Laissez Faire Books (LFB) is a seminal libertarian institution that dates back to 1972, six years before I was born. In its heyday, it played a central role in the libertarian movement as the largest libertarian bookseller, a publisher of libertarian books, and an old-school social network, hosting social gatherings and other events. This was before my time.

I’d never bought a book from LFB until yesterday (the 19th). By the time I became a libertarian in my undergraduate years at Louisiana State University, after reading the work of Ayn Rand (starting with The Fountainhead) at the urging of a friend, I was able to learn about libertarianism and Austrian economics from a large and growing sea of resources online. I bought books from Amazon and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI), read online articles and blogs, and took advantage of the growing library of digitized books and other media put online and hosted by the LvMI.

Laizzez Faire Books was fading into irrelevancy and, I think, in danger of being shuttered for good as it was passed from new owner to new owner. Enter Agora Financial, the latest owner of LFB, and hopefully the organization that will oversee its resuscitation and return to relevancy. With Jeffrey Tucker at the helm as executive editor, the prospects for profitability, innovation, and spreading the message of liberty are exciting indeed.

Many, if not most, of you know Jeffrey Tucker as the editorial vice president who led the LvMI into the digital age, building it into the open-source juggernaut with a vast online and free library of liberty and a thriving community that it is today. We were sad to see him leave that beloved institution, but eager to see what he would do in charge of a for-profit publisher and bookstore. Now we’ve been given the first taste.

Laissez Faire Books will of course be publishing and selling ebooks and dead-tree books individually. They’re a bit pricey this way, if you ask me.  The way you’ll want to get these books and the added value that LFB has to offer, however, is to sign on to the new business model that promises to return the company to the center of the libertarian movement as a book publisher, seller, and community (with online forums).

Yesterday, on the 19th of April, Jeffrey Tucker and LFB launched the Laissez Faire Club. This is an innovative subscription-based book club that offers a host of members-only benefits for the price of $10 per month, or $120 per year. Members will receive a 20% discount on all LFB products, a new ebook at no extra charge every week (in epub and mobi formats) as well as access to the entire archive of previously distributed ebooks, Tucker’s Take (short video book reviews by Jeffrey Tucker), free reports, live author interviews, a private online community forum shielded from search engines and prying eyes and drive-by trolls, and more now and to come.

That sounds like a good deal to me. I signed up last night for a free trial, which comes with some free content that’s yours to keep even if you choose to cancel your membership before the free trial is up.

In the information age, and in light of the illegitimacy of so-called intellectual property, how do you  make money publishing and selling books? Many are wailing and gnashing their teeth, rending their shirts, and lashing out in fear and lazy greed — unable to let go of their precious, state-supported publishing model, dependent on IP and an oligopoly over the publication and distribution of dead-tree books. The Big Six publishers don’t seem to have a clue. But I think it’s not really that hard to figure out:

You treat your customers right, provide them with valuable content that they’ll want to ensure you’re able to continue providing, and sell them added value built around the books: reasonable prices, great customer service with a personal touch, knowledgeable and engaged staff, early access, extra content like free reports on how to circumvent the state legally or Tucker’s Take, personal engagement with their favorite authors, a private and secure community comprised of fellow lovers of liberty, and so on.

Head on over to Laissez Faire Books to learn more about the new Laissez Faire Club and, if you’re a lover of liberty and books and books about liberty, become a member today.

[Prometheus Unbound & TLS]

For years now, since moving away from Baton Rouge and LSU’s library, I’ve been trying to get my hands on the English translation of De Rege et Regis Institutione (The King and the Education of the King) by the Spanish Scholastic Juan de Mariana.

The book is available for free on Google Books in its original Latin, but my Latin is rather rusty. The English translation by George Albert Moore, however, is much harder to come by, being out of print due to copyright, the perverse academic publishing model of  limited print runs aimed at university libraries for outrageous prices, and lack of sufficient interest to reprint it. I do not see why Google would not have scanned it and put it online too were it not (I assume) still under copyright.

Availability of the Moore translation seems to be largely limited to some university libraries. As an online instructor, I don’t live anywhere near my university’s library. And with two young kids, it’s hard to get out  and hunt down a copy at a nearby university. Occasionally I’ve found it for sale online, but always for outrageous prices. I’ve waited and waited for the price of a copy to come down below $100, so I could talk myself into buying it, but it’s never happened. The cheapest copy on Amazon right now is priced at $275 used.

Why am I so interested in this book? Well, mainly for two reasons: one scholarly, the other pertaining to fiction research. De Rege contains an example of state-of-nature theorizing 50 years older than Hobbes’s Leviathan and a defense of limited, mixed, constitutional government before Locke and Montesquieu. I discuss this in my working paper “On the Origin and Poverty of State-of-Nature Theorizing,” which I’d like to finish it someday. De Rege also belongs to the “mirror for princes” literature.

They are best known in the form of textbooks which directly instruct kings or lesser rulers on certain aspects of rule and behaviour, but in a broader sense, the term is also used to cover histories or literary works aimed at creating images of kings for imitation or avoidance. They were often composed at the accession of a new king, when a young and inexperienced ruler was about to come to power. (Wikipedia)

Machiavelli’s The Prince is a perversion of the mirror-for-princes literature, intentionally turning the literature on its head by teaching a ruler how to acquire and maintain power rather than how to be a good ruler in the moral sense.

The first book of my planned epic science fantasy series will be titled A Mirror for Princes, will feature an example or two of the literature, and will itself be an addition to the literature in the broad sense quoted above. So naturally I want to get a better feel for how this literature is written, what subjects it covers, and so on.

Mariana also defends tyrannicide. So there’s that too.

I finally decided to get my hands on this book by requesting it through InterLibrary Loan (ILL) at my local public library. Now I have hours of slogging work ahead to free The King and the Education of the King from its mortal coil.

Watch this political ad (below) promoting Washington State’s Initiative 1098, which seeks to dedicate $2 billion per year to fund education and healthcare for children. It’s always for the children! It’s not about soaking the rich! even though this other Yeson1098 video makes a point of demonizing the greedy rich. The slogan is “the wealthy pay more, the rest of us pay less.” Bill Gates, Sr., is presented as a grandfatherly figure sacrificing his comfort for the sake of childrens’ enjoyment while he explains the reasonableness of this new scheme to legally plunder the rich.

His son could donate $2 billion of his own money each year for a couple decades and still have plenty left over, thereby funding this initiative all by himself for a good long while, and yet wealthy progressives like the Gates’ eagerly volunteer the money of others.

You can’t really be generous or charitable with other peoples’ money. Taking from them against their will or volunteering them to be targets of theft is immoral and unjust.

Anyone who is in favor of funding this initiative can simply devise a voluntary payment scheme and put up their own money. Then we’ll see how much progressives really care about the children.

Instead, they waste creativity, time, and money manipulating the statist-democratic process and promoting majoritarian-populist initiatives with clever, emotional, yet substanceless propaganda.

Hypocrites.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

First of all, I found the title of the movie to be redundant from the get-go. The action scenes are mostly way over the top. The gore insanely so. Swords and other blades slice through body parts, even cutting men in half at the waist, as if they were hot knives slicing through butter. Ninja stars fly from hands like they are being fired from a machine gun. They even have chemtrails. Blood fountains and splatters by the bucket load. Our ninja hero takes dozens of lethal wounds, losing gallons of blood, and not only lives to tell about it but keeps on fighting. There is a bit of super-speed blurred movement and mind-over-body self-healing, so the movie is something of a fantasy action thriller. We’re treated to the cliché of the hero being down for the count, about to be killed, when someone he cares about is attacked and suddenly he discovers renewed vitality and determination and, inexplicably, an unbelievable (that’s saying a lot for this movie) leap in skill level.

For all that, I found the movie entertaining. The action scenes are well-done and stylish. And I particularly liked the parkour-inspired sequences. The plot is interesting and tightly executed. The story even has a couple of elements of interest to libertarians. There are a number of ninja clans that kidnap orphan children and train them to be assassins, indoctrinating them with the belief that the lives of individuals are valueless compared to that of the clan, which is one big family to which they owe unquestioning and unwavering loyalty and obedience. The ninja clans apparently act as secret private contractors for governments around the world, assassinating targets for 100 lbs. of gold. Our ninja hero is one particularly promising pupil of the Ozunu clan. He buys into the propaganda at first, but falls for a pretty young girl, a fellow trainee, who does not. She attempts to escape, and is recaptured and executed in front of all the ninjas-in-training as an example. When he is later faced with killing another girl, whom he is told has similarly betrayed the clan, as the final requirement of becoming a full member of the clan, he refuses and is nearly killed. The bulk of the movie is about his quest for revenge against the Ozunu clan with the help of a female government agent.

Though it is a classic revenge tale, the negative portrayal of coercive and aggressive collectivism is a nice touch. The notion that the individual should be subservient to and acquires his value and ultimate end from The Collective, whatever it be named (the Family, the Clan, the Tribe, the Race, the Nation or State), is an insidious sickness. It that permeates the communitarian classical republicanism of Rome (as I explain in my working paper “Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization” (pdf)), which, along with classical liberalism, with which it is in tension due to the conflict with the latter’s inherent individualism, was one of the major influences on the so-called Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It is also inherent in nationalism and, of course, the modern collectivist political movements of our age. At the risk of being redundant, a truly libertarian and civilized society exists for each and every individual’s own well-being – not the other way round.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

A 10-year-old boy is taking a stand for “liberty and justice for all,” refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance until gays and lesbians enjoy equal rights. Good for him. But this will be best achieved by getting the state out of marriage entirely. Let people define marriage how they will. Barring that, the second best option so long as the state monopolizes the definition and the legal system is to insist that the state has no right to limit marriage to opposite-sex unions, thus denying homosexuals equal legal rights, tax benefits, etc., within its auspices.

The state can never bring “liberty and justice for all” so it is incoherent, though a good rhetorical device, to make one’s pledging allegiance to it contingent on its doing so. Pledging allegiance is itself morally suspect insofar as it carries connotations of feudalism, and morally bankrupt insofar as allegiance is pledged to the state. I think it is no accident that the Pledge was not created until after the Civil War, in 1892, roughly a hundred years after the signing of the Constitution and not long before the US government’s first overseas imperial war. Nor that its creator, Francis Bellamy, was a statist-socialist intent on promoting nationalism in public indoctrination camps schools. (Incidentally, as an aside, the phrase “under God” wasn’t added to the Pledge until 1954, and “in God we trust” wasn’t the official US motto until 1956.)

Quality Time With The Kids – Watch more free videos

Consumer Reports reports that hookahs are not as healthy as many people seem to think. I’m not surprised. What I find interesting and disturbing is the view about law and the state that is expressed by the CR employee’s kid Daniel at the end of the article. What is this guy teaching his kid, huh? “They wouldn’t make something legal if it were so unsafe.” As if everything is naturally illegal by default, and it is the job of wise state’smen to choose what to make legal (allow us to do).

Ever wondered why the cost of college tuition keeps going up and up and up? Well, here’s your answer. Now, go get even and put an end this insanity.

I added a new quote to my Favorite Quotes page. I hope it is not too pretentious of me, as it is one of my own, albeit but a modification of a great Rothbard quote on ignorance of economics.

Here they are for comparison:

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” – Murray Rothbard

“It is no crime to be ignorant of philosophy, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be abstruse and of little relevance for life. But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on philosophical subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” – Me

And yes, there is a real living inspiration for this little piece of creative modification, but the person or persons shall remain nameless – or at least unnamed by me here. ;o)

It’s not the kids; it’s the education system that’s stupid.