Coincidently enough, around that same time Tom Woods requested some feedback from his readers on the same topic of a good go-to resource for introducing a newbie to the the morality of capitalism with some pro-capitalist history.
The comments were quite enlightening. One in particular offered some interesting insight…as well as a recommendation I would not have thought of…
I’ve been eyeing that big big about capitalism. I forgot the name, but it is the black one with the yellow map of the world on the front. I’ve read references and excerpts from it, and it looks pretty neat. I have it saved at home, but JJ might be able to find it faster
Yeah it’s Reisman’s opus Capitalism. NOT something I’d recommend to anyone basically. It’s useful to offer up on a piece by piece basis, but if anyone is actually going to read something like that entire treatise, they’re going to do it on their own. You can’t hand someone a book like that and expect them to read it…at least not unless they’re really into it or are just a ridiculous bookworm. (Which is why something like this campaign is just a terrible, stupid idea.)
For the purposes described in the OP, you need something much lighter, and much more readable. Reisman is useful, and believe it or not, pretty interesting at times, but incredibly dry. While I do realize The Creature from JekyllIsland is a pretty big book in itself, it’s muuuch more readable (as the former progressive admits). And How Capitalism Saved America is still at the top of the list too.
This is kind of a random question only indirectly related to this thread - I’m bouncing around the idea of writing a book-length treatment of morality from a human action standpoint (basically, Epicurean ethics) along the lines of what I’ve posted in my threads on law, ethics and other related topics. Do you think it’s possible I could at least break even if I self-published it (I’m thinking like $1.99 e-book, $6.99 paperback, 150-200 pages)? Do you think I could get LRC or Mises.org to add it to their store even though I’m not an economist?
It wouldn’t exactly be an “introduction to capitalism” but it would be basically what I believe is the moral theory that underpins capitalism. It would be aimed at the “educated layman” audience - people who know the difference between a priori and a posteriori but might not be able to explain the production-possibility frontier. The working title is “The Philosophy of Good and Evil”. Here’s a sample ToC:
Conscious Awareness: Final Knowledge
Action, Means, Ends
Good and Evil Defined
Uncertainty, Scarcity and Discovery
The Self-Discovery Process: The Philosophy of Good and Evil
What sort of monetary costs would you incur with producing an e-book?
I’m not sure about how a paperback would go, but I don’t doubt there are binding services that allow for independent publishing like that. I would just be concerned about publicity. I’m not sure how much revenue you’d be able to generate without some kind of distribution channel. Lee Doren wrote a book and put it out exclusively in electronic form on Amazon for $.99 and it did quite well. It ended up being #1 in the Education Section for a while, and I’m pretty sure it all went straight to his pocket (well, all 35% of it anyway…I believe the Amazon rates are 35% royalty on anything between $.99 – $1.99, and a 70% royalty on anything more than $1.99). (Here’s Amazon’s page about it, and here’s a video.)
However, Lee Doren had over 30k subscribers on YouTube at the time, so he was able to publicize it pretty well (not only on his own channel, but he ended up doing interviews on Reason.tv, and radio shows and the like).
It would be interesting to see if you could get it in the Mises Store. It would take some doing, but I would definitely look into it if you’re serious about getting it written. It could definitely be worth it if you could get the store to carry it, and then get them to publish a Mises Daily and/or LRC article (which you would write, I guess) giving a good overview (kinda like this and this).
If you’re serious about the project I would get a draft written and then get in touch with Brandon Hill in the Mises Store.
While I am assuming that you wouldn’t object to free distribution (ie, you wouldn’t sue us), I think I would gladly pay for the book if it were only $2. Especially if you sell if out of your own website. That way you can get 100% of the profits (minus taxes, of course ). Heck, I think even $4 might work.
@JJ: Wow, thanks for all those resources, I’ll look into them.
@Whelyous: No, I’m happy to have it spread far and wide - actually, personally, I have reservations about any kind of “e-book” other than a simple PDF document that would not be copyright restricted so it wouldn’t even make sense for me to charge for the PDF download. I believe there will always be hardcopy books (though fewer) and people will always be willing to pay a little money for a nice, bound hardcopy book. The point of charging is simply to try to recoup the costs of printing. If I distribute it solely in PDF form, there won’t really be any printing cost so it’s just a matter of finding someone willing to host it, such as mises.org.
This is more of a mid-length project, say, two or three years. I can probably have a rought draft within 18 months if I can find some spare time.
There’s a really good three volume work on capitalism called simply Capital. I can’t remember the name of the author, unfortunately, but you can probably find it if you Google the title.
IIRC it started for me without any book but the “strong” feeling about wrongness of subsedies. I simply found it unfair an could and still an not see, why one company should get them and others should pay for it. I always though something is wrong about it, it took me quite a long time to find the books which just “expressed” my feeling of wrongness.
For me the most influential books were/are
Human Action
Way into serfom
man, state and
All of this books should be known to well yes more or less anybody. But especially to the “regulators”.
