
- The Zero-Sum Fallacy: Believing that economic transactions leave winners and losers. In reality, Economic transactions are not zero-sum. You pay money for a product or a service because you value this amount of money less than you value that product or service. Both you and the merchant are better off.
- The Composition Fallacy: Believing that what is true of a part is true of the whole. For example, when a local government gives a tax break to attract a large business, only this business and the politicians it bought are better off. The rest of the community is even hurt because it has to pay the full tax that the favored business avoided.
- The Post Hoc Fallacies: Believing that if x happened before y then the x has caused y. For example, Politicians like to take credit for economic booms if they happened after they take office, even if their policies didn’t contribute to these booms.
- The Chess Pieces Fallacy: Believing that planners can arrange the members of society as chess pieces to achieve some grand goal. Governments caused many miseries because the people in charge believed that they can plan for the whole society. Humans are not chess pieces in a grand game, each human has independent goals and works to achieve them.
- The Open-Ended Fallacy: Activists like to promote open-ended goals without regard to the limits of the available resources. Some of these goals sound good like health or eliminating poverty. But there are limits to the resources available and we cannot just dedicate a lot of resources to a single goal just because it sounds noble. Reality will always prevail.
Dr. Sowell applies these fallacies to several areas of policy such as urban planning, male-female differences, income, and race.
Real Dissent
I discovered this book through an audible daily offer. This great book by Tom Woods introduced me to many ideas about Libertarianism and the great resources offered by the Mises Institute. This book is a collection of articles and podcast episodes by Dr. Woods. It introduced me to the antiwar movement on the right and the concept of the 3×5 card of allowable opinions in American politics. When you watch Democrats and Republicans argue, you realize that they always argue about the degree of something instead of it being right or wrong. They argue about whether we should leave Afghanistan but never about the reason we are there. They argue about the tax rate, but never about whether taxation is good or bad. This book will introduce you to the consistent view offered by true libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism.
Democracy The God that Failed
In this book, Hans Hermann Hoppe makes the case against Democracy. He attacks democracy using property theory. We know that an owner takes better care of any property better than a renter or a temporary caretaker. If you compare a traditional monarch against a democratically elected ruler, the first is an owner while the second is a temporary caretaker. The monarch will have a strong incentive to care about the long-term consequences of any decision, while the temporary caretaker, only cares about the next election. The monarch will eventually leave the country to his heir but the caretaker doesn’t. Democracy gives the people the wrong impression that they govern themselves, in reality, they always choose between a few choices pushed by the ruling class. In a monarchy, the people don’t have this illusion so they always view the monarch’s actions with suspicion. Other powers in the country such as the nobility and the church would check the monarch’s powers if he exceeds the norms.
Many people think that this means that Hoppe supports monarchy, he only does in comparison to democracy. He will also attack major beliefs about the government such as the need for a government monopoly on national defense. This book will make you question many of the sacred cows of our modern politics.