ANerdList

Braindead, Taylorist slop. Blame the teachers, not the hierarchy; claim the only answer is to privatize everything. The usual right-libertarian gallop. The fact that it was written by a notorious racist is almost beside the point--the positions in this book are already pretty worthy of ridicule on their own merits.

Claiming the purpose of your book is to debunk economic "myths" while actually smuggling in a whole slew of myths of your own is a pretty damn impressive psyop. Gotta hand it to Hazlitt for that approach.

Like most Austrian-based stuff, there's enough truth sprinkled among the misrepresentations to make the whole thing sound reasonable to laypeople. That's the point of the con, after all--make the ignorant feel smart without really challenging their hegemonic narratives in any fundamental way. This book is one of the popular examples of that. It distills Mises (i.e. cuts the blatant racism, classism, and antisemitism out), rephrases Bastiat (i.e. hides his misrepresentations of socialist frameworks more successfully), and packages it all in an easily digestible, thin volume that appeals.

The actual substance of the book is pretty unoriginal, regurgitating economic ideas that were already outdated in the 1940s. But that makes it no different than any other purely Austrian School book that has come out over the past century. No theory. No praxis. No new ideas. Just the same hypothetical stories and straw man opponents you come to expect from this dreck.

If by "libertarian," Murray means "right winger who tolerates minorities for now until we reach the endgame," then sure, this is an authoritative book on that. If by "libertarian,' he actually means the leftist market anarchists of old who coined the term and wrote scads of important literature on what actual resistance to the state looks like, then "Dr." Murray does a disservice to anyone who might be genuinely interested in the movement.

In case I'm still being too vague: this book is hot garbage. Intellectual rot. It is one of the handful of popular books in the late '90s and early 2000s that collectively brainwashed a generation of young angry men into Paulites and goldbugs. As such, What It Means to Be a Libertarian serves as a demonstrable net negative on the thinking world. We are collectively dumber because of its existence and popularity.

Heinous propaganda. Theocratic historical revisionism designed to make everyone but a select few enslaved by their own government. The political vision currently winning in the U.S. Many reasons to detest this book.