Ludwig von Mises' Liberalism and Socialism, adnotated.
The original work, "Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis" by Ludwig von Mises is conveniently available to the public on mises.org. It's an interesting state of affairs in the postmodern world that while any piece of crap pretending unwarrantedly to be a book is closely guarded lest someone obtains it without paying a tithe, actual books are widely and freely available. The cause, if you're curious, is exactly the same that drives ugly and annoying women to refuse copulation until marriage : they know full well that if anyone got to see the inside before commitment they'd never commit as much as a farthing. So it goes.
I like Mises. That's not to say I like him personally, we've never met. I like the man intellectually, he often has a point, he often argues the point well, it's often the case that after having spent time in his company one leaves a wiser man. This contrasts sharply with your average US writer, with whom you usually part company a tired man, an exhausted man, a disgusted man, a despondent man, a horrified man - often enough all five but absolutely never wiser, except should you mean wisdom in the sense of "well now I've really seen all possible reimplementation of this tired, old idiocy".
Precisely because I like him, and precisely because the exercise is likely to be profitable, I will go to the trouble of commenting on one of his more important published works. Comments, by their nature, are more differential than deferentiali but this isn't to be misunderstood in the pedestrian way, for we're not pedestrians : we fly high on the strong wings of superior minds.
For convenience, I'll do this on a chapter-by-chapter basis, and you can find a list of chapters below. Have fun!
———- I'm a writer, thus I innovate. If you don't like innovation in language, pretend you've read "critical". It's not an exact translation, the differential vs deferential construction denotes something like "more concerned with the difference of view between reader and author than with the greatness of the autor", whereas critical has come to mean these days - through no fault of its own - fault finding, especially of the imaginary type. I am fully aware that's not what critical used to mean, at all, and in that limited sense "it's not what critical means". Nevertheless, sooner or later we'll have to bow to facts, critical thinking as understood by our friends across the pond would make any donkey proud and that's that. [↩]
