The best books on libertarian politics and economics—with a backdrop of morality

For a New Liberty breaks apart traditional assumptions about politics in ways that I hadn’t considered until reading this book.

Rothbard uses common-sense reasoning to explain the problems with our governing structures today and paves the way for a whole new paradigm. Even more than that, Rothbard shows how society could look in the future if government functions were privatized.

This book is also a great primer for the “Austrian School” of economics. I had many aha moments when reading this book, and it helped change my worldview. 

This book is not for the faint of heart: it challenges deeply held assumptions about government that many of us have had since childhood.

Larken Rose critiques the basic role of “authority” in society and shows its moral and philosophical flaws. I’ve heard from so many readers that this book caused a paradigm shift in the way that they view government. There are certain concepts that you can’t “unhear” after you encounter them…and you’ll find many such ideas in this book.

I can say this from personal experience! 

You won’t often see books about the nature of reality and consciousness alongside political and economic theory. So why do I include it? Because politics and economics are, at their core, tied to fundamental questions like “who are we?" and "why are we here?”

Larry Dossey’s One Mind is one of the books that helped me view reality in a new way (and was one of the influences behind my first book). Previously, I viewed life as random and meaningless because I thought science was moving us away from “superstitious” ideas of “spirituality.” 

The topics covered in One Mind shifted me away from that viewpoint by examining scientific evidence that I didn’t know existed.

Science points to our innate—and invisible—interconnectedness, which creates a moral framework for thinking about how to structure society in new ways.

Near-death experiences on the surface sound like they have no relationship to politics and economics. However, they allow us to make inferences about a “moral imperative” embedded within the structure of reality itself.

Near-death experiences are instances in which a person’s consciousness has remarkable perceptions—even though the person is sometimes clinically dead. In fact, the experiences are often reported to be “realer” than real. This perplexing phenomenon has been studied extensively by the University of Virginia’s Bruce Greyson, MD, and he explains in his book why many of these profound cases are likely not hallucinations. (And he further explained these concepts to me when I interviewed him for my podcast, Where Is My Mind?).

The life-changing messages from near-death experiences teach us that we are all interconnected at a deep and fundamental level. Many near-death-experience survivors even report that they relived their whole life, and they become each person that they impacted and felt the positive and negative ways they made others feel (known as a life review).

These moral insights can be used to rethink assumptions about how “government” should (and shouldn’t) be structured.  

DiLorenzo analyzes fundamental economic topics in a clear and understandable way.

This book helped me develop better counterarguments to many of the mainstream views on how the economy “should” work. For instance, he explains that although the government is supposed to try to help the economy, its policies are often driven by special interests that steer the economy in their own desired direction.

And he explains that although government central planning is supposed to help the environment, it often results in great environmental damage (such as the severe environmental harm done under the former Soviet Union).

DiLorenzo gives example after example of the ways in which governments damage the very economies that they are allegedly tasked with managing for the “greater good.”