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A comment on 1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell.

Re:1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell by mindcrime on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @03:12PM (#7097975)
I read that book my senior year in high-school, and to this day I will cite it as one of the - if not THE - most influential books I've ever read. I know Orwell was no libertarian, but what I took from the book (probably influenced by a genetic proclivity towards rebellion and anti-authoritarian thinking) was a tremendous mistrust of government... which I suspect was a strong influence on my eventually settling into a libertarian worldview.

Some people say that Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn't written to be a warning, and maybe it wasn't - but I have a hard time seeing how anybody could read it and not discover something of a warning inside. And I think that's even more true given the various revelations over the past few years, vis-a-vis surveillance and diminishing civil liberties.

I encourage anybody who hasn't read Nineteen Eighty-Four to go read it immediately. If you aren't either angry has hell, or sad as hell, or both, at the end, you're a rare breed.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

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Re:1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell by cma on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @04:26PM (#7098523)
Left-libertarian, or royal-libertarian?

http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html

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Re:1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell by mindcrime on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @05:48PM (#7099168)
Meh... I don't much care for labels, and leaving it at "libertarian" is probably specific enough. But if you really care, I associate a lot with the "voluntaryist" and/or "anarcho-capitalist" schools of thought. My beliefs about the ownership of land are in a state of flux and I'm not actually convinced there is any truly objective way to settle that issue.
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Re:1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell by ArkyBeagle on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @08:54PM (#7100175)
Look up Henry George, specifically "Progress and Poverty."

His land taxation regime is to say the least controversial, but it's still compelling and it's something. It's also considered responsible for much of the rapid progress out of medievalism in the Far East late in the 19th/early in the 20th Century. Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan all had periods of very rapid industrialization under land taxes.

No less than William F. Buckley referenced Henry George more than once.

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