I assume that many others here are readers. Do you mind telling the rest of us about that book which has made the most impact on you over the past year? Please, no books by (or about) Ron Paul; we are all on board with Dr. Paul already, that's why we're here (I think).
But surely there are many other great book reviews to be had from this group. I'd love to read some.
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By Barbara Kingsolver, with help from her husband, Steven Hopp and oldest daughter, Camille.
This book takes you through a year-long journey of eating only locally produced food. It is wonderfully written, making you feel that you are right there beside them, while addressing many of the issues that the world is facing today with the corporate takeover of our food supply. Steven has very informative notes about the some of the scary statistics, and Camille chimes in with a young person's perspective and some delicious seasonal recipes.
With fuel/food prices continuing to rise, we had already starting thinking about these issues before finding this book. As the campaign wound down, our family turned to our muddy dog-holed suburban backyard and set to work. We now have a hen-house with 6 chickens, and a very plentiful garden and fruit trees. We're fortunate to live in an area surrounded by agriculture, so finding local sources of fresh fruits and vegetables as well as meats, poultry and dairy is not too hard. We realize that doing so will be what helps carry us through these troubling economic times.
The Law clearly defines the concept of force, plunder, compelled performance and the ruling class's mindset of superiority; all fundamental concepts to the liberty loving intellectual.
Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Great book!
How to be Free by Tom Hodgkinson (British Author) - this book is really good. There are a lot of references to living in Britain that might be confusing for USA readers, but the ideas in this book are really great!
I have no idea what this book is about, but from the sounds of the title, I like it already! :)
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
I'd have said Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged because of its lasting effect.
But this year my favorite read is 'Radicals for Capitalism - a Freewhelling History" by Brian Doherty. It is a wonderful history of the libertarian movement full of references to Leonard Reed, Menken, von Mises, Hazlitt, Friedman, Rand, Rothbard, and many, many others. It weaves a tapestry made of the threads of libertarian thought.
It is a terrific companion to Ron Paul's book because it puts Paul's book in a historical and ideological context.
Have you read "The Capitalist Manifesto" by Andrew Bernstein? Also excellent. He makes both the moral and the utilitarian case for capitalism and his argument is overwhelming.
BTW - Thumbs up for Atlas Shrugged. Great 20th century rehash of Locke. :)
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
you do make me laugh:
BTW - Thumbs up for Atlas Shrugged. Great 20th century rehash of Locke. :)
Lots of Aristotle there too.
Of course we could also say that all Locke is Aristotle because he used logic. And we could claim that they are all that unnamed person that discovered the first use of a word.
Didn't he invent logic just before inventing rock 'n roll and just after taking a mud bath with Barbara Bach?
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
Sounds like an excellent choice for some summertime reading. I originally approached libertarianism from the civil liberties (personal freedom) perspective- but now I see how important economic liberty is to securing & keeping those other liberties and seek more knowledge on this front. Thanks again,
which gives you a great advantage in trying to persuade a rational liberal to make the transition to the libertarian viewpoint.
My personal experience is that it was far easier for me to draw a thinking liberal towards a libertarian viewpoint than it was to get a conservative to ease up on his militarism.
If you tools who come thorough and put negative marks on other people's reads at least have the guts to place a coment and identify yourself.
I gave this an UPTICK without commenting. Is that ok? LOL!
Tom Mullen
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which is why I gave this an uptick.
Jack Carter is the author and the forward is by the late Robert Anton Wilson. It is about the life and accomplishments of the rocketeer John (Jack) Parsons, a founding member of JPL. His life reads like a pupl fiction novel and it is all true.
I'll check it out, I'm always in the market for something good to read.
I've read a lot of books, and had many turning points. Too numerous to mention.
But one best seller that really got my attention was "The Legacy of Luna," by Julia Butterfly Hill. It's an astounding account of the courage and strength of one woman who staged a logging protest by living in a tree which she'd named Luna.
I was heavily involved in anti-logging issues at the time, which may be why this book spoke right to me. I still can hardly believe that she spent an El Nino winter in a tiny platform midway up an ancient Redwood. She didn't even have enough room to stand up.
It's a quick and inspiring read; worth every word.
___________________
Freedom is an inside job
Did you also cease using paper, including napkins, toilet paper, etc., as well as move out of your house and buy one made without wood, cease eating at a wooden table and sitting on chairs made of wood, and cease using any other products that depend on logging to provide them?
Or, did you continue to act as if entitled to those products, yet that the people that provided them to you should neither be able to make a living, nor actually do what was necessary to provide them in the first place?
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
I don't understand the logic here at all.
You use paper, therefore you have no right to ask that forests not be decimated?
Bad logic. Bad bad bad logic.
There is a difference between resourcing lumber and decimating forests. The difference usually lies within the pulls of greed and the tugs of knowledge.
Most of the logging mistakes of the 20th century are known by forestry science. Do we continue to make them in order to satisfy your abysmal stab at Libertarian laissez fair capitalism?
Tom, I think there is a difference between being anti-logging and anti-wood products.
If logging and re-forestation were the rule, great! But sadly they are not and deforestation is a serious problem.
of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of my all time favorites. I liked how it made me comtemplate the difference between what things are, and what they mean. Underlying form, Quality, and purpose are other ideas that are addressed in this highly introspective novel that is based on a true story.
On a lighter side, Tom Robbins' "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates" was a great read, and I still love Kerouac, although I've moved on from reading his novels to listening him recite pages, as there was a tone and melody that he used when wrwiting that is hard to experience without hearing the author first.
The book I am reading and keep in my briefcase for my EL commute is a collection of Voltaire's short stories - featuring Candide and Zadig - - as well as the Story of a Good Brahman and a few other notables. While it is not as uplifting as the estimable Mr. Emerson - it is great reading for someone frustrated with our current political situation and needing a little escape - as it were. It can be psychologically beneficial to read that the problems we face in the here and now - - were experienced, bemoaned and shared amongst the intellectual European contemporaries of the founders and which likely motivated them in some small degree - as well read as they were. In fact, I believe Dr. Franklin himself was in Paris when Voltaire returned from exile (1778) and personally celebrated his return & his work. Voltaire was passionate about the idea of liberty - but was devastated that he could not find it in his native lands. So he wrote devastating Satire and had it published anonymously.
The lengths at which Voltaire had to go to mask his true intentions with imagery and fairy-tale (to avoid a possible death sentence or life imprisonment) makes it read almost like some twisted Greek or Roman mythology. When in reality, he was lampooning in a very sophisticated manner the current power structure of Church & State in his native France as well as philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, and anyone who caught his attention & scorn. Excellent reading.
I may have Locked a few people to death here in the past week, but it stands as my all time favorite book. I honestly believe that there is not one issue in government that cannot be answered correctly by appealing to this work (and nothing in Ayn Rand that can't be found here either, imho).
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
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But Locke did not understand economy -why should he, it was not yet a science? He attributed all wealth to labor as did Adam Smith, when we now know that most wealth accrues due to the application of capital.
Which is stated to make the point that there is much in Rand that is not Locke, but there is also much in Rand that is Locke. The quote by Sir Isaac Newton: "If I can see further than anyone else, it is only because I am standing on the shoulders of giants", comes to mind.
But I do agree, John Locke is a giant, certainly the giant on whose shoulders the concept of liberty as perceived by the founding fathers rests. Sadly, it is an understanding that for the most part no longer exists.
If you read Locke's section On Property, you will find that even capital is derived from labor. What is capital? The means of production. Starting from a world with no machines and only natural resources, capital must be created by labor. I would argue that he is the real father of capitalism.
I would also like to hear one aspect of Rand's philosophy that is not found in Locke. I have honestly tried, and have not yet succeeded. I'm certainly open to a new viewpoint, though.
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
you realize that this idea of Locke's led to Marx's labor theory of value and everything that followed.
"Some of the features of Locke's economic thinking would echo down the years, and not always to good consequence. Thus, Locke's notion is that labor creates value: "For 'tis Labour indeed that puts the difference of value on every thing" [§40]. Locke uses this in the first instance to explain why people have a right to property, they have "mixed" their labor in it, and second why modern life is better than in more primitive societies:
There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several Nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life; whom Nature having furnished as liberally as any other people, with the materials of Plenty, i.e. a fruitful Soil, apt to produce in abundance, what might serve for food, rayment, and delight; yet for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundreth part of the Conveniencies we enjoy: And a King of a large and fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England. [ibid., §41]
While there is almost nothing untrue about this passage, there are serious misconceptions that underlie it. The difference between the life of American Indians and the life of perhaps even a "day labourer" in Locke's England is not a difference in labor but a difference in capital. The former does labor intensive economic work, while the latter belongs to an economy where work becomes increasingly capital intensive -- i.e. more kinds of goods, of greater sophistication and in greater quantities, from equal or less amounts of labor, are produced. In the absence, evidently, of a distinction between labor and capital, Locke stands at the beginning of continuing confusion:
...he will then see, how much labour makes the far greatest part of the value of things, we enjoy in this World.. [ibid., §42]
While we think of Marx in relation to passages like this, Adam Smith himself was still thinking of value as something contributed by labor. However, even the introduction of the concept of capital -- dimissed by Marx, of course, as fictitous -- does not get us to the value of things. As David Hume, no mean economist himself, pointed out to Smith, things have economic value only because people want them. No amount of labor makes something of worth in the market if nobody wants it. By the same token, something that everyone wants, if available in sufficient abundance, will have no market value either. Where there is both demand and scarcity, there are prices."
From: http://www.friesian.com/locke.htm
Apart from this, Rand's value theory, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics owes nothing to Locke. Her argument also for the validation of the concept of individual rights differs completely from Locke. Where Locke argues that rights are imbued in a person by his Creator, Rand dispenses with that idea and makes the claim that the justification for individual rights is the objective requirements of man's life as a rational being.
Locke condoned the idea of slavery:
That "every Man has a Property in his own Person" proves an awkward principle when Locke turns to address slavery, of which he has an uncritical and traditionalistic justification. But the friction with his larger, liberal principles starts to become evident. Locke can only justify slavery as the moral fruit of crime: "This is the perfect condition of Slavery, which is nothing else, but the State of War continued, between a lawful Conquerour, and a Captive" [§24]. Thus, the "lawful Conquerour" is one acting in self-defense and retribution, while the "Captive," who deserves death, has been granted a life of bondage rather than execution. This is historically and morally unrelated to the reality of the institution. Historically, slaves have been captured by aggressors, not by defenders; and no amount of wrong, even in an aggressor, would make their children to morally forfeit the ownership of their own persons. Yet we know that slavery is all but universally heritable, even as a slave trade is almost always of chattel victims, not wrongdoers pardoned from execution. Locke's own example of slavery among the Jews [cf. §24] compounds the confusion, when the Bible explicitly forbids Jews to hold other each other as slaves [Leviticus 25:39-43]. It is a shame that Locke was not so prescient and enlightened as to use his principles to condemn slavery altogether, rather than just to ahistorically misconstrue it; but then no one in his day did. Anyone belaboring Locke now for tolerating the institution often seems to have the notion that somehow Communism ended slavery, rather than the British and American liberalism that grew out of Locke's ideas. The slave labor of the Soviet Union draws far less vitriol than Locke's archaic and inconsistent defense. Indeed, the vitriol is not really for Locke, it is for liberalism in general, long after it put an end to slavery in the West."
I put the full case here in fairness to Locke, but also to make the point that there were subsequent advances in economics that invalidated some of Locke's theories, advances of which subsequent scholars were aware. This does not invalidate Locke, it merely says that he was not omniscient, a statement that as an empiricist, he would heartily agree.
It would be like saying that all that followed Locke is Locke, well Locke is in it, true, but it is not ALL Locke
And when he says that all that is value is made by labor - it is also clear that all labor does not create value. "What then creates value?", is the real question. And then we see that value is not created by labor alone.
One of my favorite characters on Lost... and now he's dead, damn you John Locke!! :'-(
You know, the 19th century British utilitarian.
Tom Mullen
www.tommullen.net
www.myspace.com/skepticsongs
I have carried this book around with me for years and read exerts of it anytime I have a few minutes. Its a collection of Emersons essays in which he reminds us of "the traditional virtues- love, humility, courage, friendship, integrity and self-reliance--that have, to our immeasurable loss, become all to rare." I believe if we could restore these virtues to our lives and the conscience of our nation, many of todays problems would diminish or disappear. So I continue to read in hopes that I will live in such a way that these virtues can work though me.
" When the universal soul breathes through a man's intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. " -Ralph Waldo Emmerson
Emersons vision of the world is that truth is apparent in every being, substance and event. Through study of his wisdom I have found I have become more open to seeing this truth.
One of my favorites is:
"The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant."
It told me that people see God in their own image, and it informed me as to what kind of people would have a god of vengeance and terror, and what kind of people would have a god of benevolence and understanding.