Red Clay Citizen

Holiday Gifts for Smart Lefties

Government's End - Jonathan Rauch
A stunning distillation of public choice -- or why government expansion and special interests go hand in hand.
Fatal Conceit - F.A. Von Hayek
A must read for anyone who believes society can be planned, shaped or engineered by elites for "the good."
The Mystery of Capital - Hernando de Soto
How property rights protect the poor and can pull them out of poverty.
The Best Laid Plans
A giant antidote to smart growth, town planning and other municipal fetishes.
Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid - M.K. Pralahad
Why we should stop thinking of the poor as victims, and instead as resilient, creative entrepreneurs.
The Future and Its Enemies - Virginia Postrel
Unpacks the disturbing trend towards preference for stasis over dynamism.
White Man's Burden - William Easterly
Why foreign aid is doomed to perpetual failure.
Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance - Douglass North
It's all about getting the rulesets right.
Moral's by Agreement - David Gauthier
A contractarian theory deriving the liberal (original sense) state and the free individual.
The Improving State of the World - Indur Goklany
How trade, progress and globalization is good for the world (including the environment).
Anarchy, State & Utopia and A Theory of Justice (together!) - Robert Nozick, John Rawls respectively
Titanic political theory from two great minds - compare and contrast.

Leave your own recommendations in the comments...
-Max Borders

This Perfect Day

Professor Boudreaux on the late Ira Levin:

"Rosemary's Baby" and "The Boys from Brazil" are indeed the two most popular novels written by the late Ira Levin ("'Rosemary's Baby' Author Ira Levin Dies," November 14).  But his best work, in my opinion, is his little-known 1970 novel "This Perfect Day."  In this work, Mr. Levin describes the horrors unleashed by a collectivist mentality that deifies the state as the creator of all that is orderly and good in society - a mentality that, as a result, empowers government to crush liberty and individuality.  "This Perfect Day" should rank with other collectivist-dystopian works such as Orwell's "1984" and with Huxley's "Brave New World."

McCarthy's Day

Buried beneath the news of 30+ dead in Blacksburg, we learn that Cormac McCarthy has won the Pulitzer prize for his work of fiction, The Road. Fitting, somehow, for this strange April -- with all its snow flurries and violence.

As a new father, I read The Road with a box of Kleenex. Imagine a post-apocolyptic setting. Think dirty snow, ash, and greyness. And yet little lights burn within a father and son as they make their way through the sunless world. A few beings, once-human, scavenge the wasteland desperate enough to become thieves, even cannibals. And yet the love a father for his son takes them through weeks of shivering, filth, hunger and thirst, down a long road that may offer nothing at its end. Where McCarthy's world should have no meaning, it somehow does. Read it.

Oprah agrees.

Remembering Vonnegut

In honor of Kurt Vonnegut, progressives so fond of egalitarian principles should read this short story. (Hat tip Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek). Inequality never felt so good.