Lew Rockwell writes:
If you’re a libertarian, chances are you find yourself bombarded with objections, or feeling compelled to respond to the barrage of uncomprehending criticism your friends are sharing on social media. Conservatives badger you about war, drugs, even liberty itself, and left-liberals demand to know why you don’t favor redistribution and a Scandinavian welfare state.
I have two suggestions for you, and they both involve new books by Tom Woods.
First, Tom has just published a free eBook called 14 Hard Questions for Libertarians – Answered. Now if you have any experience with “free eBooks,” you’ve doubtless become jaded: they tend to be 20 pages long, and with large type. But 14 Hard Questions is a full-length book, covering topics ranging from the environment and net neutrality to harder cases like private police and private law. It’s available in EPUB, PDF, and Kindle versions, and I recommend it to you as an easy, enjoyable, and efficient way to build up your arsenal of evidence and arguments.
More important is Tom’s first print book in nearly four years: Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion. Tom tells me it’s his favorite of the dozen books he’s written.
Tom’s premise is that there is very little real dissent in the United States, where the confines of what the political and media classes have declared to be allowable opinion are extremely narrow. The bipartisan foreign-policy consensus is a good example: you can favor somewhat more or somewhat less foreign intervention, or you may criticize the precise form that a particular intervention takes, but you may not reject the overall framework root and branch, or even raise fundamental questions about it.
Should you stray from these boundaries of opinion, you will simply be excluded from the discussion, and likely smeared and vilified to boot.
