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From last year's secret Santa.

What is Property is a difficult book to rate. From a production standpoint this may well be the best non-fiction audiobook I've listened to. Certainly the best with footnotes. I don't know how to describe it, but it wasn't annoying. James Gilles was amazing.

As far as the work itself it was a mixed bag. P-J.P. I felt made many good points. I personally was surprised by how much a self-described anarchist quoted scripture and Church history in his argument that property is an artificial establishment of the State used to control the working class.

However he seemed to have a few complete misses in his arguments. He acted as though property is like matter, not being able to be created or destroyed. While we know the attagem"buy land they aren't making any more of it," even private property is more than land. He also acts as though all value is a a zero-sum game, completely ignoring the subjective value of goods and services that results from not everyone thinking the same things are important to them. I don't think these points necessarily disprove his theory but their absence is apparent. Maybe they weren't known in the mid-19th century?

Prodouhn is also pretty full of himself acting as though his thought experiments are truly scientific and anyone who disagree is an idiot. This issue gets worse in the second memoir were he tries to conteract his ditractors. On top of that he starts in the second going on about how the monarch needs to be the leader of the French radical Party against the bourgeoisie. I always thought anarcho-monarchisn was a joke, I'm still not convinced it's not.

I had hoped he'd get more into the history of WHY the idea that mixing one's labor with land, or occupying land, had come to be how property was determined, but not much there, lots of went that idea is bull, whith which I agree.

I was disappointed by this book. I had been looking forward to reading it since I first heard of it, but alas.

As a prison abolitionist I should know better than to think someone who calls themselves a prision reformer is going to have the trans I'm hoping they will. Even after three years in prison Kerik still comes out as a conservative patriotic Republican. He makes some really good points that might make some lawmakers think twice. Costs to the public to lock 'em up, the dangers of solitary confinement, attack on the families that did nothing to wrong, unnecessary lengths of sentences, problems getting employment after being labeled an felon, etc. But he still comes back to the need for punishment, including for terrorist suspects awaiting trial, and he several times tries to show that he, like many other white collar criminals, not as bad as these guys they lock up, though he does have soft spot for nonviolent drug offenders.

I think this one is worth skipping for most people, unless you have a right wing uncle who might have room in his heart to bleed a little bit.