Until now, I was not aware that Jeff had a brother. In fact, I discovered his brother is even more badass then Jeff himself. On top of being the lead singer, lyricist, and guitar player of one of the most influential bands in our history (Nirvana would not exist w/o them), he also has the world's greatest hair.  
 
I present to you, Jeff's brother: King Buzzo 
 
  

First of all, one of the greatest bands is making a return; SOUNDGARDEN. It's gonna be a helluva year with Faith No More, Them Crooked Vultures , and Soundgarden all playing live shows.  
 
Soundgarden is THE grunge band. I'll be getting tickets to at least one of their shows, regardless of how far I have to travel.  
 
Here's a taste of some Soundgarden: 
 
  

"The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned. Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved."

I know a lot of people (not necessarily on this site) that are interested in ideas of sound economics and liberty. A major problem is that they have no idea what kind of resources exist for them to continue their intellectual journey. So I figured I would give some of my personal favorites that I have stumbled upon through my own journey.  
 
I have broken the literature up into subjects, which any learned individual should be educated in. These are the subjects in which libertarians have written extensively on, and it does no good to just be educated in one subject. A worldview needs to encompass all areas of life.   
  
Not all literature I am listing is written by libertarians, but there are many areas of many disciplines which are not opinions, but rather things we should just know.  These obviously don't come exclusively from libertarian authors. 

So let's get started: 
 
History 
 
-Conceived in Liberty: Volumes I-IV,  Murray Rothbard 
-The Real Lincoln,  Thomas DiLorenzo 
-Hamilton's Curse,  Thomas DiLorenzo 
-Founding Brothers, Joseph Ellis 
-Recarving Rushmore, Ivan Iland 
-History of Money and Banking, Murray Rothbard 
-The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes 
-33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask, Thomas Woods 
-Who Killed the Constitution, Thomas Woods 
-America's Great Depression, Murray Rothbard 
-FDR's Folly, Jim Powell 
-Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs  
-The Panic of 1819, Murray Rothbard
 -The Origins of the Keynesian Revolution, Robert Dimand
 -Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War, Robert Ekelund Jr
 
Philosophy 
 
-Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, Murray Rothbard 
-Constitution of Liberty, Friedrick von Hayek 
-The Road to Serfdom,  Friedrick von Hayek  
-Our Enemy the State, Albert Jay Nock 
-Against Intellectual Property, Stephan Kinsella 
-For a New Liberty, Murray Rothbard 
-The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard 
-Anarchy and the Law, Edward Stringham 
-Rights of Man, Thomas Paine 
-Democracy: The God that Failed, Hans Hermann Hoppe 
-Economics and the Ethics of Private Property,  Hans Hermann Hoppe 
-Liberalism, Ludwig von Mises 
-Socialism, Ludwig von Mises  
-Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman 
-Four Essays on Liberty, Isaiah Berlin 
-The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Immanuel Kant edited by Paul Guyer
-On Liberty, John Stuart Mill  
-Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes 
-An Essay Concerning Human Understand, John Locke 
-Two Treatises of Government, John Locke
 
Basic Economics 
 
-Man, Economy, and State, Murray Rothbard 
-Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt  
-Meltdown, Thomas Woods 
-What Should You Know About Inflation?, Henry Hazlitt 
-The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrick von Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Gottfried Haberler
-Give Me a Break!, John Stossel 
-The Fatal Conceit, Friedrick von Hayek 
-The Economics of Liberty, Various Authors, Edited by Lew Rockwell  
-What Has Government Done to Our Money?, Murray Rothbard 
-The Case Against the FED, Murray Rothbard  
-Deflation and Liberty, Jorge Guido Hulsmann  
-Profit and Loss, Ludwig von Mises 
-Economic Logic, Mark Skousen 
-Privatization of Roads and Highways, Walter Block
 
Advanced Economics 
 
-Human Action, Ludwig von Mises 
-Economic Science and the Austrian Method, Hans Hermann Hoppe 
-Power and Market, Murray Rothbard 
-The Ultimate Method of Economic Science 
-The Theory of Money and Credit, Ludwig von Mises 
-Epistemelogical Problems of Economics, Ludwig von Mises 
-Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, Jesus Huerta de Soto 
-Prices and Production, Friedrick von Hayek 
-The General Theory of  Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes 
-The Failure of the New Economics, Henry Hazlitt  
-The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith 
-A Theory of Full Employment, Y.S. Brenner and N. Brenner-Golomb  
-The Structure of Production, Mark Skousen 
-Capital, Interest, and Rent: A Theory of Distribution, Frank Fetter 
 
Fiction 
 
-Time Will Run Back, Henry Hazlitt 
-Animal Farm, George Orwell 
-1984, George Orwell 
-Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand 
-The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
 
 
I hate fiction, but some people can't take philosophy straight, so they settle with fiction. That's the only reason I threw Rand's books on here. Even though the message in Atlas Shrugged could be written on 2 pages as opposed to 1,000, it's a hell of a book written by a very bad person.  
 
I'll be adding more to the list in the future. Also, I may add the credentials of the authors as well. Maybe some short biographies will be included as well.  
 
But for now, this list should keep anyone interested in ideas of liberty and prosperity happy. 

I said a few months ago that I would post some pics when I got em, so here are some:  
 

Ronald Reagan, the supposed idol of the Republican Party. He is known as the "Great Conservative" by most, and has been praised by many so called small-government folk for his massive reduction in government activities.  
 
But was Reagan really that conservative? Was he really the traditional, small government, tax cutting liberty lover that we have all come to adore?  
 
heh 
 
1) "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"  
 
Reagan was not responsible for "winning" the Cold War.  The Soviet Union collapsed because it was never a strong nation to begin with. In order to be a superpower, you must have power. In order to have power, you must have wealth. The Soviet Union had a pathetic economy. The president of the United States is irrelevant to the fact that the Soviet system was crumbling right from underneath them. Just as Bush cannot take credit for the lack of an event (no terror attacks since 9/11), neither can Reagan be given credit for a consequence which was not brought about by him.  Confusing correlation with causation is a problem in many different subjects, no less with politics.  
 
The Soviet Union used its small amount of wealth to build up arms to compete with the US. The threat was greatly exagerated considering that we knew their economy could not support such expenditures. If we were not in a military arms race, then the danger would not exist. If we were to enter an arms race, again, the danger would not exist because their system would collapse. Either way, the economic collapse was inevitable and  they were never the threat they were made out to be.  The truth is, the massive increase in military expenditures hurt everyone. It costed the US taxpayers greatly, and also hurt the Soviets population as well.  
 
Ad lastly, the Soviets DID intend on spreading communism and expanding their territories. This further extension was have brought about the collapse even sooner. If the US had stayed out of their affairs, the Soviets would have probably tried to aquire other territories such as  Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia among others. No doubt this would have brought about their inevitabel collapse even sooner.  
 
2) Awful Foreign Policy 
 
Besides Reagan's battle with the Soviets, he also was responsible for other military interventions, all of which were done without the legally required congressional authorization. Reagan was involved with Lebanon, Grenada, and Libya.   
 
Oh, and did I mention that Reagan had supported Saddam Hussein through funding and the provision of intelligence and military training? This was the main cause for Iraq's coming of power in the mideast and their subsequent invasion of Kuwait. 
 
3) Increased the Federal Government 
 
Not only did Reagan increase government expenditures on national defense, but he also increased domestic spending as well. Between 1980 and 1986, federal spending went from 21.6% of GNP to 24.3% of GNP. Reagan had cooperated with the Democrats to increase domestic spending in exchange for being able to increase defense spending.  
 
Federal spending $590 billion in 1980, and had increased to $1.14 trillion by 1988, nearly doubling the amount spent. And again, despite popular opinion, this increase was NOT mostly defense spending. In fact, only $150 billion of that increase was directed towards military budgets, where nearly $400 billion was spent on domestic programs.  
 
4) Did Not Change the Role of the government
 
Even though he based his platform on it, Reagan did not shut down a single government agency. Not one. All he did was increase the agencies that existed.  
 
5) Did not Deregulate 
 
Reagan is credited for massive deregulation. Jimmy Carter was actually the real deregulator. The few deregulation acts that Reagan actually did get around to, were already in the process from the Cater administration.  
 
Neither did Reagan fight the welfare state which he was credited for. While he promised to fight for welfare reform, it never happened. In fact, by the end of his administration, Reagan had increased the Aid to Families with Dependent Children by 10%.  
 
6) Reagan's Tax Cuts 
 
Sure, Reagan was responsible for a massive tax cut in 1981. As a matter of fact, it was the largest in American history. But it was meaningless, and actually more harmful. when taxes are cut without cutting govrenment spending, the government either has to print money, which is itself a form of taxation, or it has to borrow the money, again just higher taxation in the future.  
 
Reagan kept repeating that supply-side economics would prevail. He thought that the increased production from lower taxes would create more revenue for the state so that it could keep spending. He was wrong. The result was high inflation.  
 
7) Reagan's Tax Increases? 
 
In 1982, Reagan was responsible for the greatest tax increase in American history. He increased taxes on tobacco, airports, communications, and in 1984 reduced Social Security benefits while at the same time increased payroll taxes. 
 
As another attack against businesses, Reagan signed the Tax Reform Act. This shifted taxes from individuals to corporations. Corporate taxation is double taxation because it taxes their profits, their capital gains, and then it taxes the dividends of their stockholders.  
 
To be fair, overall taxes throughout the Reagan administration had decreased from 18.9% to 18.4%. But as I said earlier, this minimal tax decrease was also accompanied by a massive spending increase, resulting in massive debt.
 
8) Iran-Contra Affair 
 
Reagan was responsible for the supply of heavy weaponry to Iran. It was paid as ransom for U.S. hostages in Lebanon. Of course, not only was this illegal for Reagan to do, but this supply of weaponss and in turn, wealth, funding terrorist organizations who kill thousands of people.   
 
What resulted was a massive cover up, and an unfortunate escaped impeachment (Oh, and the creation of all things terrorist). 
 
I could go into this much deeper, but this post is long enough, and I have stuff to do.  If you have any spare time, please research the Iran-Contra Affair. It's very interesting to see how those with power are above the law. 
 
Conclusion 
 
Reagan is not the man he is made out to be. He was not a small government conservative, but rather a massive government imperialist who can partially be blamed for the current terrorist threat. 

Alright, so this is the first of a new blog series I'm going to be doing. Each blog post will be called "The Case Against  [Insert President Here]". 

So it's 12:54 AM and I'm angry at Red Faction, so I'm going to write about last weekend.