One of the books that is still on sale at Audible.com is Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

Some Austrian scholars are discussing it on one of the mailing lists, and I decided to move it from my wishlist to my shopping cart.

I can't really review or recommend it, since I've only listened to about a quarter of it, so far, but I suspect I'll be giving it a thumbs up.

Meanwhile, I mention it here because I'm overwhelmed by how much of it already vindicates

1. Murray Rothbard's foreign-policy analysis from the 1950s onward, and

2. Robert Anton Wilson's information-theory analysis from "Celine's Laws," which you can read here on my website.

At this point I spend more money on audiobooks than I spend on print books (although that's in part because loved ones send me print books as gifts (thanks, loved ones!)) and it adds up fast. For me, it's worth it, but the hefty price of audiobooks makes it hard for a newcomer to try things out, especially when there's so much free audio available online. Why pay for the professionals? Again, for me, the professionals earn their keep, but I can easily see why this is a hard case to make.

So it's very smart of Audible.com to hold these holiday and summer sales. The one going on now is a doozy: a list of "summer paperbacks" (which I assume means the audio versions of books that, in print, are paperbacks) for only $5.95 each.

I just grabbed these, all unabridged:

• Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers by Michael Barone
• How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion
  by Daniel H. Wilson
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by (yes, our very own) Dr. Robert P. Murphy

The only reason The Whiskey Rebellion by William Hogeland isn't also on that list is because I already own it.

Here are the on-sale titles I didn't buy but do recommend:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clark
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Another on-sale title that I already own and listened to only last spring is The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager.

It is a fascinating and little-known tale about the first false steps and real advances that took us from an age of epidemics and common childhood death and crippling disease to a medical era of inoculations, antibiotics, and surging survival rates. It does have an unbelievably naive chapter about the heroic government finally gaining the power to reign in and regulate the evil capitalists, but you can fast-forward through that section. The rest of the book is unexpectedly engrossing.

I'm embarrassed by how little of this I knew and how much of our current condition I'd taken for granted. Less than 100 years ago, the rich and powerful shared with the poor and marginalized the likelihood of seeing at least one of their children (or the mother, giving birth do those children) die from the sort of disease and infection we barely think about today. Millennia of disease followed by less than a century of pharmaceuticals.

My whole family took turns being miserably sick last week from a mysterious infection, so this topic hits home right now. After listening to The Demon Under the Microscope, I'm more grateful than ever to have been born in the 20th century and to still be alive in the 21st.

A few years ago, just before I discovered the Austrian School, I read The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. Austrians are somewhere between suspicious and dismissive of game theory (see this paper [pdf] for an exception and this article for a more typical example), but I find the central "point" of this book quite compelling and relevant to libertarianism. I'll explain why after this humorous interruption from my mother:

As a young boy enters a barber shop, the barber whispers to his customer, "This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you."

The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, "Which do you want, son?"

The boy takes the quarters and leaves.

"What did I tell you?" says the barber. "That kid never learns!"

Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. "Hey, son!" he says. "May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?"

The boy licks his cone and replies, "Because the day I take the dollar, the game's over!"

That's one she sent me last week in email. I laughed out loud and then thought about it. It reminded me of Axelrod's book, which is also about how the meaning of a single event is turned upside down when we can expect the event to be iterative — when, in other words, we expect it to repeat. How's that for humorless nerd talk?

The boy seems stupid when we think he believes $1 < 50¢. He seems surprisingly cunning when we realize he knows $1 < 50¢+50¢+50¢…

(I won't even touch the question of time preference, though you'll notice the joke implicitly includes that concept, as well.)

So Axelrod's book is about a similar shift involving the prisoner's dilemma.

In its "classical" form, the prisoner's dilemma (PD) is presented as follows:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies ("defects") for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act? (Wikipedia)

Pure self-interest, guided by reason, will lead a prisoner to rat out his partner.

The standard interpretation of this classical prisoner's dilemma is that rational self-interest guides individuals to reject cooperation, even when cooperation assures the greatest good for the greatest number. And the standard interpretation of that standard interpretation is that therefore we need a coercive authority to impose cooperation on us for our own good.

To borrow the Google Books summary of The Evolution of Cooperation,

This widely praised and much-discussed book explores how cooperation can emerge in a world of self-seeking egoists—whether superpowers, businesses, or individuals—when there is no central authority.

Axelrod changed the rules to create the "iterated prisoner's dilemma" (IPD), wherein prisoner A and prisoner B face the classical prisoner's dilemma over and over again, remembering what decisions were made and what results occurred in previous iterations. He invited others to submit strategies (programmed in BASIC) to compete in an IPD tournament.

The result: the best strategy was called "Tit-for-Tat" in which the player is always cooperative with strangers and always imitates the last move, cooperative or uncooperative, of any player whose game history is known.

That result is already interesting, and the Tit-for-Tat strategy seems to me to be something you could reasonably call "the libertarian strategy": don't hit first; do hit back.*

As the Wikipedia page puts it, "Axelrod reached the Utopian-sounding conclusion that selfish individuals for their own selfish good will tend to be nice and forgiving and non-envious."

The even more interesting and "Utopian-sounding" result comes from iterating the already-iterated form of the PD, in which winning strategies "go forth and multiply" where the game rules dictate that losing players adopt the strategies of the players that beat them. The more successful a player's strategy, the more like-minded players are encountered over time. Tit-for-Tat ends up taking over the world. Eventually everyone cooperates. This is a very different result, obviously, than the one-shot "lesson" of the classical prisoner's dilemma.

My favorite part of Axelrod's book is the historical section, where he applies the Tit-for-Tat insights to examples of spontaneous cooperation among strangers and enemies across battle lines. Unfortunately, while most of his conclusions are libertarian friendly, he also draws some very interventionist conclusions about the need to prevent the forms of spontaneous cooperation that might take place between market competitors in the absence of antitrust policing.

Despite what might seem like two strikes against it (from an Austrolibertarian perspective), I still recommend the book to anyone who is trying to think through the dynamics of cooperation and self-interest.

* Pacifist libertarians might object to my summary of libertarianism as "don't hit first; do hit back," and they'd be right: the libertarian strategy says don't hit first; whether or not to hit back is, technically, outside the limits of libertarian theory.

I spent much of the weekend listening to The Iliad, which I'm enjoying immensely. I had recently read that Homer's epic is appreciated not just as a work of literature but also as a set of clues for historians. The story is filled with details about the culture of prehistoric Greece — if not the culture of Agamemnon and company, then at least the culture of Home and his audience a few centuries later. One such detail is something I'm surprised I've never heard any libertarians mention (by which I mean radical libertarians who are better read and more educated than I am): Agamemnon has insulted Achilles and Achilles has withdrawn from the war in protest. (I'd describe Agamemnon's offense as theft, but that would require acknowledging property rights in other human beings: the warlord Agamemnon "steals" the sex slave of his best warrior, Achilles.)

The war goes very badly while Achilles is on strike, and Agamemnon relents, recants, says mea culpa, and offers Achilles very generous restitution, including the return of "the girl" whom Agamemnon swears he never touched, and a boat load of gold — literally, Achilles can fill his ship with as much gold as it can carry. Agamemnon sends Achilles's most beloved comrades to deliver the apologies and give the details of what is, in essence, a verbal contract for the two warriors to forgive each other. Achilles tells his friends just where Agamemnon can stick his boat load.

At this point, Ajax scolds Achilles for being unreasonable:

Ajax son of Telamon then said, "Ulysses, noble son of Laertes, let us be gone, for I see that our journey is vain. We must now take our answer, unwelcome though it be, to the Danaans who are waiting to receive it. Achilles is savage and remorseless; he is cruel, and cares nothing for the love his comrades lavished upon him more than on all the others. He is implacable — and yet if a man's brother or son has been slain he will accept a fine by way of amends from him that killed him, and the wrong-doer having paid in full remains in peace among his own people; but as for you, Achilles, the gods have put a wicked unforgiving spirit in your heart, and this, all about one single girl…

There is is, stated quite starkly: murder wasn't a crime against the king or the state; it was a crime against the murder victim and his family; once restitution was paid, that settled the matter.

I figured someone has to have written about this, but I've only found one brief mention so far, and I found it at StephanKinsella.com/texts (thanks, Kinsella!):

• Schafer, Dr. Stephen, Restitution to Victims of Crime, 1960 (selected chapters)

PAST OF RESTITUTION AND PUNISHMENT

…neither the adherents of restitution nor its opponents can be indifferent to the fact that restitution to victims of crime is an ancient institution, has had an established position in the history of penology, and for a long period was almost inseparably attached to the institution of punishment.

The historical origin of restitution, in a proper sense, the so-called system of "composition," lies in the Middle Ages, and can mainly be found in the Germanic common laws.

Earlier sources do not offer clear information. There are some sporadic references. The death fine in Greece is referred to more than once in Homer; thus, in the 9th Book of the Iliad, Ajax, in reproaching Achilles for not accepting the offer of reparation made to him by Agamemnon, reminds him that even a brother's death may be appeased by a pecuniary fine, and that the murderer, having paid the fine, may remain at home, free among his own people.

Having examples in famous literature strikes me as far more helpful to us than assertions about little-known tribal law among ancient Celts and Vikings, or even recent Indonesians.

Does anyone have any other examples?

I had the distinct privilege of being the first person outside the Riggenbach household to hear this recording. All the praise of Garet Garrett's novels had failed to convince me to read any of them. Listening to the audiobook was something I did for work, to check for errors before we went into production. I didn't even take up the task with any pleasure, as there was a very narrow window for quality review and it meant that I had to spend my weekend doing something other than R&R.

I thought I'd at least get some yard work done while I listened, so the first chapters are etched into my memory with visions of my own manual labor as the book opens with crowds of unemployed workers, organizing to march on Washington.

My first reaction was skeptical. Riggenbach's is a great voice for nonfiction. He is clear, easy on the ears, and conveys the importance of his subject; but these virtues in the context of nonfiction don't necessarily carry over to the quirky, emotional, character-driven realm of fiction.

Well, I quickly forgot those reservations as I got swept up in the story. The Mises Institute and its supporters have mostly discussed the economic history of The Driver, which is much more interesting than you might fear, and much more interesting, I found, than is conveyed in all the reviews that emphasize how interesting it is. It is indeed a procapitalism novel, and Garrett manages to communicate that part of the story with passion and fascination, feelings that are contagious for the reader (or listener).

What I was not expecting was the human story behind the economic history. Back to Riggenbach as reader: after a few chapters, it was obvious that Jeff Riggenbach was, in fact, the perfect choice for the unnamed first-person narrator of this novel. The narrator is a journalist, and so is Riggenbach. The narration is wry and reserved, which isn't a bad description of Riggenbach's reading voice. But this reserved style acts as a counterpoint to the often chaotic action of the story. The man telling the story is the calm at the center of the storm of human activity that surrounds him. When we meet the hero of the story — the great railroad capitalist, Henry Galt — we find in him the only other steady presence in the swirl of confusion that was turn-of-the-20th-century Wall Street. I don't mean to suggest similarities between the two characters beyond that central complementary calmness; Galt is irritable, impatient with people, and far from charming in any mundane sense; the narrator is patient and sociable without being quite outgoing. He is also primarily an observer, whereas Galt is The Driver: the driver of the story and the driver, it turns out, of the American economy.

The human side of the story is everything Galt fails to see, mostly concerning his family: an elderly mother, a socialite wife, and two daughters — one attractive but aloof and the other winsome and playful. Galt's family suffers through their waxing and waning fortunes, and continues to suffer the anti-new-money social ostracism of Galt's ultimate success. Galt is immune to society's subtler punishments and he doesn't have the moral imagination to understand why his family isn't happy. Fortunately for him, they love him devotedly.

And love, believe it or not, is the other driver of this book. It turns out to be a love story, or two or three love stories — between the narrator and (1) Henry Galt himself, (2) the Galt family, who come to adopt him slowly and quietly as one of their own, and (3) one of Galt's daughters, for whom his feelings become more than fraternal.

What began as labor quickly turned to pleasure as I listened to this newly available audiobook, and I recommend it highly, whether or not you care about economics or history. It is a very human story. The fact that you might finish it with a greater respect for the social benefits of speculation and entrepreneurship is merely an added bonus.

Update: The Mises Institute has made an audio sample available:

Just how many blatant falsehoods can we find in the publisher's summary of The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War over the American Dollar by H. W. Brands:

A best-selling historian's gripping account of the powerful men who controlled America's financial destiny.

From the first days of the United States, a battle raged over money. On one side were the democrats, who wanted cheap money and feared the concentration of financial interests in the hands of a few. On the other were the capitalists who sought the soundness of a national bank — and the profits that came with it.

In telling this exciting story, H. W. Brands focuses on five "Money Men": Alexander Hamilton, who championed a national bank; Nicholas Biddle, whose run-in with Andrew Jackson led to the bank's demise; Jay Cooke, who financed the Union in the Civil War; Jay Gould, who tried to corner the gold market; and J. P. Morgan, whose position was so commanding that he bailed out the U.S. Treasury.

The Money Men is a riveting narrative, a revealing history of the men who fought over the lifeblood of American commerce and power.

Here's a telling line from the Publisher's Weekly review: "This inherent tension, the author writes, was resolved by the 1913 compromise that created the Federal Reserve System."

So long as "capitalism" is understood to be at odds with free-market money, so long as it is associated with Alexander Hamilton and government-enforced cartels, so long as history continues to be told not just inaccurately but completely backwards, we really have little hope of having our position understood, let alone sympathized with or supported.

I'm a big fan of highbrow Cliff Notes. For example, Kant's famous metaphysical treatise is called
Critique of Pure Reason; I eventually had to read it for an upper-level course on Kant, but in 101, we read his much shorter Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, which was, our intro professor explained to us, Kant's own summary presentation of his longer work.

These days, I'm reading H.G. Wells's A Short History of the World, which is the summary version of his two-volume Outline of History.

In both cases, the author wrote his own summary. I couldn't hope for an equivalent with the Bible — which I've started several times but never made it out of Genesis — so instead I'm reading and enjoying David Plotz's "Blogging the Bible," from Slate.com.

As they come up, I'm also keeping track of famous saying I didn't realize were biblical in origin, some of which have been reworded in their popular form, such as, "Can the Cushite change his skin or the leopard his spots?" (Jeremiah 13:23). I guess the Bible isn't very politically correct.

Here's Plotz's introductory comment to Jeremiah chapters 14–16:

Anyone who's ever been in a bad relationship knows the Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Cruelty: Before you go through the torture of dumping a boyfriend, you act meaner than you feel toward him. (This usually goes on at an unconscious level.) Boyfriend understandably bristles and retaliates. This makes the actual leave-taking much easier. You get to lighten your own guilt by blaming the dumpee for being such a jerk.

This appears to be God's strategy.

My father used to lament the lack of biblical literacy in my so-called education. For most of my life, I haven't shared his regret. But that concept alone — the doctrine of preemptive cruelty (which yes, I suppose might be more Plotz's than God's) — would have been well worth knowing in my formative years. My teens and 20's would have looked very different if I'd known it.

My father, who in one of his professional incarnations was a college English instructor specializing in Shakespeare, is currently reading Conn Iggulden's Emperor series, historical fiction based on the life of Julius Caesar. He's also watching the HBO/BBC series Rome, at our enthusiastic recommendation.

He wrote me today about the complexities of emotionally allying with different "sides" in historical struggles, and how much our allegiance is affected by already knowing the winners and losers.

I replied with a very different perspective on what affects the sides we take and whom we root for:

This is something I've been meaning to ask you about, and to research more generally.

Do you think of Shakespeare's play as pro-Caesar? That's certainly the impression I remember.

For most of my life, I've sensed from our culture an approval of Julius Caesar and a disapproval (or hatred) for Brutus. But the more history I learn, the less sense this makes. Or rather, the more Anglo-American republican history I learn, the greater is my sense that American admiration of Caesar is a 20th-century phenomenon.

The Lockean liberals in England, the American revolutionaries, and the founding fathers wrote and published under not just Roman names but Roman republican names — the names of the opponents of Caesar, the allies of Brutus. The once-upon-a-time-libertarian Cato Institute is named for the 18th-century "Cato's Letters" whose English authors were taking the name of the Roman republican Cato. When the American Revolution was over and the debate was beginning for and against a centralizing constitution, the so-called anti-Federalists (the classical liberal/libertarian, decentralist, republicans) wrote under the names Cato and Brutus! (And despite the eventual victory of the Federalists, the mass of the population was on the side of the anti-Federalists.)

Eighty years later, John Wilkes Booth expressed his bafflement, after assassinating Lincoln, that he was so universally reviled when Brutus was so universally honored!

My current guess is that Shakespeare wrote a pro-Caesar play in an era of pro-monarchy, at least somewhat genuinely felt. But English and American republicans recognized that they were historically on the opposite side. In the 20th century (this theory would have it), Americans lost their classical educations and forgot their historical alliances. We knew we should admire Shakespeare, and Shakespeare seemed to admire the centralizers, therefore we abandon our decentralist history and alliances and all hail Caesar.

My father says that Shakespeare saw through Julius Caesar — but despised Brutus.

I'm still hoping someone can tell me about the evolution of Anglo-American attitudes toward Caesar and Brutus. How much of this story do I have right?

I'd never heard of G.K. Chesterton before reading David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom. For some reason, Friedman ends his anarchocapitalist manifesto with a defense of G.K. Chesterton against accusations of antisemitism. I learned that Chesterton regularly debated George Bernard Shaw in public on the question of socialism, which endeared him to me without my knowing anything else. I later learned that Chesterton had written a mystery novel about a man who goes undercover to investigate a cell of bomb-throwing anarchists. That sounded like something I had to have a look at, but I've read so little fiction in the past 4 years that I never got around to it.

Then last week, LearnOutLoud.com announced that ChristianAudio.com was giving away a free audiobook of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday for the month of April. You still have a week left to grab it.

The text of the novel is available at Project Gutenberg and also at Bartleby.com.

I've only listened to the first chapter (which I then downloaded and read aloud to my wife), but I'm already tempted to give the book high praise. Here's an excerpt from the opening:

Gregory resumed in high oratorical good humour.

"An artist is identical with an anarchist," he cried. "You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."

"So it is," said Mr. Syme.

"Nonsense!" said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox. "Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!"

"It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!"

[Read the rest »]

"Moral courage is the rarest of all the rare things of this earth. The war has shown that millions have physical courage. Millions were willing to face rifle and cannon, bombardment, poison gas, liquid fire, and the bayonet; to trust themselves to flying machines thousands of feet in air, under the fire of anti-aircraft guns of enemy planes; to go into submarines, perhaps to meet a horrible death. But how many had the courage merely to make themselves unpopular? The bitter truth must be told: the many enlisted or submitted to the draft on both sides of the conflict not because they were convinced that they were helping to save the world, not because they had any real hatred for the enemy, not to uphold the right, but simply that they hadn't the moral courage to face the stigma of "slacker" or "conscientious objector." ... Fear of death? No; the soldiers faced death bravely. But they feared unpopularity. They dreaded the suspicion of their fellows. What was needed in war is needed no less urgently in peace. How many persons in public or even in private life have the courage to say the thing that people do not like to hear?" – Henry Hazlitt, The Way to Willpower (via blog.Mises)

Robert Higgs shares with us this note to the author of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism:

I have finally finished reading your great book about Mises. When I use the word "great," I mean not simply that it weighs at least a kilo and contains more than 1,000 pages. I mean most of all that it is a magnificent scholarly achievement. I can't remember when I have taken more pleasure from a book. It is a joy to read, in every way. The English is precise and polished, and everything is put just right. The research is amazingly broad, yet deep, too. The judgments are sensible and mature. The coverage — from the personal details to the content of Mises's ideas to the context in which he lived and worked — is extraordinary, and the organization puts everything into comprehensible order. The bibliography is more than impressive. All in all, the book is simply an amazing accomplishment, and a fitting tribute to its great subject.

The Mises Institute deserves great credit, too, not only for its support of your work on this project, but also for producing a book that is a fine example of the publisher's art: the typeface is clean and clear, and large enough to permit effortless reading; the layout is spacious and proper; the footnotes are where they should be, and they, too, are large enough to be read without a magnifying glass; the illustrations are splendid complements to the text; and the indexes are terrific. The work is thus not simply beautiful intellectually, but beautiful physically, as well.

If I had ever written anything half so wonderful — and I recognize that I lack the abilities to do so — I would consider my career a complete success, and feel myself justified in taking my ease, to rest on my laurels. I do not perceive that you have this plan in mind for yourself, and therefore the world will be the better, not only for your great book on Mises, but also for all the great achievements that lie in your future. I salute you, my friend, not without a touch of envy, but with my whole heart.

I'd love to claim that this was all planned and coordinated, but really, the scheduling of this weekend edition and the publishing of this book review just happened to coincide:

The Laissez-Faire Radical: A Quest for the Historical Mises by Murray N. Rothbard

[This article originally appeared in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. You can listen (MP3) to Murray Rothbard presenting the paper on Friday, 16 October 1981, at the monthly Libertarian Heritage Series, hosted by the Center for Libertarian Studies.]

That Ludwig von Mises was the outstanding champion of laissez-faire and the free-market economy in this century is well known and needs no documentation. But in the course of refining and codifying his political views, Mises's followers have unwittingly distorted them and made them seem at one with the modern conservative movement in the United States. Mises is made to appear a sort of National Review intellectual concentrating on the free-market aspects of conservatism. While the image of Mises as an essential conservative is scarcely made up of the whole cloth, it totally overlooks rich strains of Misesian thought that can be described only as "laissez-faire radical." Unfortunately, these strands of Misesian thought have been all but lost. Perhaps this essay will help to right the balance.

There is no need here to try to define and distinguish laissez-faire "conservatism" from "radicalism." A setting forth of various radical positions taken by Mises should make the distinction clear enough.

Some anti-conservative aspects of Misesian thought are, again, too well known to require discussion. Thus, for Mises, personal liberty was required by logical consistency; for, if the government began to restrict or suppress one or a few consumption goods, why should they stop at regulating all? As a champion of consumer sovereignty and the consumer society, Mises also had no patience with aristocratic conservatives who scorned mass consumption or the rule of production by consumer demand.

[Continue reading this article at Mises.org.]

Life of a Hero by Warren Gibson

If you're going to write a biography of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), you have your work cut out for you.

You face a mountain of books, articles, speeches, and correspondence by and about the great libertarian economist and his forebears, contemporaries, disciples, and critics, much of it in German. Because his productive career lasted from the 1880s into the 1960s, you have to be thoroughly grounded in the intellectual and political history of that time, sweeping all the way from Marxism, historicism, and fascism, through Keynesianism, and into the beginnings of monetarism. You must be conversant not just with economics, but with history, sociology, and philosophy, since Mises ranged over all these subjects. You must focus on the political and military events that shaped Austria and its neighbors in the early 20th century, because Mises was personally involved in many of them. You must come to grips with terms and concepts that are central to Mises but unknown outside the Austrian School of economics, of which he was a part — terms such as praxeology, catallactics, thymology, etatism, and Verstehen.

Your own prejudices will likely be activated either by Mises' extreme positions or by an occasional belief that he failed to follow through on his own principles. You must try to divine the mental and emotional life of a man who kept his feelings to himself and whose devoted wife very likely took a number of his personal secrets to her grave. Lastly, you must condense and shape your work into something people will want to read.

[Continue reading this book review at LibertyUnbound.com.]