“Economics in One Lesson” by Henry Hazlitt

In any study of economics, Economics in One Lesson is a must-read and an important part. You can buy copies on Abebooks.com. The book is online on James’s Liberty file collection index. The Campaign for Liberty has a good series of videos (each about 10 or 15 minutes long) in which economics professors discuss a chapter or two of the book. The book will give you a much clearer understanding of economics, clear thinking, proper thinking, and today’s events. The book is a short, 150 (or so) pages. Or, if you disagree with the book, it will give you some serious arguments you must address. I must say that James (of James’s Liberty file), Ron Paul, and the Libertarians want liberty without a moral or philosophic foundation. Think about that one. Would that not be like trying to practice civil or aeronautical engineering without physics or mathematics? And without a philosophy of science and mathematics? Don’t think for a second that a “philosophy of mathematics” is abstruse and abstract and arm-chair stuff only. It has very practical implications — just as a philosophy of education makes all the difference in the world as to the nature of the education our children get, what their day-to-day activities are, and whether our children learn to reason and become independent, self-sovereign adults or whether they become tortured emotional wrecks who don’t understand the world, don’t know how, and don’t know how to make any important decisions for themselves. A philosophy of mathematics can make someone regard math as a game, as an intellectual exercise in futility, as a confusing heap of symbols, as a mystery cult — or as a means of understanding important, fundamental aspects of reality, as a means of controlling things in the world, as a means of gaining insight into how a rational consciousness works. So also one cannot intellectually have freedom for free: freedom won’t survive, for example, under anarchy, which some Libertarians support. Anarchy would give us gang-warfare run amuck. It would give us The Lord of the Flies on a massive scale. It would give us waves of small and large destruction sweeping over us as in the Middle Ages. These are serious facts that someone who believes in liberty under anarchy must address — then they still have to deal with questions of putting their theory into practice, of morality, of human nature, of epistemology. Nor is freedom tenable under just any political and moral conditions. Socrates was voted to death in the democracy of ancient Athens; the Founding Fathers — after scholarly study of history, politics and philosophy — viewed democracy as a perversion of government. There has not been one theocracy that I am aware of that has not practiced human sacrifice or oppression. These are serious facts that someone who believes in liberty under democracy or theocracy must address — then they still have to deal with questions of putting their theory into practice, of morality, of human nature, of epistemology. An approach to liberty must be scientific: based on facts, inductive, and integrated with the rest of one’s knowledge of reality. An approach to liberty — that is tenable and practical — cannot be floating and cannot be isolated from the rest of one’s knowledge and of reality. In defending — or opposing — liberty, some questions one must ask and answer are: What is man? What are his most important values? How does he survive? Is man free or is he a determined being? How does man gain knowledge? What are the principles needed for man to live in society? What is the relation of man to society? Which is more important: the individual or the group?