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IC's Top 25 Philosophical and Ideological Conservative Books
No. 11- Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr, Editor, The Ludwig von Mises Institute.: The Free Market Reader
by Dr. Enrico Peppe
5 November 2004

Eight categories of essays: Fundamentals, Fiat Money and the Gold Standard, Free Trade and Protectionism, Great Economists, Socialism, Privatization versus Government Ownership, Budgets, Taxes, Bureaucracy, and Interventionism, and Reaganomics.

The Boaz pieces are eclectic and historic (Paine, Madison, Locke, Hume, Spencer, Bastiat; some Friedman, Rothbard, and Mises). All in all, a great read, and designed, I might add, to be enjoyed by the Rand crowd, the Hawkish Libertarians, and the Remove Laws Restricting Free Thought and Marijuana Use cabal best found in "Reason" Magazine. Libertarians of all strands should purchase this collection. It stands time and is decidedly a useful and "compleat" reference work.

The Machan collection is strongly academic and tough going. It should not be avoided as it features in all its selections a pristine libertarian hermeneutic by great thought-provokers Eric Mack, J. Charles King, Hospers, Block, Flew, and the editor. Marginal notes are a must here, whereas, as in the Boaz collection, a book shelf or coffee table might suffice between random reads as a place for rest.

But my charge by IntellectualConservative.com editors Rachel and Andrew Alexander is to discern the best of the best. And the nod (without a bit of prodding) must go to "The Free Market Reader," edited by Rockwell. The contained essays in the "Economics of Liberty" are unapologetically Austrian. "Ergo," the reads are straightforward, logical, and fun. Notes are not recommended. The book cupboard should not contain this paperback. Instead, the bed stand is the proper place for its reading, i.e., a piece before slumber, for a relaxed nightmare-free experience.

There are eight categories of essays (about one-third by Rothbard, and brilliant fare, by amongst others, Skousen, Ron Paul, Jeffrey Tucker, Hoppe, Walter Block, Sam Wells, and Sheldon L. Richman): Fundamentals, Fiat Money and the Gold Standard, Free Trade and Protectionism, Great Economists, Socialism, Privatization versus Government Ownership, Budgets, Taxes, Bureaucracy, and Interventionism, and Reaganomics (this latter section should be read with Buchanan's new book on Neoconservatism for the full picture).

Each category features a piece so throughly rich that rereading such becomes habitual (though there isn't a poor selection in the entire collection).

I-FUNDAMENTALS:

Rothbard dispels "Ten Great Economic Myths." dealing with deficits, tax increases, the fed, econometrics, unemployment/inflation, the "flat" tax, and the overly-discussed outsourcing "problem."

Pure Rothbard on Flat Taxation:

"Allowing someone to keep some of his own income is neither a loophole nor a subsidy. Lowering the overall tax by abolishing deductions for medical care, for interest payments, or for uninsured losses, is simply lowering the taxes of one set of people...at the expense of raising them for those who have incurred such expenses."

II-FIAT MONEY AND THE GOLD STANDARD:

Mark Skousen clearly understands the Austrian theory of the business cycle. What the consumer should understand first and foremost is that the main source of bad economics is bad government policy.

From Skousen:

"The business cycle, inflation, and high nominal interest rates are not caused by the free market, but by government's monetary and fiscal policies. Without government intervention, the free-market economy would reflect:
1. Stable interest rates...
2. No inflation...
3. Low unemployment...
4. (A)...high savings rate...and,
5. Economic growth without recessions or depressions."

III-FREE TRADE AND PROTECTIONISM:

Sam Wells' great piece demythologizes the trade deficit shibboleth. If I could only tempt my "buy American" brethren to read Wells, they might get the obvious point that,

"If it were not for the inflow of (foreign capital), the 'crowding out' of domestic borrowers in our credit markets by big government's gargantuan budget deficits would have slammed us into a deep repression long before now."

IV-GREAT ECONOMISTS:

Margit von Mises ruminates on her husband as an activist. In a beautiful piece, she says, in part,

"Yes, Ludwig von Mises was an activist, whose influence has reached -- and is still reaching-- far over the world. Imagine how much better our world would be today if (the activists) who chant for women's rights, for gay rights, for tenant's rights, for minorities' rights, were working to correct the true cause of our social problems...(the remedy of which would be an understanding of)...the economic facts of life as demonstrated by Ludwig von Mises."

V-SOCIALISM:

Richard Ebeling in a prescient manner states,

"It is clear that socialism has lost the war on the battlefield of ideas. But free-market capitalism has not yet won. Both in the United States and around the world, policy-makers promote the 'mixed economy,' a hodgepodge of competition and state control. Intellectuals on both the collectivist left and the conservative right have enshrined the idea of state intervention."

VI-PRIVATIZATION VERSUS STATE OWNERSHIP:

The ever-concise-no-holds barred Walter Block fields the case for a free market in body parts:

"(The shortage of parts difficulty)... is that our legal-economic system has not kept up with medical technology. The law prohibits people from using the property rights we each have in our own person. Specifically, it has banned trade, or a marketplace, in live spare body parts...(if)...the price of human organs were allowed to rise to its market level, barring new technological breakthroughs in artificial organs, there would still be a high demand from people needing an organ transplant to sustain their lives. Thus the immediate effect of a free market would be mainly on the amount supplied."

VII-BUDGETS, TAXES, BUREAUCRACY, AND INTERVENTIONISM:

Robert Higgs scores a "bulls-eye" on why our Constitution has deteriorated:

"Starting in 1937...the (Supreme) Court reversed so many important decisions on economic matters that its turnabout must be considered a constitutional revolution. The heart of the court's position was a broad reading of the Commerce Clause. Practically everything, no matter how manifestly local, was seen as part of interstate commerce and therefore subject to regulation by Congress and its agencies."

VIII-Reaganomics:

Sheldon Richman on the sad legacy:

"Reagan's fans argue that he has changed the terms of public-policy debate, that no one dares propose big-spending programs. I contend that the alleged spending-shyness of politicians is not the result of an ideological sea-change, but rather...fiscal fright brought about by $250 billion Reagan budget deficits. If the deficit ever shrinks, the demand for spending will resume."

Coming up on an every-three-week basis will be my reviews for IC of the top ten philosophical and ideological conservative/libertarian books.

Before I begin my analysis of this mind-wrenching task, however, I feel it is time to answer in a general way a bunch of e-mails I've received as to why my "sudden switch" from Buckley conservative to Rockwell libertarian.

Well, it's not been that sudden; it's been a long time looming.

I read Buckley's "God and Man At Yale" when I was thirteen, and I was never the same. But the Buckley I studied and studied about was influenced by some Nock, plenty of Chodorov, and enough Mencken to create some fun in an otherwise drab Leftist "milieu."

And then Mr. Buckley became a "personality." And the meetings with the Kristol neo-conservative statists became commonplace. Things became trendy and modish.

We know the rest of the story (many of my previous IC reviews in one manner or another speak to the change in the conservative movement in general or to the Buckley morph in particular).

In college, "some of my best friends" were libertarians. Most seemed a strange lot, however. Many were Athiests (I'm a Catholic). A healthy majority had preference for weed (I was into megavitamin rapture).

But mostly they were culturally alienated, and yet had a romantic inclination toward precinct politics --- and they seemed not to realize what attends this: statism and ultimately war.

Mises' "Human Action" was another story, however. I never thought of this great book as a libertarian "manifesto."

For me it made sense. It made common sense. I made very little connection between Mises (later on Rothbard) and the libertarians I knew and read about.

It took Brian Doherty's interview of Lew Rockwell in the May 12, 1999 issue of "SpintechMag.com" to clear out my sinuses.

I learned things like the following:

1. There are libertarians and there are libertarians.

Rockwell in the interview:

"We began to write about the errors of the 'modal' libertarians. They were soft on war, sanguine about centralization of power, and friendly towards the rise of the social-therapeutic aspects of the state inherent in civil-rights egalitarianism. They were uninterested in scholarship and unschooled in history. They were culturally fringy and politically mainstream, which is precisely the opposite of what Murray and Mises were. I couldn't imagine the old libertarian school of Nock, Chodorov, Garrett, Flynn, and Mencken at home with this."

(I should just write like Rockwell talks).

2. It's perfectly fine to be libertarian and religious.

Rockwell:

"I remember people at the time saying: 'Oh no! You're falling in bed with a bunch of religious rightists!' (the paleoconservatives) I would just rub my eyes in dismay. In the first place, if a person believes in liberty and also happens to be religious, what is wrong with that? Since when did atheism become a mandatory view within libertarian circles? Also, the point was not to fall in bed with anybody but to organize a new intellectual movement precisely to do battle with the statists on all sides."

3. The Austrian brand of libertarianism, apart from its essentially correct economics, has a decided cultural thrust.

"Murray rejected what Mises called the cultural destructionism of the left because he saw it as back-door to state building. If you attack the family by impinging in its autonomy, the family can no longer serve as a bulwark against state power. So it is with leftist rhetoric that ridicules the habits, prejudices, traditions, and institutions that form the basis of settled, middle-class community life. He saw the relentless attacks on these as paving the way for government managers to claim more territory as their own."

(The full Doherty interview was published in LRC as:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/oldright.html).

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