Current Reading List

As a result of reading Albert Jay Nock's The Freeman Book, available as a pdf from The Ludwig Von Mises Institute I just re-read the last chapter of Kapital by Marx and am not in the middle of Democracy Vs. Socialism by Max Hirch...Hirch gives a nice demolition of Socialism as it stood at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, as well as a concise overview of the Austrian Theory of Subjective Value....

Below is an except from The Freeman Book with some required reading for consideration.....


He might perhaps best see what sort of thing the radical has to offer in this line, by beginning with the last chapter, which is all he need ever read, of Marx’s “Kapital”; then reading carefully the “Grossgrundeigentum und Soziale Frage” of Franz Oppenheimer, the same author’s “Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Œkonomie,” and then the “Protection or Free Trade” of Henry George. This lay-out of provender will give him most plentifully what he says he wants, “something solid for both the friends and the enemies of the new regime to set their teeth in.” It is something indeed so solid that those who hitherto have undertaken to bite it have simply broken their teeth. Henry George, in a preface to the fourth edition of “Progress and Poverty,” a book which sets forth the same “detailed plan of reconstruction which meets every test of reason,” says what could be said of very few books, “I have yet to see an objection not answered in advance in the book itself.”
Perhaps our correspondent, at the end of this exercise, will see that radicals have been quite forward to “accept the obligations of careful, methodical and constructive thought.” They have assumed no monopoly of those obligations or of the ability to discharge them; they desire the production and exchange of thought to be quite as free as the production and exchange of goods. But they have done well enough, possibly, not quite to deserve the implication that they habitually shirk those obligations. It seems unfortunate, perhaps a little unfair, that our correspondent should disparage the “apostles of the new order,” without knowing at least a little of the best that those apostles can do. He would, for example, find a great deal of careful, methodical and constructive thought applied to the most modern conditions and our very latest problems, in the solid treatise called “Democracy versus Socialism,” by the Australian economist, Max Hirsch; and if he can summon energy to chew his way through seven chapters of the most highly concentrated and most highly nutritious pemmican ever put before mankind, he will find it in Franz Oppenheimer’s little volume, hardly more than a pamphlet, called “The State.” It is solid food-value, if one can worry it down, but it is very, very rough.

--The Freeman Book pg 106 To Whom it May Concern 

An answer to a letter asking for a logical explanation of radicalism....