Jeffrey Tucker

Audio: The Laissez-Faire Books panel at FreedomFest

by on September 11, 2012 @ 2:51 am · 1 comment

in Anti-Statism

This summer I had the honor of speaking on the Laissez-Faire Books panel at FreedomFest, the annual libertarian mega-event put on by Mark Skousen in Las Vegas. Now the audio of the panel — the theme of which was “Live Better, Live Liberty: The Quest to Get Government Out of Our Lives” — is online:

The lineup for the panel includes:

  • Robert Murphy, speaking on alternative educational institutions
  • Wendy McElroy, speaking about her new book, The Art of Being Free
  • Jeffrey Tucker, on “defying the plan through your own digital civilization”
  • Jacob Huebert, on private forms of security and dispute-management,
  • Stefan Molyneux, on “redefining communities of peace and learning,” and
  • Douglas French, as emcee

If you only have time for part of this two-hour event, then at least be sure to listen to Jeffrey Tucker’s talk. I have already heard from people who have said they found this presentation life-changing, and I understand why. Tucker talks about how we can defeat the state by creating better products through the market, rather than by just following the old think-tank model. He’s putting these ideas to work through LFB, but, as he explains, there is so much more to be done by people who aren’t just selling books or ideas.

The other talks were very well-received, too. First, Robert Murphy talks about one of my favorite topics, the importance of education in the advancement of liberty.

Next, Wendy McElroy offers a taste of her latest book, The Art of Being Free, which is available in paperback and as a free e-book for members of the Laissez-Faire Club. (The talk is great, but you may just want to skip directly to the book and start reading, since that’s what you’ll end up doing anyway.)

For my part, I talk about ways that the market already provides security and dispute-resolution through products such as credit cards, smartphones, and Yelp. When people think about how the market would provide these goods in the absence of government, they tend to look back to ancient examples (e.g. Iceland, Ireland) or speculate about insurance companies funding police and armies — but perhaps the most relevant examples already exist today, right in front of our faces (or in our wallets).

Finally, the inimitable Stefan Molyneux offers his usual clarity and enthusiasm in arguing that we must make the moral case for liberty. I don’t agree with his suggestion that we must only make moral arguments — I think consequentialist arguments may often be a good place to start, as I argue in my foreword to LFB’s new edition of Gary Chartier’s Conscience of an Anarchist. Still, Molyneux is compelling and enjoyable, and if you like his approach, there is of course much more at his site, Freedomain Radio, and in his books, two of which are also available from LFB.

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Laissez Faire Books Launches the Laissez Faire Club

by on April 20, 2012 @ 12:44 am · 3 comments

in (Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Business, Education, History, Libertarian Theory, The Basics

Laissez Faire Books

Laissez Faire Books (LFB) is a seminal libertarian institution that dates back to 1972, six years before I was born. In its heyday, it played a central role in the libertarian movement as the largest libertarian bookseller, a publisher of libertarian books, and an old-school social network, hosting social gatherings and other events. This was before my time.

I’d never bought a book from LFB until yesterday (the 19th). By the time I became a libertarian in my undergraduate years at Louisiana State University, after reading the work of Ayn Rand (starting with The Fountainhead) at the urging of a friend, I was able to learn about libertarianism and Austrian economics from a large and growing sea of resources online. I bought books from Amazon and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI), read online articles and blogs, and took advantage of the growing library of digitized books and other media put online and hosted by the LvMI.

Laizzez Faire Books was fading into irrelevancy and, I think, in danger of being shuttered for good as it was passed from new owner to new owner. Enter Agora Financial, the latest owner of LFB, and hopefully the organization that will oversee its resuscitation and return to relevancy. With Jeffrey Tucker at the helm as executive editor, the prospects for profitability, innovation, and spreading the message of liberty are exciting indeed.

Many, if not most, of you know Jeffrey Tucker as the editorial vice president who led the LvMI into the digital age, building it into the open-source juggernaut with a vast online and free library of liberty and a thriving community that it is today. We were sad to see him leave that beloved institution, but eager to see what he would do in charge of a for-profit publisher and bookstore. Now we’ve been given the first taste.

[Keep reading…]

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TLS Podcast Picks: Tibor Machan and Jeff Tucker

by on March 21, 2012 @ 7:59 pm · 0 comments

in (Austrian) Economics, IP Law, Libertarian Theory, Podcast Picks, Technology, The Basics

Recommended podcasts:

  • machan-bannerProfiles in Liberty: Tibor Machan, by Stephen Hicks. Great profile of an important libertarian thinker and good friend of mine.  “Tibor Machan is professor of philosophy at Chapman University in California. He was born in Communist Hungary, smuggled out as a teenager, and came to the United States, where he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. A prolific writer, he has published over forty books and scores of essays. A recent collection of scholarly essays on Machan’s work, Reality, Reason, and Rights: Essays in Honor of Tibor R. Machan, edited by Douglas B. Rasmussen, Aeon J. Skoble, and Douglas J. Den Uyl, was published in 2011.”
  • The World No One Will Tell You is Possible, Radio Free Market interview with Jeff Tucker, about various themes discussed in his book It’s a Jetsons World, such as intellectual property and other issues.

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Grading the Pledge to America

by on September 24, 2010 @ 12:01 am · 3 comments

in Corporatism, Democracy, Health Care, Imperialism, The Right, Vulgar Politics, War

So….the Republicans have put out their Pledge to America. Is it any good?

Jeffrey Tucker sums it up pithily by juxtaposing short quotes from it and the Declaration of Independence:

Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…”

A Pledge to America (GOP, 2010): “Whenever the agenda of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to institute a new governing agenda and set a different course.”

If this goes on, related fellow TLS blogger Daniel Coleman to me, in another 100 years it will be “Whenever a subpoint of policy within a government agenda becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to organize a committee to change those subpoints of policy and replace them with better subpoints.”

Liberty Central, the Establishment’s attempt to co-opt the Tea Party, has a poll asking us to grade the Pledge. Head on over there and tell them what you think of it. Fellow TLS blogger Jacob Huebert has a couple of good posts on LewRockwell.com about Liberty Central, the Tea Party, the Pledge, and Glenn Beck.

The Liberty Central poll only lets you grade the Pledge as a whole. Here is a quick graded breakdown of important aspects of the Pledge, with short reactions by me in parentheses:

[Keep reading…]

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Mises.org Available as a Torrent Download!

by on June 15, 2010 @ 11:41 am · 6 comments

in Anti-Statism, Education, Technology

The Ludwig von Mises Institute has issued the second release of all of the content on their website as torrent files. This means that you can download all of the content available on Mises.org (as of June 15, 2010) by downloading various torrent files and opening them up with your torrent client (e.g., uTorrent, Vuze, or Transmission). This is great both for those who read Mises.org or listen to the media from that website. Thank you David Veksler, Jeffrey Tucker, and everyone else at the Mises Institute who made this possible!

The benefits of this are enormous. All of the information, wisdom, and knowledge on Mises.org is available for $0 to the general public, via Torrent download. This directly contradicts what Statists would have us believe is the nature of the free-market — people exploiting each other to succeed. How then do they explain the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a truly philanthropic organization, which helps thousands through education: education through peace and persuasion, not “education” at the barrel of a gun.

This will help the Mises Institute, its patrons, and Mises.org readers in numerous ways. Instead of having to navigate to the page or Media section of Mises.org and use browser plugins or spiders, those with a thirst for knowledge and understanding of economics and the free market can simply download everything they want through one torrent file. It also saves the Mises Institute tons of bandwidth, because people downloading torrents simultaneously share in the upload burden by seeding the file (if you download the file, please try to seed until your upload:download ratio is 1.2, this is normal Torrent etiquette). There is a dynamic carryover effect to torrenting: one person might only seed for a few weeks, but dozens of people who leeched from him might seed for a few weeks as well. Thus, there is a kind of digital compounding or interest-effect. Contrary to what you might think — and contrary to what advocates of intellectual property and particularly copyrights would tell you — this will not hurt Mises.org sales of books, but rather boost them, as explained by Jeffrey Tucker.

We can also think of this as a kind of grassroots, guerrilla intellectual resistance. The entire Mises.org media, book, journal, and PDF library will be distributed to thousands of hard drives around the world, will be shared by thousands of people. It can’t shut it down simply by shutting down the Mises Institute anymore. This has two benefits: (1) People can access Mises.org content even if the Mises.org website is down, provided they have the torrents; (2) If the US government wanted to shut down Mises.org, it would still face the distributed world-wide torrents, which would be almost impossible to shut down by a central authority.

So for those of you who are interested, please download: Help Mises.org and yourself at the same time. Download the books, pdfs, journal articles, videos, and mp3 files; listen to, watch, or read them; enjoy the overwhelming amount of knowledge you can have at your fingertips. This is truly a great example of Austrian economics at work: both parties clearly gain something from the interaction ex ante and almost certainly ex post too!

The Mises.org blog announcement:

Mises Torrents 2.0 Available

It’s been about a year early since the first public release of torrents containing all the document and media content on Mises.org. The Mises Institute staff adds new content frequently, so it is time for version 2.0.  Here are the 2010 torrents: Mises Media (132 GB), Books (8.6GB), Journals (4.1 GB), PDFs (324 MB), and ReasonPapers (1.4 GB).

For more files and details see the original announcement.  If you are new to BitTorrent, install the uTorrent client, open the links above, and you’ll be on your way.

If you downloaded an earlier version of this content, please do not re-download everything.  In both uTorrent and Vuze, you can get just the missing files.  In uTorrent,  start the download and let it create the placeholder directory, then stop it.  Overwrite the placeholder directory with your existing files, then “Force Re-Check.”  You can do the same in Vuze –  just enable the option to “Truncate existing files that are too large” under Options->Files.  Then resume.

By my best calculations, we seeded last year’s torrents to thousands of computers worldwide and served over 4 terabytes from our servers alone.  Please help us spread the word and make this release even bigger.

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