Reading

When I started this blog, I wasn't sure that I'd be able to write enough to justify it. Then I surprised myself by writing on average more than once a day for a couple of months. I slowed down a bit due to taking a couple of weeks of vacation (during one of which I had the kids to myself), but the other major impact is that I've been reading a lot lately.

I just finished Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom. This is one of those classics that everyone should read. He makes the case that any type of state that attempts to plan some part of our lives must necessarily[1] end up planning all parts of our lives. Furthermore, he argues that a state of this nature must necessarily attract the worst kind of people to its leadership (thugs, essentially.) There's obviously more to the book, and it's definitely worth a read.

I'm also on the verge of finishing Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. It was fairly interesting reading these two books at the same time. He covers a lot of early 20th century American history that I'd been unaware of (or possibly managed to forget since high school.) He argues that, rather than conservatives being Fascists, as every protester of the last 8 years would have us believe, it's actually liberals that have far more in common with the Italian Fascists and the Nazis.

Next on the list: Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions.

[1] Modulo his comments about the inevitability of planning.