Archive | March 15, 2008

Garden of Forking Spooners

The Mises Institute has re-released a 1972 Rothbard-edited collection of Spooner’s writings titled Let’s Abolish Government. So how does it compare with George Smith’s 1992 collection The Lysander Spooner Reader (now sadly out of print)?

Apart from the Rothbard collection’s containing facsimiles of the originals (greater guarantee of accuracy, but also harder to read), the main difference is in contents – overlapping but distinct:

Lysander Spooner Reader Let’s Abolish Government
Tucker’s Obituary for Spooner  
Natural Law  
Vices Are Not Crimes  
Essay on the Trial by Jury Essay on the Trial by Jury
No Treason No. I  
No Treason No. II  
No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority
Letter to Thomas F. Bayard Letter to Thomas F. Bayard
  Letter to Grover Cleveland
  Essay by James J. Martin

So the only piece that Let’s Abolish Government has that the Reader doesn’t have (apart from the Martin essay) is the Letter to Grover Cleveland. On the other hand, the latter is arguably Spooner’s principal manifesto, providing an overview of his whole outlook. 


Rand Together

Interesting article today from Justin Raimondo on his youthful meeting with Ayn Rand. (Conical hat tip to LRC.) I must Randgeekily (not to be confused with Radgeekily) point out, however, that he has confused We the Living’s Andrei Taganov with Leo Kovalensky, and The Fountainhead’s Cortland Homes with the Stoddard Home for Subnormal Children.

(P.S. – Raimondo notes that in his teenage years his “own sense of diplomacy, and basic human interaction, was somewhat retarded as a result” of Rand’s influence. Thank goodness he got over the diplomacy thing!)


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