One of the distinguishing traits of the Founders was their love of books.  Jefferson bought them by the hundreds when he was United States minister to France in the 1780s.  After amassing 6,487 volumes, the largest private collection in the country, he sold them to Congress in 1815 for about $3.50 each, to replace books the British burned the year before.  [1]  He immediately began building his own collection again.

Though John Adams admitted to Jefferson he had not half as many books as his Virginian friend, he was no less a bibliophile.  [2]  Adams had a library built to rid his house of all the books.  The bookshelves in the library ran floor-to-ceiling, two stories high, and were crammed with books two and three rows deep.  The house was soon cluttered with books again, with bookshelves lining the walls of nearly every room, even the hallways.

For both Jefferson and Adams, books were a means to political success.  No less was true for James Madison.  In preparing to create a replacement for the Articles of Confederation, Madison read voraciously about confederations of the ancient world and Europe.  Many of the books Madison devoured were shipped by Jefferson from Paris. [3]

Nor was the love of the printed word exclusive to Early America's leaders.  Most working people were literate and consumed pamphlets and newspaper articles whenever they could get them.  Such was their receptiveness to printed information that in early 1776, Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense sold in three months the equivalent of five million copies today and aroused many Americans to favor separation from England.   

A literate people heard no new ideas when they attended public readings of the Declaration of Independence.  Jefferson knew his words would be widely understood when he drafted the document.  Young America loved to read.

"Well, Smith," you might say, "how else could people spend their time back then?  Reading had very little competition.  It's not as if they could practice their golf swings or hone their Blackberry skills."  True, but mankind was not born in 1776, either.  Unlike previous ages when people had no moral alternative to obeying the state, ideas had direct survival function in the American colonies.  The Enlightenment put the individual on center stage, making him sovereign and responsible.  Patriots knew they had a right to defy the state and craved information that would help them implement that right.

Now that America has lost much of its hard-won freedom, we find ourselves drowning in a culture that long ago abandoned any talk of individual rights or liberty.  The term "patriot" has done an about-face and now stands for support of the state, rather than dedication to a principle.  The patriots who founded this country would today be in the crosshairs of Ashcroft's agents.

One of the biggest problems confronting conscientious Americans now are the hours spent earning a living.  It leaves little time for watching over our political future.  But if we value our lives, we have no choice but to make an effort to understand our past, see where we're headed, and do something to abort our self-destruction.  Our government now is the Britain our Founders faced, only worse.  Do you think our Founders would pledge allegiance to a state that ran roughshod over their laws and rights, while creating havoc around the world?  They would fight it, even at the risk of imprisonment or death.

What exactly can a person do?  For starters, learn -- learn American history, get a clear understanding of what constitutes a moral society, and take a close look at how a free economy works.

Books on liberty proliferated during the second half of the last century.  Here are a few that can get you going:

1.  The works of Ayn Rand, most importantly her 1,100-page blockbuster, Atlas Shrugged.  Atlas is a philosophical mystery novel that shows what happens when the innovators and producers of the world, at all levels of ability, go on strike.  According to a survey taken by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month club, Atlas ranked only behind the Bible as the most influential book in people's lives.

2.  Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt.  First published in 1946, this short book dissects common economic fallacies still prevalent today and provides a lucid presentation of free market thinking.  In his introduction, Hazlitt says the book is an update of the approach found in Frederic Bastiat's 1850 essay, "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen," available online.  [4]  The lesson: "The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

3.  The works of Murray Rothbard, particularly Man, Economy, and State, a 987-page treatise on economics.  Rothbard was a scholar and teacher who wrote prodigiously on economics, politics, and history.  One of his best shorter works is called, What Has Government Done to Our Money?, in which he shows how money "originated, and must originate, in a useful commodity chosen by the free market as a medium of exchange . . . . Under freedom, the commodities chosen as money, their shape and form, are left to the voluntary decisions of free individuals."  He then explains how governments fund themselves by direct seizure of monetary assets (taxation) and indirect seizure of monetary assets through inflation (counterfeiting).

4.  The works of Ludwig von Mises, many of which are available online.  [5]  Mises founded the Austrian school of economics, the only school to predict the Great Depression.   

5.  The Real Lincoln, Thomas DiLorenzo, and Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.  Of the 16,000 books estimated to have been written about the Civil War, these two are special for their courage and scholarship.  Both authors argue that slavery could have ended without fighting a war that eventually killed over 600,000 people, including 50,000 civilians.  DiLorenzo strips Lincoln down to his naked self -- a slick politician with an agenda for aggrandizing state power, who held the Union together at gunpoint, and for whom slavery provided a moral cover for aggression.  Hummel regards the Civil War as America's real turning point.  "In contrast to the whittling away of government that had preceded Fort Sumter," he concludes, "the United States had commenced its halting but inexorable march toward the welfare-warfare State of today."

For an article-length version of The Real Lincoln, read "Lincoln's Second American Revolution," by DiLorenzo.  [6]  Historian Robert Higgs has written a fascinating review of Hummel's book, "The Bloody Hinge of American History."  [7]

With the exception of Rand's works, these books are rare finds in bookstores.  You can order them online, though, at Laissez Faire Books or www.mises.org.

The foregoing recommendations will likely make you mad, because they show in painful detail how the state has lied to, plundered, and murdered its citizens.  But the anger will keep you reading, and hopefully keep you remembering the next time you hear a politician or one of his lapdogs speak.


1.  Jefferson's Library, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jefflib.html

2.  Cappon, Lester J. 1959.  The Adams --Jefferson Letters, University of North Carolina Press, p. 440.

3.  Madison, James, 1787.  Notes on the Confederacy - Introduction, http://www.jmu.edu/madison/confweak.htm

4.  Bastiat, Frederic, "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen," http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

5.  von Mises, Ludwig, Online Books, http://www.mises.org/misesbooks.asp

6.  DiLorenzo, Thomas, "Lincoln's Second American Revolution," http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo32.html

7.  Higgs, Robert, "The Bloody Hinge of American History," http://www.libertysoft.com/liberty/reviews/59higgs.html