I’ve been reading through a small stack of recent collectivist and statist books. (I won’t mention them by name until I’ve published my reviews or given my comments on them.) What’s depressing is not that there are a lot of them (duh), but that they only cite each other. People with that mind set rarely ever read anything challenging to them. In one book, which is an attack on libertarianism, only one libertarian book is cited. (Guess…..ok, it’s Robert Nozick’s brilliant, suggestive, playful work Anarchy, State, and Utopia, one chapter of which the author knows he or she has to read, but which is then treated as the only defense of the free market and critique of redistributionism ever written.) The pattern is actually quite consistent. Read one chapter of Nozick and you’ve read all there is to be said in defense of limited government. And find one flaw or problem in that one chapter (and Nozick points them out for you, anyway), and you’ve refuted it and, by a remarkable logical leap, you’ve justified socialism or welfare statism or nationalism or whatever.
