So much to read and learn, and so little time. Thanks in no small measure to the energy that Ron Paul's candidacy unleashed, more people than ever are eager to cut through the propaganda and uncover the truth. But where to start? And how can you get the most out of the time you have to devote to reading and study?

I put together the resources that follow as my way of answering these questions. I've included books (many in free online versions) and articles, as well as audio and video files that are also free. For the current crisis, see especially The Bailout Reader. Take a look also at the reading list Dr. Paul includes in his book The Revolution: A Manifesto. Many of these titles also appear in the categories below: economics, sound money, foreign policy, the Constitution, and civil liberties.

Can we read our way to freedom? No, but we cannot be effective activists in the Ron Paul tradition unless we know some economics and history, and the various depredations, foreign and domestic, of the regime.

Ira Levin's gift is no longer what it once was, to judge from his recent Son of Rosemary and his Sliver a few years back. Still, we are permanently in Levin's debt. For decades he produced some of the most exciting and intelligent page-turners in the business – A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil. Like his Broadway hit, Death Trap, these were all turned into movies. Rosemary's Baby, brilliantly directed by Roman Polanski with a superb cast, was understandably omitted from the American Film Institute's recent list of the 100 greatest American films – otherwise, there might not have been room for Jaws or Dances with Wolves. However, the best work of Levin's creative period was never filmed at all. It is This Perfect Day.

The great intellectual and political movement known as liberalism has been one of the prime shapers of the modern world. As Ludwig von Mises wrote, it "changed the face of the earth," creating for the peoples who shared in it a life of freedom and abundance unexampled in previous history. Given this, the paucity of general works on the history and philosophical bases of liberalism and the mediocrity of most of the readily accessible ones is curious indeed. (This does not hold, however, for works of more limited scope. The Decline of American Liberalism, (1955) by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., for example, combines fine scholarship with a seasoned understanding of the true meaning of liberalism.)

The best known book in the field is doubtless the History of European Liberalism, by Guido de Ruggiero, originally published in 1925. Still useful in some respects, it suffers from a conceptual haziness and a lack of cutting edge perhaps attributable to the neo-idealist philosophy popular in Italy at the time, of which the author was a follower. Moreover, although himself a liberal in a very broad sense, Ruggiero had little knowledge of economics or appreciation of the functioning of the free market. His vulnerability to anticapitalist arguments may be gathered, for instance, from his treatment of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Here he repeats the common socialist interpretation of that great process as a catastrophe for the working class, in terms scarcely differing from those of Friedrich Engels.

The personal, political, and scholarly papers of Ludwig von Mises have been discovered in a formerly secret archive in Moscow. So have the papers of many of Mises's colleagues and associates during his years in Vienna, including friends and foes in academia, politics, and business.

What does this startling news --which has Misesians the world over cheering--mean? It opens enormous possibilities for deepening our understanding of the life and times of Mises, and therefore much about the intellectual history of our century. Mises's career in the U.S., which began when he was sixty years old, is documented, but without his Vienna papers, there would always have been a void in our understanding of this extraordinary man.