FREE - Cato's Home Study Course

[George H. Smith]

http://www.cato.org/cato-university/study_course/

Cato's Home Study Course can now be downloaded for free. I wrote most of the scripts for these recordings. Three -- The Ideas of Liberty, The Achievements of 19th Century Classical Liberalism, and The Modern Quest for Liberty -- were written especially for Cato (around 1996) and used Jeff Riggenbach as narrator. The rest of my scripts -- Paine, Jefferson, Adam Smith, the Constitution, and J.S. Mil...l -- were written for Knowledge Products during the 1980s. These latter are the original recordings, though I think JR added new introductions for the Cato versions.

I especially recommend "The Ideas of Liberty." This overview (146 minutes) is one of the best things I have ever written. It is only available here.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

A sidebar:

In my scripts on "The Modern Quest for Liberty," I included discussions of Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand. We used actors for the voices, and the woman who voiced Rand did a good job.

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

George,

I have bookmarked this.

Thank you very much.

Michael

[Mikee]

George, thanks very much. I listened to "The Austrian Case for the Free Market" first, very enjoyable. "Ideas of Liberty" next.

These ideas are so compelling, but I despair of getting anyone I care about to listen to one of these programs or read the literature. I get excited listening but when finished I feel very lonely. Truth and Reason is compelling only if you are searching for it. It occurs to me, all peoples brains don't work the same. I've heard of a genetic condition when certain parts of grammer are impossible for the people afflicted to learn. And then there's Oliver Sacks who has the inability to recognize faces. Perhaps a large portion of humanity is unable to perceive the morality of liberty and free markets.

[George H. Smith]

George, thanks very much. I listened to "The Austrian Case for the Free Market" first, very enjoyable. "Ideas of Liberty" next. These ideas are so compelling, but I despair of getting anyone I care about to listen to one of these programs or read the literature. I get excited listening but when finished I feel very lonely. Truth and Reason is compelling only if you are searching for it. It occurs to me, all peoples brains don't work the same. I've heard of a genetic condition when certain parts of grammer are impossible for the people afflicted to learn. And then there's Oliver Sacks who has the inability to recognize faces. Perhaps a large portion of humanity is unable to perceive the morality of liberty and free markets.

Thanks for your comments.

I didn't write the scripts for "The Austrian Case for the Free Market," of course, and I don't recall offhand who did. I'm not even sure where those scripts originated. They might have been taken from the KP series on the history of economic thought. The author should have been mentioned in the beginning. Do you recall who it was?

These recordings are quite advanced and were not intended for people with no prior interest in libertarian ideas.

My scripts on "The Ideas of LIberty" have an interesting history. While I was living in Long Beach c. 1993, I decided that I wanted to write two scripts that would present an overview of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of liberty. The scripts would be highly condensed and cover a lot of ground, in the hope that they might inspire some listeners, especially college students, to research and develop some of the ideas in more detail.

I knew that a project of this scope and magnitude (nearly 100 pages) would take a long time to write, so, on a lark, I wrote to Charles Koch (whom I barely knew from years earlier) and asked if he would finance me for six months. He agreed, and I completed the project in six months, but the powers-that-be at the Koch Foundation didn't care for the scripts, so I wasn't able to get the money needed to produce the tapes.

When I moved to SF in late 1994, Laissez-Faire Books agreed to produce the tapes, but the budget was so small that I couldn't afford to hire actors to read the quotations, as had been done with the KP tapes from the 1980s. So Jeff Riggenbach, who had access to a recording studio (in Oakland, as I recall), and I did the recording ourselves. I did the narration and Jeff read the quotations.

LFB marketed these tapes for a while, and Tom Palmer at Cato heard them. He liked them a lot, but correctly noted that my narration skills left something to be desired. Cato then financed a re-recording of my scripts, with Jeff as narrator and a professional actor reading the quotations. "The Ideas of Liberty" then became the lead set in Cato's Home Study Course. I wrote two more sets of scripts especially for this course (on Classical Liberalism and The Modern Quest for Liberty), and the remainder of the tapes were taken from KP material, written and produced during the 1980s.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

One of the "tapes" in the Cato Course is on Thomas Paine's Common Sense. This was the very first script that I wrote for Knowledge Products in 1985. I had not listened to this tape for over 20 years, so I listened to it last night. I was a bit nervous, thinking that my first effort at scriptwriting might not have been very good, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's a good presentation.

Listening to that tape brought back a lot of memories of the many hours that I spent in a recording studio in Nashville (Archer Productions). At that early stage we only used one local actor for all the voices, but he was remarkable. It is difficult to believe that all those voices came from one guy.

This guy (his name is mentioned at the beginning of the presentation) did amazing impersonations, so during breaks I had him read passages from Paine in the voice of John Wayne, passages from Thoreau in the voice of Paul Lynde, etc., etc. He had the entire crew rolling on the floor, and I don't think I have ever laughed so hard in my life. You haven't lived until you have heard "Paul Lynde" (the impersonation was spot-on) read serious passages from Walden. And to have passages from Common Sense read by "John Wayne," with an occasional "pilgrim" thrown in for good measure, was priceless.

Ghs

[Mikee]

George, thanks very much. I listened to "The Austrian Case for the Free Market" first, very enjoyable. "Ideas of Liberty" next. These ideas are so compelling, but I despair of getting anyone I care about to listen to one of these programs or read the literature. I get excited listening but when finished I feel very lonely. Truth and Reason is compelling only if you are searching for it. It occurs to me, all peoples brains don't work the same. I've heard of a genetic condition when certain parts of grammer are impossible for the people afflicted to learn. And then there's Oliver Sacks who has the inability to recognize faces. Perhaps a large portion of humanity is unable to perceive the morality of liberty and free markets.

Thanks for your comments.

I didn't write the scripts for "The Austrian Case for the Free Market," of course, and I don't recall offhand who did. I'm not even sure where those scripts originated. They might have been taken from the KP series on the history of economic thought. The author should have been mentioned in the beginning. Do you recall who it was?

These recordings are quite advanced and were not intended for people with no prior interest in libertarian ideas.

My scripts on "The Ideas of LIberty" have an interesting history. While I was living in Long Beach c. 1993, I decided that I wanted to write two scripts that would present an overview of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of liberty. The scripts would be highly condensed and cover a lot of ground, in the hope that they might inspire some listeners, especially college students, to research and develop some of the ideas in more detail.

I knew that a project of this scope and magnitude (nearly 100 pages) would take a long time to write, so, on a lark, I wrote to Charles Koch (whom I barely knew from years earlier) and asked if he would finance me for six months. He agreed, and I completed the project in six months, but the powers-that-be at the Koch Foundation didn't care for the scripts, so I wasn't able to get the money needed to produce the tapes.

When I moved to SF in late 1994, Laissez-Faire Books agreed to produce the tapes, but the budget was so small that I couldn't afford to hire actors to read the quotations, as had been done with the KP tapes from the 1980s. So Jeff Riggenbach, who had access to a recording studio (in Oakland, as I recall), and I did the recording ourselves. I did the narration and Jeff read the quotations.

LFB marketed these tapes for a while, and Tom Palmer at Cato heard them. He liked them a lot, but correctly noted that my narration skills left something to be desired. Cato then financed a re-recording of my scripts, with Jeff as narrator and a professional actor reading the quotations. "The Ideas of Liberty" then became the lead set in Cato's Home Study Course. I wrote two more sets of scripts especially for this course (on Classical Liberalism and The Modern Quest for Liberty), and the remainder of the tapes were taken from KP material, written and produced during the 1980s.

Ghs

"The Austrian Case for the Free Market" was written by William H. Patterson, narrated by Louis Rukeyser. Quotations were read by Dan Church, Pat Childs, Mike Edwards, Marshall Falwell, Jim Gossett, Travis Hardison, Paul Meyer and John Shurberg. Some of the spellings may be wrong because I got them off of the recording.

George: I can't believe in all these years I haven't read much of your stuff. Since following you here I've come to look forward to your contributions more and more. I heard of you and "The case against God" long ago, but I've never had a problem with"God", I dismissed the concept as unnecessary at around the age of ten and never felt I needed more persuasion. I ran across one or two of you articles in "the voluntaryist" some years back, liked them but didn't realize how much more writing you have done. Better late than never I guess. I hope you are doing well.

[George H. Smith]

While listening to some of the presentations I wrote years ago, I noticed an error of attribution on the first Adam Smith mod.

Three authors are listed: Jack High, Wendy McElroy, and myself. This is wrong. I wrong the all the material myself. The error occurred on the original packaging, which Cato must have used when Jeff re-recorded the intro, because the package copy had to be written several months before the scripts were finished.

The original plan was to have my friend, the economist Jack High, write most of the material for WN, after which Wendy and I would fill in the gaps (with Wendy acting mainly as an editor, since she didn't know anything about Adam Smith). But after Jack submitted his ms, we found we couldn't use it, so rather than attempting to fix it, I wrote a new ms (over 160 pages) from scratch and had Wendy serve as the editor. (We often switched back and forth on editorial duties with each other's scripts.)

The error was corrected in a later version of the packaging. I was listed as author, Wendy as editor.

For a picture of the later packaging, with the correct author listed by Amazon, see:

http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Nations-Giants-Political-Thought/dp/0786169869

Ghs