If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen Greg Ransom’s posts below discussing what Tom Woods and Yuri Maltsev’s appearance on Glenn Beck did for Hayek exposure (watch the whole thing here).
I’m optimistic about the world we’re building for our children. The Road to Sefdom became the hottest seller on Amazon.com after Tom and Yuri appeared on Glenn Beck. FEE is hosting an Austrian seminar right now. IHS is running seminars all summer. Mises U is in less than two months. There are Mises Institutes in the US, Brazil, Sweden, and Poland (and probably more in the works).
The students who organized the “In Defense of Capitalism” conference in Copenhagen in April have put my lecture and Peter Klein’s lecture online. I got an email last week in which a graduate student in Tehran directed me to a link where he has translated my paper “The Market’s Benevolent Tendencies” into Farsi. If you like electronic copies of books to go with your paper versions, you can download Peter Klein’s book for a price of $0. You can do the same with Paul Cantor and Stephen D. Cox’s edited volume Literature and the Economics of Liberty. And with the new edition of Eugen Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future, which features a fantastic introduction by Bryan Caplan.
Henry Hazlitt has said that good ideas need to be re-learned every generation. That’s now easier than ever. I tweeted the other day that I’m optimistic because while books can be burned, digital files can’t (I like to think the author of XKCD saw that tweet; see here).
The game is changing day by day. For an inspirational look at how, check out Jeffrey Tucker’s talk “Dissident Publishing: Then and Now.”
Update: thanks to the commenters who pointed out broken links.
