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In the last two weeks I’ve been reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.  Hayek argues in this book that any form of collectivism (whether left or right) inevitably leads to a totalitarian state.  My views are mostly libertarian, so I agree with almost all of the arguments Hayek presented.

Reading through the book, however, I realized that my own values (freedom, independence, fairness) may be blinding me to weak points in Hayek’s arguments.  Was I agreeing with Hayek because his arguments were sound, or because I had already decided what I wanted to believe before opening the book?

Reading is an incredibly important skill to have. Just about any form of education will involve reading, sometimes almost exclusively. You can often make yourself an expert on an intellectual subject just by reading enough in that area. But despite the incredible importance of reading, most people are wildly inefficient at it. Like a child that never goes beyond a crawl, most people have enough reading skills to move around, but they are far from running.