Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
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First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate, widespread attention. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 books were sold. In April 1945,Reader’s Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this edition to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best seller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and has been translated into more than twenty languages, along the way becoming one of the most important and influential books of the century.
Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto diagnoses what is wrong with the American political system and tells us what we need to fix things. The cure is a radical one because, as the book incontrovertibly shows, the many problems that confront us today are no accident. They stem from the nature of government itself. Only peaceful cooperation based on the free market can rescue us from our present plight.
Against the State is written by Lew Rockwell, the founder of the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com, and the closest friend and associate of Murray Rothbard, the leading theorist of anarcho-capitalism. Rockwell applies Rothbard’s combination of individualist anarchism and Austrian economics to contemporary America. The book shows how the government is based on war, both against foreign nations and against the American people themselves, through massive invasions of our liberties. Fueled by an out-of-control banking system, the American State has become in essence fascist. We cannot escape our predicament through limited government: the government is incapable of controlling itself. Only a purely private social order can save us, and Rockwell succinctly sets out how an anarcho-capitalist order would work.
If you are reading this, it means that you have ascended to the highest levels of government, so it’s really, re-ally important that you don’t do or say anything stupid, and screw things up for the rest of us.
The first thing to remember is that you are a figurehead, about as relevant to the direction of the state as a hood ornament is to the direction of a car – but you are a very important distraction, the “smiling face” of the fist of power. So hold your nose, kiss the babies, and just think how good you would look on a stamp. A stamp, for mail… No, not email, mail. Never mind, we’ll explain later.
Now, before we go into your media responsibilities, you must understand the true history of political power, so you don’t accidentally act on the naïve idealism you are required to project to
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