Rich Dad Poor Dad, the #1 Personal Finance book of all time, tells the story of Robert Kiyosaki and his two dads—his real father and the father of his best friend, his rich dad—and the ways in which both men shaped his thoughts about money and investing. The book explodes the myth that you need to earn a high income to be rich and explains the difference between working for money and having your money work for you.

No country is as misunderstood as North Korea, and no modern tyrant has remained more mysterious than the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il. Now, celebrity ghostwriter Michael Malice pulls back the curtain to expose the life story of the “Incarnation of Love and Morality.” Taken directly from books spirited out of Pyongyang, DEAR READER is a carefully reconstructed first-person account of the man behind the mythology.

From his miraculous rainbow-filled birth during the fiery conflict of World War II, Kim Jong Il watched as his beloved Korea finally earned its freedom from the cursed Japanese. Mere years later, the wicked US imperialists took their chance at conquering the liberated nation—with devastating results. But that’s only the beginning of the Dear Leader’s story.

In DEAR READER, Kim Jong Il explains:
How he can shrink time
Why he despises the Mona Lisa
How he recreated the arts in Korea
Why the Juche idea is the greatest concept ever discovered by man
How he handled the crippling famine
Why Kim Jong Un was chosen as successor over his elder brothers

With nothing left uncovered, drawing straight from dozens on books, hundreds of articles and thousands of years of Korean history, DEAR READER is both the definitive account of Kim Jong Il’s life and the complete stranger-than-fiction history of the world’s most unique country.

Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression — the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully.Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims — men, women, and children — we encounter secret police operations, labor camps and prisons; the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the welcome that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness the astounding moral courage of the incorruptible, who, defenseless, endured great brutality and degradation. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 — a grisly indictment of a regime, fashioned here into a veritable literary miracle — has now been updated with a new introduction that includes the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn’s move back to Russia.

Robert A. Heinlein was the most influential science fiction writer of his era, an influence so large that, as Samuel R. Delany notes, “modern critics attempting to wrestle with that influence find themselves dealing with an object rather like the sky or an ocean.” He won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, a record that still stands. “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” was the last of these Hugo-winning novels, and it is widely considered his finest work.

It is a tale of revolution, of the rebellion of the former Lunar penal colony against the Lunar Authority that controls it from Earth. It is the tale of the disparate people–a computer technician, a vigorous young female agitator, and an elderly academic–who become the rebel movement’s leaders. And it is the story of Mike, the supercomputer whose sentience is known only to this inner circle, and who for reasons of his own is committed to the revolution’s ultimate success.

“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” is one of the high points of modern science fiction, a novel bursting with politics, humanity, passion, innovative technical speculation, and a firm belief in the pursuit of human freedom.

“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” is the winner of the 1967 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

The core of this book is a systematic treatment of the historic transformation of the West from monarchy to democracy. Revisionist in nature, it reaches the conclusion that monarchy is a lesser evil than democracy, but outlines deficiencies in both. Its methodology is axiomatic-deductive, allowing the writer to derive economic and sociological theorems, and then apply them to interpret historical events.

A compelling chapter on time preference describes the progress of civilization as lowering time preferences as capital structure is built, and explains how the interaction between people can lower time all around, with interesting parallels to the Ricardian Law of Association. By focusing on this transformation, the author is able to interpret many historical phenomena, such as rising levels of crime, degeneration of standards of conduct and morality, and the growth of the mega-state. In underscoring the deficiencies of both monarchy and democracy, the author demonstrates how these systems are both inferior to a natural order based on private-property.

Hoppe deconstructs the classical liberal belief in the possibility of limited government and calls for an alignment of conservatism and libertarianism as natural allies with common goals. He defends the proper role of the production of defense as undertaken by insurance companies on a free market, and describes the emergence of private law among competing insurers.

Having established a natural order as superior on utilitarian grounds, the author goes on to assess the prospects for achieving a natural order. Informed by his analysis of the deficiencies of social democracy, and armed with the social theory of legitimation, he forsees secession as the likely future of the US and Europe, resulting in a multitude of region and city-states. This book complements the author’s previous work defending the ethics of private property and natural order. Democracy – The God that Failed will be of interest to scholars and students of history, political economy, and political philosophy.

Tracing postmodernism from its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant to their development in thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty, philosopher Stephen Hicks provides a provocative account of why postmodernism has been the most vigorous intellectual movement of the late 20th century. Why do skeptical and relativistic arguments have such power in the contemporary intellectual world? Why do they have that power in the humanities but not in the sciences? Why has a significant portion of the political Left – the same Left that traditionally promoted reason, science, equality for all, and optimism – now switched to themes of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism? Explaining Postmodernism is intellectual history with a polemical twist, providing fresh insights into the debates underlying the furor over

political correctness, multiculturalism, and the future of liberal democracy.

This monograph is justifiably considered a modern classic. Stephan Kinsella has caused libertarians worldwide to rethink the very basis of intellectual property.

Mises warned against patents, and so did Rothbard. But Kinsella goes much further. He argues that the very existence of patents — and copyrights and trademarks, too — is contrary to a free market. They all use the state to create artificial scarcities of nonscarce goods and employ coercion in a way that is contrary to property rights and the freedom of contract.

Many who read this book will be unprepared for the rigor of Kinsella’s argument. It takes time to settle in, simply because it seems so shocking at first. But Kinsella makes his case with powerful logic and examples that are overwhelming in their persuasive power.

After all, the relevance of this argument in a digital age can’t be overstated. The state works with monopolistic private producers to inhibit innovation and stop the progress of technology, while using coercion against possible competitors and against consumers. Even US foreign policy is profoundly affected by widespread confusions over what is legitimate and what is merely asserted as property.

What Kinsella is calling for instead of this cartelizing system is nothing more or less than a pure free market, which involves nothing resembling what we call intellectual property today. IP, he argues, is really nothing more than a state-enforced legal convention, not an extension of real ownership.

Few books written in the last decades have caused so much fundamental rethinking. It is essential that libertarians get this issue right and understand the arguments on all sides. Kinsella’s book is masterful in doing just that — making a case against IP that turns out to be more rigorous and thorough than any written on the left, right, or anywhere in between.

Read it and prepare to change your mind.

To search for Mises Institute titles, enter a keyword and LvMI (short for Ludwig von Mises Institute); e.g., Depression LvMI

From The Teaching Company’s The Great Courses Modern History series. Thomas Jefferson : American Visionary
(12 lectures, 45 minutes/lecture)
on audiotape with course booklets

Taught by Darren Staloff
City College of New York

For those fans of Professor Staloff, whose Teaching Company courses have almost entirely fallen out of print, comes this in-depth course on the most important of the Founding Fathers.

Course titles
1. The Allure and Challenge of Thomas Jefferson
2. The Mind of Thomas Jefferson
3. Jefferson the Revolutionary American.
4. Jefferson the Revolutionary Virginian
5. The American Sage : notes on the State of Virginia
6. Jefferson Abroad
7. Jefferson versus Hamilton
8. the Road to Victory – the “Revolution of 1800”
9. Principle and Practice in Jefferson’s Presidency
10. Literary Legacies
11. Final Projects, Closing Fears
12. Through a Glass Darkly : The Man and the Symbol

What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? Each is an example of how an iconic company was defined by a particular moment of fame or notoriety.

These notable and fascinating accounts are as relevant today to understanding the intricacies of corporate life as they were when the events happened.

Stories about Wall Street are infused with drama and adventure and reveal the machinations and volatile nature of the world of finance. John Brooks’s insightful reportage is so full of personality and critical detail that whether he is looking at the astounding market crash of 1962, the collapse of a well-known brokerage firm, or the bold attempt by American bankers to save the British pound, one gets the sense that history really does repeat itself.

This business classic written by longtime New Yorker contributor John Brooks is an insightful and engaging look into corporate and financial life in America.