Hugo’s blogger book tag

My esteemed colleague Tom Cerber has seen fit to tag me with this thing.

1) How many books do you own?

About 300, plus maybe 50 or so e-books. I’m not in the habit of keeping a book once I’ve read it unless I find it particularly exceptional. Usually I’ll trade it in at a used book store.

2. What was the last book you bought?

I last picked up Friedman on Galbraith and on Curing the British Disease by Milton Friedman and The Portable Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode.

3. What was the last book you read?

I’m currently reading American Slavery/American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia by Edmund S. Morgan. It’s very interesting to read the history of America’s most pivotal state from the very beginning, and Morgan spares no details. I’ve just finished the aforementioned Friedman on Galbraith, which is a great blast against economic interventionism.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard. I find Rothbard to be the best writer and critic of political economy in the 20th Century. His works would be disquieting to most people, but are so consistent and, as he would say, cleave militantly to pure principle so that they can’t be faulted. He is also unafraid to make enemies on any side of the political spectrum and lashes out alternately at Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Franklin Roosevelt and Ayn Rand.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Of all the dire warnings about a collectivist future this has to be the best I’ve read. Unlike George Orwell or Sir Thomas More, Huxley actually constructs a bleak future devoid of human spirit that people would willingly hurl themselves into, and raises a number of telling points that can be applied to our own society. Huxley’s key lesson is that the most dangerous path towards despotism is not the brutal one, but the one paved with good intentions.

The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. This is the nonfiction equivalent of Huxley’s work, written in 1944 and showing that Nazism arose not out of a mysterious pure evil (Hitler = Sauron?) or the aggressive nature of the German people as was widely supposed at the time, but from the trends and modes of thinking that the New Deal made widely popular and that continue to this day.

No Treason by Lysander Spooner. This book is all you need to explode the myths of the social contract and consensual government, and is as valid today as when it was written, just after the Civil War.

And finally, on a lighter note, Picture This by Joseph Heller. Magnificently funny and at the same time informative and interesting, this is history as seen by Rembrandt through Homer via Aristotle as imagined by the author of Catch-22.

Now, whom shall I tag?

1) Roderick T. Long
2) Lew Rockwell
3 & 4) Gary Becker and Richard Posner
5) Ali Massoud