Hacker News Books

Read The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty by Hayek for a deep discussion of liberalism.

The Wealth of Nations and Free to Choose are also great books to consider.

I'm not trying to be cute here btw.

Oddly, "Free to Choose" (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Free_to_Choos... ) is not one of the books that you can buy.

Emotional Intelligence - Daniel Goleman

https://www.amazon.com/Free-Choose-Statement-Milton-Friedman...

At some point you have to acknowledge the irony at refusing to see Libertarianism as anti-poor ideology, while simultaneously pointing people to a man who worked (and trained others to work with at the University if Chicago) far right dictators like Pinochet.

There was a fantastic 1980 PBS (video) series called Free to Choose, by Nobel-Prize winning economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose.
It's available for free viewing here: http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/

Once you get into economics, you will like this blog: http://marginalrevolution.com/

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell

Free to Choose by Milton Friedman (video series, too)

Use of Knowledge in Society by Hayek (short, non-technical paper which is full of brilliant insights): http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

Not a book, but the Econtalk podcast is fantastic: http://www.econtalk.org/

No. Libertarians are against any sort of class system (i.e. legal privileges for certain groups). They are neither anti-rich nor anti-poor. Of course, there are libertarians who are jerks, but that isn't what Libertarianism is about. Also, most people only hear about Libertarianism from non-Libertarians, hence they only hear negative things about it.

Libertarianism is mainly about people being free to choose, and being responsible for their choices, as long as they aren't hurting others in the process.

Milton Friedman's book "Free to Choose" is a good introduction if you're interested in more.

Let's consider this part:

"A hundred years ago the philosophical radicals formed a school of intelligent men who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are; the result was that they dominated politics and that the world advanced rapidly both in intelligence and in material well-being."

Another example of this is neo-liberal capitalism: from Hayek [1] and his disciple, Friedman [2], to myriad think tanks, Reagan and Thatcher, SCOTUS (eg Powell [3]), etc. We're still living with the outcome of a generation of intelligent, organized, ambitious people united by a [flawed] ideology.

[1] Hayek - "The Road to Serfdom" http://amzn.to/1PRWyDj
[2] Friedman - "Free to Choose" http://amzn.to/1QKIewt
[3] Powell - "Attack on American Free Enterprise System" http://bit.ly/1Q2bHR7

Bully for them. It's been working for them in the past, and it's nice to see a government that (at least seems) to have their act together trying out some weird and out there stuff.

Milton Friedman described the pencil in his Free to Choose series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws

And in 2012 CEI made a movie version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYO3tOqDISE

I know the rules here are such that we don't talk about voting up/down, but I have no idea why you were voted down. Your post is on-topic and informative. I didn't know their was a book version or the CEI movie version, I had only watched the Free to Choose series. Thanks for sharing.

Economics in One Lesson is also a good read, but to me it comes across as a bit more dogmatic... the examples are a bit less falsifiable, etc. In general, it's not the sort of book that is likely to be quite as convincing to a skeptic as Friedman's.

C&F (unlike some of Friedman's other books) is very welcoming to those with different ideas, and focuses on the goal of the discipline of economics and does not get caught up in political issues. I found the opposite tone in "Free to Choose", for example.

If you have the time, you should pick up some Friedman or Hayek. Friedman's "Free to Choose" is a mass market book on libertarian economic policy. Hayek's "The Use of Information in Society" is a beautiful exposition on the function of a decentralized market. But there are plenty others.

You might also benefit from a well-reasoned, economic critique of regulation. "Regulatory capture" is a real phenomenon, as is self-serving bureaucracy. If hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and a multi-trillion dollar budget weren't enough to fix the market, there is probably something wrong with the process. "More rules and money" probably isn't going to fix things.

I can find such writing for you if you don't have the time. Drop me an email.

However, you will find that writings by competent libertarian economists are not so easy to "debunk" when compared to forum posts written by 16-year-olds. Or Misesians. Those guys are crazy.

It is also a reminder that politicians who claim that they can make college and healthcare free, create jobs, increase wages, protect use from Chinese people stealing jobs, negotiate "smart trade deals" are basically people who have no clue what they are talking about.

Just FYI: this is a television series from Friedmans book "Free to Choose", a classic book that advocates laissez-faire politics (free markets). Highly recommanded if you are interested in economics.

EDIT: Actually I checked and it seems that the book was written after the first TV-series, my bad.

But you can't connect abstract "regulations" to any kind of bigger context for a cost/benefit analysis. You can for a particular regulation or a particular set of regulations, though.

I believed stuff like "regulations are only added never removed" and "government always grows, never shrinks," but that's empirically false. I read all about how the ICC's regulatory regime was awful in Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, but it turns out by that time it had already been abolished: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission....

I don't think it's a bad thing to periodically revisit regulations and revise/abolish them if they're no longer needed or can be improved. However, I think it a lot of cases, regulation is actually a set of solutions to problems, and repealing the regulation will just unsolve those problems.

> Re forum, collecting emails seem to count as personal data, maybe the amount of work wouldn't be high, but researching what do I really need to do, how to register personal data database etc. was high, there were not much info available at the time. AFAIR changes were pretty brutal to me since I was miraculously running on some very deprecated phpBB with a few manual patches which kept bots away.

IIRC, I think they do, but from my employer's GDPR training, all you'd have to do is not use the emails you collected for a purpose other than what you obtained consent for. E.g. if you collected them for account maintenance notifications, you can't turn around and build a marketing list from them without getting additional consent from the user.

So in that spirit, here are a couple of economics books that I quite seriously believe everyone should be forced to read.

Economics in One Lesson, by Hazlitt

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, by Milton and Rose Friedman

Freakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner (this book is just so damn fun to read)

and for the hackers:
The God of the Machine, by Paterson
(Think engineering principles as applied to economics, history and politics. Probably one of the most interesting books I've read in my entire life, even if I don't entirely agree with the thesis.)

they are just worshippers of the state capitalist system, ideological managers keeping the party line "top of mind"