Fooled By Randomness

If you are not reading Nassim Taleb, you are living under a rock. This book improves your thinking and includes unique insights on Austrian Economics, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman.

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Connor Boyack

The Tuttle Twins Learn About The Law

Children are often taught that government protects our life, liberty, and property, but could it be true that some laws actually allow people to hurt us and take are things? Join Ethan and Emily Tuttle as they learn about property, pirates, and plunder. With the help of their neighbor Fred, the twins will need to figure out what they can do to stop the bad guys in the government. Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French political economist and classical liberal who wrote The Law, upon which this book is based. Through fun illustrations and in engaging dialogue, young readers will be led to understand the principles of liberty and the proper role of government.

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Frederic Bastiat

The Law

Read this for FREE at mises.org

The Law, originally published as a pamphlet in 1850. It defines, through development, a just system of laws and then demonstrates how such law facilitates a free society. In The Law, he wrote that everyone has a right to protect "his person, his liberty, and his property". The State should be only a "substitution of a common force for individual forces" to defend this right. "Justice" (defense of one's life, liberty, property) has precise limits, but if government power extends further, into philanthropic endeavors, government becomes so limitless that it can grow endlessly. The resulting statism is "based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator." The public then becomes socially-engineered by the legislator and must bend to the legislators' will "like the clay to the potter": "I do not dispute their right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose these plans upon us by law – by force – and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes". Bastiat posits that the law becomes perverted when it punishes one's right to self-defense (of his life, liberty, and property) in favor of another's right to "legalized plunder," which he defines as: "if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." Bastiat was thus against redistribution.

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Murray Rothbard

Anatomy Of The State

Murray Rothbard was known as the state's greatest living enemy, and this book is his most powerful statement on the topic. He explains what a state is and what it is not. He shows how it is an institution that violates all that we hold as honest and moral, and how it operates under a false cover. He shows how the state wrecks freedom, destroys civilization, and threatens all lives and property and social well being, all under the veneer of "good intentions."

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