With an introduction reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels, I was introduced to an absurd little island yesterday:
Welcome to another exciting adventure of Jonathan Gullible. As you may recall, we last left Jonathan Gullible on a remote Pacific Island after his boat was blown far off course by a terrific storm…
Eager to learn about the inhabitants of this island, Jonathan questions the natives about their seemingly bizarre customs. But are they so bizarre?
When the tortoise challenges the hare to a little competition to see who can gain the most customers in a week, it seems like an easy win for the energetic, efficient and friendly hare. The tortoise wins, but not because the hare decides to sleep on the job. On the contrary, the hare does double duty and reports to the court house to find that the tortoise has won by delivering only one letter.
Well, everyone knows that the letter was from the Council of Lords, granting the tortoise a legal monopoly over the delivery of all letters. So you see, the tortoise won all the customers by official decree.
Check out this and other exciting adventures from the author of The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible, A Free Market Odyssey, a book which Milton Friedman praised saying,
It certainly presents basic economic principles in a very simple and intelligible form. It is an imaginative and very useful piece of work.
Update: These are obviously libertarian. While I am libertarian-leaning, I disagree with libertarians on a few issues. A couple of these issues are represented in these radio shorts so you might want to listen to them before sharing them with your children (drugs and pornography). I generally assume people would, but then I have started a video or sound file on a site before and found myself quickly turning off the sound because children walked in!
Jonathan Gullible
Principled Discovery is a place to stop and discuss news and information related to faith, family and particularly education. Pour yourself a cup of tea and join the conversation! 
Dana,
You just helped me find out about the origins of that video I had posted. I was looking up the online version of that book and found this.
The most important part of the book is locked in the Epilogue, where Schoolland summarizes in very succinct terms the very foundation for all free-market and human liberty philosophies. Late Canadian animator Kerry “Lux Lucre” Pearson took the words from the end of Jonathan Gullible and turned them into a short 10-minute flash animation, made available online. The animation, “The Philosophy of Liberty“, was such a success as a primer for liberty-based ideas that it’s been promoted as a basic standard introduction to the entire Libertarian/free-market movement.
ps, I just now found another reason to dislike blogger comments - why would a blockquote tag be unacceptable?
Yes, I think I actually got the website off the credits of the video. I’m curious about the book. It sounds like an interesting read.
Can’t answer questions about blogger or its formatting options. Sorry about that. : )
I’ve used this book with my kids. They chuckled their way through some of the stories and learned some valuable lessons.
I thought it sounded like an interesting book to use with children. I may look into it when mine are a little older. Right now, they don’t quite understand the analogy.