[A] The only author along these lines I've read much of is Murray Rothbard, mostly because I typeset several of his books for the Kochs back in the mid-1970s, before their falling out. The fatal flaw there is that there is no practical way to extend the freedom sought to anywhere near everyone, a failure that results in tiny pockets of power that most closely resemble feudalism. The Friedman and Rachels books look to be closely related to Rothbard. I mostly know Murray from The Bell Curve Debate, a compilation of critical articles edited by Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, so I've tended to view him as a simple-minded last-grasp racist, but Quinn Slobodian's Hayek's Bastards ties Rothbard and Murray close together, with Rothbard coming off racist and Murray as a libertarian economic hack. I don't know Sowell well enough to pick out fine points, but he's spent all of his career paddling around Hayekian currents, which has enamored him to propagandists like Rush Limbaugh. By the way, Rachels' other book is White, Right, and Libertarian.

I have on occasion felt some attraction to libertarian ideas, but I never figured out a way to make them work for more than a tiny minority of people. So when I ran across the argument that libertarianism had been tried but was then called feudalism, it all sort of clicked. Charles Koch never wanted other people to share the freedom he supposedly advocated. He just wanted to be a feudal lord, absolute in his power over the vast majority of failures everywhere. The notion that everyone should fight to get ahead only ensures that almost everyone will fall behind. On the other hand, socialism allows for scenarios where there are no real losers. It may be hard to give up the romance of individualism, especially as it's been drummed into us all our lives, but cooperation is possible, and ultimately much more satisfying than the war-of-all-against-all. Call that "leftoid la la land" if you like. That sounds like something I need more of, not less.

I should like to end this with an alternative reading list, but it would be very hard to think one through on the spot. I wonder, for instance, whether books that had a profound influence on me more than 50 years ago still hold up — like: Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1960); Robert Paul Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (1968); John N Bleibtreu, The Parable of the Beast (1968); Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism; Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; and Paul Williams, Outlaw Blues (1969). But the following are pretty solid, with Brockway answering all the crap economics on Johnny's list, and the rest affirming that things other than money still matter:

1. George Brockway, The End of Economic Man (1991)
2. Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner: Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1971)
3. Jan Myrdal, Angkor: An Essay on Art and Imperialism (1970)
4. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
5. Mark Kurlansky, Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea (2006)

Tomorrow I may come up with a completely different list. One thing I hope to do in the not-too-distant future is to go through my accumulation of books and jot down what I remember of each.