Blaze Books recommendations featured in Dept. of Labor books initiative

Some weeks back we pointed out that there were a handful of books that we wholeheartedly recommended from the Department of Labor's (DOL) "Books That Shaped Work in America Initiative," along with some with which we were not so enamored. The initiative, being run in honor of the Labor Department's 100th year anniversary, reflects book recommendations contributed by various influential labor officials on titles they felt shaped work in America.

In response to our posts, a representative from the DOL reached out to Blaze Books in order to solicit our own recommendations.

We "seconded" a few of those books recommended by prior participants in the DOL survey, writing up brief endorsements of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson," and "The Federalist Papers" (as well as "The Anti-Federalist Papers").

One of our recommendations was Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." (Image Source: Department of Labor screenshot)

We made our recommendations in the following context:

"Man seeks pleasure and avoids pain. It is capitalism—the natural extension of individual liberty—that has allowed man to achieve ever-greater measures of the former with ever-diminishing amounts of the latter. Yet man has begun to take material progress for granted as if inevitable, when in fact most of history has been marked by man’s slaving away in poverty. Today the state continues to grow while the individual shrinks. My suggestions are made in this light, with the underlying belief that it is virtuous individuals working freely in voluntary harmony that allow all of society to flourish. Man’s labor is an essential part of man’s being, and to restrict his ability to work freely and prosper is to restrict not just man but society itself."

You can read our recommendations in full here.