Some of you might not have yet encountered the Liberty Law Blog, the newest online offering from Liberty Fund. If you haven’t, it’s well worthwhile, and not just because of the nice posts my friend and colleague Mike Rappaport has recently put up on Bleeding Heart Libertarianism here and here.
I’ve been reading Jim Powell’s book, The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000 Year History Told Through the Lives of Freedom’s Greatest Champions. It’s a terrific book for a number of reasons, the primary of which is its dramatic and highly readable accounts of the lives of great libertarians defenders of liberty like Cicero, Lysander Spooner, and Richard Cobden. But I think it’s especially valuable for libertarian academics and aspiring, who are wont to feel put upon by an academic world that is largely (though decreasingly) hostile to their ideas. I’ve felt this way too, and the feeling is understandable. But it’s not a very productive feeling, and Powell’s book is helpful in dispelling it. It’s hard to feel oppressed for being a defender of liberty because one’s journal article was rejected when one reads about John Lilburne getting his eye poked out with a pike for printing a pamphlet deemed offensive by the authorities, or about Hugo Grotius being imprisoned and having to escape by sneaking out in the trunk that was used to deliver him books, or any of the number of other horrifying stories recounted in Powell’s book. And you think you got it hard because you don’t get invited to the right cocktail parties anymore?
Finally, LearnLiberty just put up a video on price gouging, featuring yours truly. It’s about five minute long, and so obviously leaves a lot of the trickier issues unaddressed. But if you’re into that kind of thing, you can read some academic papers I’ve written on the topic here and here. I have a more detailed treatment still in the works for the book I’m writing on Exploitation, Capitalism, and the State.
