Dear Friend of Liberty,
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Principled freedom activism requires informed workers with a strong grasp of the ideas we champion. The more immersed we are in the reasons for our beliefs, the better we are able to communicate our message and achieve our goals. These recent books should be of great interest to members of Campaign for Liberty.
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For the book on the financial collapse, how it started, and what to do about it, see Tom Woods’s newest masterpiece Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse (Regnery, 2009). Woods explains how the Federal Reserve, Fannie and Freddie, and other government programs meant to subsidize housing caused the real estate bubble. He sheds light on the whole crisis, critiques the bailout, provides an accessible explanation of the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, discusses past booms and busts including the Great Depression, and discusses the importance of sound money to a free, functioning economy. The book anticipates the other side’s arguments and refutes them in an understandable way. Meltdown is short, comprehensive, a pleasure to read, and could not be more needed today.
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Presidential power has been a top issue under the last couple presidencies, but the abuses go far back in our history. Who were the best presidents, from the standpoint of liberty, peace, and prosperity? Who were the worst? Ivan Eland ranks the presidents in his well-researched and well-written tome Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty (The Independent Institute, 2009). While most historians, pundits, journalists, and political scientists tend to favor “great” presidents who waged major wars and expanded their own power, Eland judges America’s chief executives on the basis of how closely they adhered to the Constitution, avoided unnecessary war, and protected Americans’ personal and economic liberties. Find out why Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan tend to be overestimated while overlooked presidents like John Tyler and Warren G. Harding are the true greats.
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Now that the Bush years are over and the Obama era is well underway, it is an important time to reflect on why government power, whether controlled by the left or the right, is a great danger to liberty. Lew Rockwell’s newest book, The Left, the Right, and the State (Mises Institute, 2009), identifies the threats to liberty coming from both sides of the modern political spectrum, is uncompromising in its analysis of statist ideology, and points the way toward a principled alternative: freedom. Rockwell dissects socialism, economic ignorance, central planning, environmentalism, anti-capitalism, and invasions into economic liberty; he critiques warmongering, the drug war, nationalism, and corporatism; he defends the free market against all its enemies and finds threats to liberty in government operations ranging from drunk driving laws to the census. For a full understanding of what we freedom lovers are up against, this beautiful book is a must-read.
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If you have not yet read Andrew Napolitano’s blockbuster A Nation of Sheep (Thomas Nelson, 2007), what are you waiting for? The book is a wonderful treatment of the war on terror’s threats to our liberties, public complacency in the face of government lawlessness, the danger of censorship, as well as the importance of a political culture that respects individual rights. And don’t miss his forthcoming book Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America. This book explores the origins of American slavery, the problems with early America in sticking to its ideals, the history of segregation and Jim Crow, the Tuskegee Experiment, the trouble with legal positivism, and how both parties exploit racial tensions. The Spanish edition is currently available for pre-order here.
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These books will help you arm yourself in the battle for our liberties and articulate the ideas we believe are essential to a free society. For more information on Campaign for Liberty’s core principles of individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a noninterventionist foreign policy, check out our Education section at CampaignforLiberty.com.
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In Liberty,
Anthony Gregory
Editor-In-Chief, Campaign for Liberty