Books keep coming in from my mammoth Amazon book order I mentioned in the last post. Some of the recent ones are Murray N. Rothbard's "The Ethics of Liberty," "For a New Liberty" and "The Case For a 100 Percent Gold Dollar"; Frederic Bastiat's "Economic Sophisms"; Walter Block's "Defending the Undefendable"; Bradley and Fulmer's "Energy: The Master Resource"; and Jim Cox's "The Concise Guide to Economics."
I have started on most. I have the habit of reading multiple books at the same time instead of dedicating myself to just one. Block's book, "Defending the Undefendable" -- the one I've made the most headway on -- is highly recommended. It throws the case of the free market at a host of ethical situations and asks the reader, "So you say you support free markets? How about in this case?" F.A. Hayek has a quote on the inside cover the sums up the book nicely:
"Looking through DEFENDING THE UNDEFENDABLE made me feel that I was once more exposed to the shock therapy by which, more than fifty years ago, the late Ludwig von Mises converted me to a consistent free market position. Even now I am occasionally at first incredulous and feel that 'this is going too far,' but usually find myself in the end that you are right. Some may find it too strong a medicine, but it will still do them good even if they hate it. A real understanding of economics demands that one disabuses oneself of many dear prejudices and illusions."
Also, another edition of The Abridged Reader is out. This time the focal point is the concept of private property in Hans-Herman Hoppe's piece "The Ethics and Economics of Private Property." The full version can be found be clicking on the previously mentioned title and the abridged version can be found here.
I woke up this morning, made myself some green tea and printed out a copy of Murray N. Rothbard's article "The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine: An Economist's View." It was a great read. Rothbard is such a clear writer and merges the two areas I always looked for: a political philosopher and a common-sense economist.
Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker are two individualist anarchists. Up to now, I had not read much of their work. Rothbard exposes many of their classical economic fallacies, but the little research I was able to do -- particularly Spooner's "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority" -- has encouraged me to research more of their political philosophy.
This reading also encouraged one more thing: it is a series I'm going to experiment with called "The Abridged Reader." Most people are familiar with the concept of abridgement -- condensing a work down to what the reader considers the most important parts to get the core of the reading experience. I started with the aforementioned article, writing out sections I thought were important and adding footnotes explaining important points. I encourage readers to check out the abridged version as well as the full version over at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
I placed a huge book order at Amazon.com a few days ago. Books will be coming in random shipments. This afternoon I received F.A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom." I can't wait to get started. I will be probably crack it open and get a good start tonight.
The third batch of clippings come from work I did for Appalachian Live Wire: Appalachian State University's on-line news service. The service, organized by Professor Kay Taylor, is still very beta and most of the website is broken. However, Professor Taylor has been diligently working on it and hopes to get all student's past work up and archived.
"Virginia Tech Professor Educates Students on Arsenic"; "Appalachian Panel Reviews Hamas Victory in Palestinian Elections"; "General Education Task Force Takes Aim at Revamping Core Curriculum"; "Deconstructing The War on Terror"; "Corrupted Media"; "Watauga County Board of Commissioners Meeting: October 18"; "New Student Recreation Center"; "Iraq Through The Looking Glass: Historical Repeats"; "Home Grown Torture"; "There's No Place Like Azeroth: The rise of World of Warcraft and online gaming"; "UN Resolution Puts International Pressure on Syria"; "The Iranian Standoff"; "The Hidden Stories of Fallujah"; "Guilford Economics Professor Forecasts the Future of the U.S. Economy"; and "Kevin Rose Discusses Digg.com".
On to the second batch of clippings. These are pieces I wrote for the Asheville Citizen-Times.
"Intelligence agency of our 'ally' Pakistan is really a funding source for terrorism" (July 18, 2005); "Iran's nuclear ambitions have U.S. reviewing controversial options" (July 31, 2005); "Extra flood relief is much appreciated"; "American press's meeking handling of Downing Street disclosures shames the profession" (June 29, 2005); and "Asheville's signature festival offering some new twists this year".
One of the main purposes of this site -- aside from serving as a personal blog -- is to host my journalism work from the past three years. eSnips is a great site for hosting, tagging and sharing data, so I've decided to host all my files there in .pdf form for easy viewing and printing. Let's proceed with the links.
Mountain Xpress articles:
"Brevard Music Festival 2004" (July 23, 2004); "Spinning WNC craft into the spotlight" (August 4, 2004); "On the financial rebound" (July 28, 2004); "On stage and in Spanish" (July 7, 2004); "Not your average hostel" (July 21, 2004) and "Task force takes aim at downtown problems" (June 30, 2004).
If direct links to these pdf files are not work, readers can head over to my "Journalism Work" public folder at eSnips.
