Ten books to read

Miscellaneous General
1

Put up your 10 favourite books on politics/economics/history. Some of you have incredibly interesting thoughts and I would like to see which books helped shape them, so I can read them and expand my own mind.

2

  1. For A New Liberty

  2. Ethics of Liberty

  3. No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

  4. Meltdown

  5. 33 Questions your not suppose to ask

6, The Socialist Tradition

  1. Betrayal of the American Right

  2. History of Money and Banking

  3. Theory and History

3

  1. Rothbard - For A New Liberty

  2. Hoppe - A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism

  3. Rothbard - Man, Economy and State, with Power and Market

  4. Paul - The Revolution: A Manifesto

  5. Hayek - The Road to Serfdom

  6. Hoppe - Democracy: The God That Failed

  7. Rothbard - The Ethics of Liberty

  8. Mises - Theory and History

  9. Stringham - Anarchy and the Law

  10. Nock - Our Enemy, The State

4

I’ve got only one so far. Hard to plough through those 700 pagers.

  1. Economics in One lesson by Hazlitt. Simple clear logic and language, a real eye opener.

I like the tapes from this wonderful site and from fee.org

5
  1. Hayek - Individualism and Economic Order
  2. Kirzner - The Driving Force of the Market
  3. Garrison - Time and Money
  4. Rothbard - Man, Economy and State
  5. Rothbard - Power and Market
  6. Huerta de Soto - Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles
  7. Horwitz - Microfoundations and Macroeconomics
  8. White - Competition and Currency
  9. White - Free Banking in Britain
  10. Leeson - The Invisible Hook
6

Boundaries of Order - Butler Shaffer

The Machinery of Freedom - David Friedman

Man, Economy, and State w/ Power and Market - Murray Rothbard

The Servile State - Hilaire Belloc

The Theory of Monetary Institutions - Lawrence White

The Fluttering Veil - Leland Yeager

The Enterprise of Law - Bruce Benson

The Structure of Liberty - Randy Barnett

The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State - Auberon Herbert

The Principles of Ethics - Herbert Spencer

7

Have you had the chance of reading Larry Sechrest’s Free Banking? Sechrest is a pro-fractional reserve free-banker, but critiques White’s thesis that Scotland’s banking was truly free.

8

That was my 11!

9

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick

The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman

Justice and Its Surroundings by Anthony de Jasay

The Road to Serfdom by F A Hayek

On Liberty by J S Mill

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

Individualism and Economic Order by F A Hayek

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Law by Frederic Bastiat

10

I’ve been reading this one for over a year, going back and making notes over it. I could list more but no other compares to the influence it has had on me, one of the few books that has ever changed my mind on anything. Without it I would not be an Austrian I can guarantee it.

I present to you, the one, the only:

  1. Human Action.

Nuff said[H]

11

  1. For a New Liberty (Rothbard)

  2. Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics & the Logic of Action (Long)

  3. The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (also, his paper on hermeneutics) (Hoppe)

  4. Human Action (Mises)

  5. Norms of Liberty (Rasmussen and den Uyl)

  6. Socialism (Mises)

  7. Democracy - The God that Failed (Hoppe)

  8. In Defense of Pure Reason (BonJour)

  9. Rational Economic Man (Hollis and Nell)

  10. The Virtue of Selfishness (Rand)

Runner ups would be Principles of Economics (Menger), ASU (Nozick), The Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), Long’s article on non-precisive abstraction, Economics for Real People (Callahan), Geoffrey Plauche’s paper on Aristotelian apriorism and praxeology, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Rand), An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (same), What is it like to be a Human instead of a bat? (BonJour), The Ethics of Liberty (Rothbard), Man, Economy & State (same), The Market for Liberty (Tannehills), Two Logics (Veatch), Rational Man (same), Liberty and Nature (Rasmussen & den Uyl), Mises’s epistemological works (Theory & History, UFOES and The Epistemological Problems of Economics as well as his The Theory of Money and Credit), Rediscovering the Mind (Searle), On Giving libertarians what they say they want (Dennet - the term here is to denote libertarianism as in free will, not the NAP) and Selgin’s Praxeology & Understanding.

12

Here is a list of 10 books that most changed my way of looking at the world around us. Although you can find many flaws in the non-Austrian books, they are a still source of good information if you can simply ignore the occasional mistakes their authors have made.

Ludwig von Mises: Theory and History
Murray N. Rothbard: Betrayal of the American Right
Pat Buchanan: Where the Right went wrong
Robert Shiller: Irrational Exuberance
Stephen Sniegoski: Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel
F.A. Hayek: Road to Serfdom
Ralph de Toledano: Cry Havoc: The Great American Bring-Down and How It Happened
Paul Gottfried: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt
Henry Hazlitt: Economics in One Lesson
Richard Webster: Why Freud was wrong

Economic books by Mises, Hayek and Rothbard are difficult to mention here because as a whole they are a whole system and it is difficult to mention any one pearl that surpasses their other works on this subject.

13

Rather than name the same books over and over, here are mine that I didn’t spot on other lists.

One is a Crowd - Frank Chodorov

The Art of War - Sun Tzu

God Emperor of Dune - Frank Herbert

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Defending the Undefendable - Walter Block

The Book of the 5 Rings - Miyamoto Musashi

ADDED

The Black Swan - NN Taleb

14

I don’t need to read any more. I’m already cynical enough. [:P]