Recommended Reading

The Law is the essential primer on libertarian thought. In the short pamphlet, French economist Fredrick Bastiat builds a basic framework for understanding liberty that has endured in libertarian thought ever since. He coins the phrase “legal plunder,” to demonstrate the illegitimacy of socialist programs, which Ezra Taft Benson would quote in his article “The Proper Role of Government” in 1968. The Law is short and accessible, and Bastiat’s biting wit should keep any reader over the age of twelve fully engaged. It’s the best economic and philosophical introduction to libertarian ideas available.

Austrian Economics are a key part of modern libertariansim, as the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle is the most powerful tool to show how the monetary actions of the Federal Government weigh down the economy and contribute to future recessions. Human Action is a large and dense book, but it has the most comprehensive account that relates human needs and desires to a full picture of their economic lives. A more reader-friendly introduction to these concepts can also be found in Robert P. Murphy’s shorter volume Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action (2015).

For a case study in applying Austrian Economics to a real-world economic situation we all remember, Tom Woods’s Meltdown is the place to start. It was written early in the long recession that followed the 2007-2008 collapse and explains how Federal Reserve policy and various laws and regulations created the distortions in the market that allowed the housing bubble to inflate with so little regard for actual economic conditions. Dr. Woods also explains why the reallocation of capital by the Bush and Obama administrations would set up a long term drag on the economy, a period of stunted growth that lasted almost a decade after he wrote Meltdown.

The late BYU Professor and Salt Lake City Chief of Police W. Cleon Skousen was the central figure of Latter-Day Saint conservatism in the 80s and 90s. While I’ll admit that I dislike his dives into conspiratorial speculation, and believe that accusing people of communist collaboration instead of arguing against their ideas undermines the ideological war against Marxism, The Making of America is the ultimate tool for understanding how the US Constitution secures liberty. It takes us clause by clause through the full text of the Constitution, explaining in the founders’ own words how each clause was intended to protect individual rights.

The reading list of any member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints should have Rough Stone Rolling just a notch below the Bible. It’s the full story in cultural context of the life of the prophet Joseph Smith, but it’s also an examination of how imperfect humans in an imperfect world relate to the perfect divinity of our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, and make themselves and the world better because of it. “The past is a foreign land,” and Richard Lyman Bushman is a perfect tour guide, explaining the complications and quirks of a long-gone culture to help us understand the meaning of human actions in their context.

No one is more hated by racists than economist Thomas Sowell. Because no one else with Sowell’s intellectual ability and qualifications dares to say things like “With blacks as with whites, the redneck culture has been a less achieving culture. Moreover, that culture has affected a higher proportion of the black population than of the white population.” His essays collected in Black Rednecks and White Liberals and other great books, are kryptonite for those who use race to divide humanity for their own cynical ends.

J D Vance is a Yale-educated Juris Doctor, a Marine Corps veteran, a venture capitalist, and now a candidate for Senate in Ohio. Before that, he was raised as what can only be called “white trash” by his addict mother and his grandmother who once tried to burn her husband to death after a drunken argument. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is an unintentional companion piece to Black Rednecks and White Liberals, showing us in visceral, emotional terms what Sowell described academically.

Not since the work of Shakespeare has the writing of one man so permeated our language. In 1984, Orwell gave us the language we use to describe the machinery of despotism right up to the present, and that we will continue to use as long as the conflict between freedom and tyranny continues. 1984 is grim, as it is an exploration of traps that can keep the human mind enslaved. Once society is controlled by “English Socialism,” there’s no going back, which is why Orwell was so desperate to try to hold humanity back from the brink.

Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is my personal favorite of the four great dystopian novels (the other two being Brave New World and Atlas Shrugged). Where the other three and many others focus on the various ways we might be enslaved by society, Fahrenheit 451 explores how we naturally enslave ourselves. It focuses on our personal path to despotism.

When I first read The Screwtape Letters, I believed it was about the devil and temptation. It is, after all, written from the fictional point of view of an experienced demon writing letters of advice to his nephew on how to best tempt a certain Englishman. Screwtape is fictional, we don’t know the details of how demons and devils organize themselves and go about their plans. But do know a little about human nature, and that’s what The Screwtape Letters is ultimately about; the stubbornness and bad habits and capacity for willful ignorance that must make the devil laugh at us, as well as the capacity to have hope and courage and take control of our lives with the help of the Savior. Lewis’s insight on this topic is immense.

Understanding the “critical theory” based ideologies that permeate modern discourse requires going to their sources. Unfortunately, the sources are filled with deliberately indecipherable or ambiguous prose, lengthy tangents intended to prove points of pedantry that are often barely related to their arguments, and confusing jumps from academic observation to activist agitation (see Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality for a relatively simple example of this pattern).

Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace is a book like no other, a thousand page journey to impress on the reader Tolstoy’s vision of the workings of history and human life: God is in control, and hardships are for our benefit in ways we can’t possibly understand yet. The reader is in a position like that of the characters for most of the book: confronted with enormous ideas and conflicts but unable to see the hand of God, we lash out in search of an answer. Tolstoy’s seemingly strange diversions into historical theory – asking why history happens the way it does – in analyzing the Napoleonic Wars serve as a backdrop to the drama but illustrate that this theme of providence applies at level of individuals and of empires. Maybe I’ve given too much away, but these are insights that can only be experienced by an emotional journey, not told in precise language. War and Peace is also a grand drama and great war epic, filled with characters that range from enchanting to exciting to repulsive yet sympathetic.