While George Orwell wrote magnificently against totalitarianism, his attempt to defend socialism in The Road to Wigan Pier stumbled badly.

Original Article: "Review: Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier"

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is a book for which I kept hearing recommendations. I was told that it contained biting criticisms of socialism and was a valuable source of antiauthoritarian thought.
What I found, instead, was a snobbish text that ineffectually denounces snobbery, an erudite-sounding text that lacks any philosophical or economic depth, and a persistent veil of ignorance over and presumption in favor of state intervention for any of the problems described, as well as the shortsighted implication that the solution is simply more of the same.
The book was first published in 1937, which is long after the Soviets abandoned war communism in 1921, after the end of the New Economic Policy in 1928, and even after the state-engineered Ukraine famine

Ludwig von Mises’s book The Theory of Money and Credit is a masterwork of monetary theory. Despite being written in the early twentieth century, its arguments and conclusions are still valid and interesting today. Mises describes five characteristics that are vital to the function of money: marketability, durability, fungibility, trustworthiness, and convenience.
The history of money is straightforward. Markets developed and expanded as long as the private sector controlled the money supply. A decline followed once the state took hold of the monetary system. This arc can be illustrated by looking at a few broad examples of historical money.
Barter produces serious bottlenecks. The double coincidence of wants is a high barrier to trade. Primitive societies