Reddit reviews The Law

Zacks - An Underground Education : The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human Knowledge

Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bastiat - The Law

> I'm gonna read that book just to get a better idea of what exactly I'm advocating for.

LOL, not my intention to spread the ideas I disagree with. But it sounded like a thesis you would.

> Do we know this? I don't think we do

I think the evidence suggests this. And it makes sense to me that the lives of people who highly value self-reliance are going to generally be far better than those who don't share that value and who are perfectly content to be on the dole.

At the risk of going down a completely different rabbit trail my view is actually a little more complex since I DO think interdependence in the context of family and community is important and of great value. I'm all for Edmund Burke "little platoons" of family, church and local neighborhood. It is large impersonal institutions that reliably fail, they cannot know and love the individual, they cannot make the moral judgments that a loving parent, or an increasingly impatient neighbor might make when presented with yet another plea for next month's rent. I very much agree with the title of Hillary Clinton's book "It takes a village" I don't think she understood the full meaning of the proverb... since she turned it around to mean: "It take a large impersonal bureaucracy" which is NOT the same thing at all.

> If you have any other reading suggestions then I'll take a look. I don't want to become massively entrenched in my views

None of these are necessarily related to your discussion though they might touch on some similar topics.

I recently read Haidt's The Righteous Mind not actually a conservative book but one which is really interesting in terms of figuring out why liberals and conservatives talk past each other.

And there's always the conservative classics that you'll always get when people ask. A few personal favorites: Kirke's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom though technically he'd insist on calling himself as a "liberal" (By which he means a classical 19th century liberal) I liked Bastiate's The Law if you want an actual 19th century liberal. The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis

Those last two are both relatively quick and easy reads.

And of course Sowell has written extensively on exactly this subject. I think Race and Economics was his first book so it may be a bit dated now.

Sadly I've not read that one nor his other books that seem most directly related to our discussion. Personally I've only read his Basic Economics and I read Race and Culture years ago which is somewhat related but about the impact of race, ethnicity and culture in an international setting. His ideas about the primacy of cultural capital in explaining group differences in economic capital are consistent but he's applying those concepts internationally in how various cultural groups have done economically as majorities, as minorities, migrants, conquers or conquered etc. it's been a while but I remembered more about the overseas Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia than about blacks in America.

The Law by Frederic Bastiat. Published in 1850 but still very relevant today.

Bastiat also wrote Parable of the Broken Window and The Candlemaker's Petition.