For many years I’ve kept a personal blog. Nothing too big or grand. There I discuss mostly politics and history. From time to time I get e-mails from parents asking for reading lists. What books will best impart an understanding of freedom? Like many parents, they’re unsatisfied with the low-thinking busywork their children get assigned. They’re even less satisfied with the flagrantly statist and collectivist slant of their course material.

What these parents are looking for is something that will inoculate their children from the pernicious ideas that circulate in the public school system. While most of the people I’ve dealt with are devout Christians, a very large number are entirely secular. All of them are thoughtful parents who are terrified of raising unskilled, unemployable children who will whittle away their lives playing revolutionary.

It is the irony of the modern world that the most successful socio-economic system in history, Anglosphere-style capitalism, is the least defended. The times have been worse. Scroll back to the 1930s when, with the exception of men like Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, there were very few serious voices raised in the defense of economic liberty. Today much of the English-speaking world boasts a network for think tanks, endowed chairs, and prominent commentators. Without them we would be in a far worse position than we are.