As everything comes unraveled more rapidly than you thought it could, perhaps your thoughts have turned to the prospect of coming to a greater understanding of stuff. The airplane is nose down ten thousand feet above the ocean, and you have now begun to reflect on where, exactly, the flight attendant said the life preservers were supposed to have been stowed.
Toward that end, I would like to recommend the following ten titles that I believe might help you make sense of all the senseless. Of course, recommending these does not entail recommending every jot and tittle in them, but it does mean that I believe that these books will certainly help to inform and equip. Apologies for including one of my own, but I needed a title to cover that territory.
1. Idols for Destruction (Herbert Schlossberg)
2. The Politics of Guilt and Pity (Rousas Rushdoony)
3. The Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis)
4. Excused Absence (Douglas Wilson)
5. The Vision of the Anointed (Thomas Sowell)
6. Our Culture, What’s Left of It (Theodore Dalrymple)
7. Above All Earthly Pow’rs (David Wells)
8. The God of Sex (Peter Jones)
9. Liberal Fascism (Jonah Goldberg)
10. Economics in One Lesson (Henry Hazlitt)
I think it was Dalrymple who said, “The poor are a gold mine.” To that could be added, “The uneducated (the poor who ‘need’ gubmint skools) are a gold mine.” Who is reaching for the cheese? School administrators, teachers, janitors, bus drivers, caterers, nurses, psychologists, grounds keepers, publishers, vendors, contractors, etc. No wonder Americans have traded away their property rights.
Are they in recommended reading order?
See also:
11. Democracy, The God That Failed (Hans-Herman Hoppe)
12. The Collapse of Complex Societies (Joseph Tainter)
12. Free Trade Doesn’t Work (Ian Fletcher)
And if you’re feeling particularly vigorous: The True History of the American Revolution (Sydney George Fisher)
Debt the first 5000 years – David Graeber
For those of us who buy books you recommend we need some more detail. From my perspective…. Economics in one lesson is good. Free download here: https://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson (click on the pdf, 1.4 MB) Anything by Lewis is usually good. I didn’t find Abolition of Man as good as other Lewis but read it many years ago. Perhaps time to look at it again. Liberal Fascism enjoyable and worth reading. A comparison between the policies of Fascism (and Nazism which is generally considered a form of Fascism) and the policies espoused by the Left. Tyranny of Cliches by Goldberg is how… Read more »
Henry Hazlitt has one book on LibriVox; not the one DW recommends here. I’m downloading it anyway. Need more Douglas Wilson audiobooks!