What One Book Do You Recommend?

Xenophage said:
I recommend Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It is the single most essential work of fiction you can read.
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One of my favorites as well...

The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot... it will blow your mind.

but I suspect the new favorite, coming out in April will be:

THE REVOLUTION: A MANIFESTO by Dr. Ronald Ernest Paul

I've heard he's authored a lot of things... Legislation comes to mind... speeches... other books...

And he's running for some office... I forget which one though.
 
Xenophage said:
I recommend Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It is the single most essential work of fiction you can read.

Next to that, I'd say The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein.
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Excellent choice. Sometimes I wonder if it is fiction, or if Ayn Rand gave us a blueprint for moral people to exit from the power the looter/moocher government has over us.

Galt's Gulch is a metaphor. If we could find some way to set up a network where we could trade with each other using money 100% backed by gold or silver instead of using Federal Reserve fiat, we could hide from the men in black, in plain sight! It would be a "virtual" Galt's Gulch, as we would decouple from our debt-based monetary system and trade with each other using our own sound money, cashing in gold or silver from time to time to pay our taxes with Federal Reserve paper notes.

That way, like in Atlas Shrugged, when the empire collapses and the purchasing power of fiat went through the floor, we might have a chance to survive it as the trading network would be established...assuming of course, our medium of trade was still available..:eek:

Adjusting tinfoil hat...:D
 
gilliganscorner said:
Excellent choice. Sometimes I wonder if it is fiction, or if Ayn Rand gave us a blueprint for moral people to exit from the power the looter/moocher government has over us.

Galt's Gulch is a metaphor. If we could find some way to set up a network where we could trade with each other using money 100% backed by gold or silver instead of using Federal Reserve fiat, we could hide from the men in black, in plain sight! It would be a "virtual" Galt's Gulch, as we would decouple from our debt-based monetary system and trade with each other using our own sound money, cashing in gold or silver from time to time to pay our taxes with Federal Reserve paper notes.

That way, like in Atlas Shrugged, when the empire collapses and the purchasing power of fiat went through the floor, we might have a chance to survive it as the trading network would be established...assuming of course, our medium of trade was still available..:eek:

Adjusting tinfoil hat...:D
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I've actually had this exact idea before. Interesting!
 
John Taylor Gatto

Especially his "The Underground History of American Education". This book describes how the American people were saddled with a Prussian model school system designed for mind and behavior control, essentially training a people to chain themselves using their minds. After a few generations of that, tyranny is child's play.

Oh, and the Bible
 
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Commit this to memory... exposing the Jesus Myth
 
Ayn Rand's "Hymn To Money"

Hi Folks,

One of the greatest (shorter than "This is John Galt speaking...") is Rand's observations of money. I repeat a few passages here, with my comments injected where appropriate:

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced, and there are men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must do so by trade, and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
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How many of us have heard, "money is the root of all evil". I think this is a paraphrase of Timothy 6:10, who said,
"For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows."
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So it is incorrect.

Rand continues:

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so on the conviction that you will be able to exchange it for the products of the effort of others. It is neither the moochers nor the looters who give value to money. Neither an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should really be gold, are a token of honor - your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on the moral principle that is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?
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We have often heard from economists that gold or sliver is a barbarous relic. This is garbage. The BIG difference between the two is:

  • Gold and Silver cannot be produced out of thin air. Neither governments nor the banking system can create it at will, hence their constant attacks and demonetization laws on it.
  • We traded in gold and silver, because it was the free market that gave it value. You and I interacting in freedom decided what was to be used as money. Fiat was forced upon us by the government/banking cartel - at the point of a gun or by an ocean of tears.

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric motor and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover how to do it for the first time. Try to grow food by means of nothing but physical motions - and you'll learn that it is man's mind that is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak. What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Does it follow, then, that money made by the inventor of the motor is at the expense of others who invented nothing? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? Or by the able, at the expense of the lazy? Money is made - before it can be looted or mooched - by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

Run for your life from anyone who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another - their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of the gun.
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God, she is good.

Then you see the rise of men of a double standard - men who live by force yet count on those who live by trade to create value to back their looted money - hitch-hikers of virtue. In a moral society these are criminals, and statues are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creator's avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters who get it from them the way they've got it from you. Then the race gets under way, and the prize goes, not to the ablest at production, but to the most ruthless at brutality. When coercion is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then society vanishes in a spread of ruin and slaughter.
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Make no mistake. This is happening now.

Do you want to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of society's virtue. When you see that trading is done not by consent but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods but in favors - when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - then you will know that your society is doomed. Gold is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half property, half loot.
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Gold and silver are the only assets that does not represent someone else's liability.

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying gold money, for it is man's protection, and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper.
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The Federal Reserve. Or any Central Bank.

This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values.
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Our government destroys the value of your money for their ends.

Gold is an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper money is mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by guns aimed at those who are expected to produce. Paper money is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: "account overdrawn".

When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and to become fodder for the immoral. Do not expect them to produce when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask who is destroying the world. You are.
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To the glory of mankind there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money - and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being - the self-made man - the American industrialist.
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Prior to the Federal Reserve, America created the greatest wealth the world has ever known and raised the standard of living of all higher than recorded history.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose - because it contains all the others - the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money". No other language or nation has ever used this combination of words before; men have always thought of wealth as a static quantity - to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth must be created. The phrase "to make money" holds the essence of morality.

Yet these were words for which the Americans were denounced by the rotten cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, no better than the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of gold and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide - as I think he will.

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns - or gold. Take your choice - there is no other - and your time is running out.
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Alan Greenspan (yes. THAT Alan Greenspan) understood this too. In 1966-67, he wrote an essay entitled "Gold and Economic Freedom":

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.
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Irrelevant you say? He wrote it in 1966, so it is no longer valid? When asked by Ron Paul in 2002, if he still believed in what he wrote back then was still valid today, Greenspan responded, "I wouldn't change a word.". So what happened? This is the answer I wanted to see in his book.
 
Just finished "nation of sheep" by judge napalatano (apologies for spelling..)

Ii is a very concise litany on the unconstitutional actions our goverenment over the years--scary stuff.

I think Naomi Wolf is next.
 
Brave New World, 1984, The Fountainhead, and just for the sake of appreciating our economic system, The Communist Manifesto. The Creature from Jekyll Island author has a speech somewhere online. I don't have time to find it right now, but it's good.
 
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