Whatever Happened to Justice?

Another great book from Richard Maybury, this one deals with the history and practice of the Common Law. He reviews how judges of old felt that the Higher Law existed independently and eternally and their job was to discover it. He talks about how law was slowly evolved, versus “political law” which is the decree of government and changes from day-to-day. The book is filled with great quotes from the Founding Fathers and other luminaries.

I’ll keep this review short and just say that the book is fascinating, it’s a part of history that you almost never hear about and it really shows how wise our ancestors were. If you are interested at all in society and justice you really should read this book.

 

Economics in One Lesson

I’ve heard about this book for a long time, and I finally got around to reading it.  I was not disappointed!

The author starts with Bastiat’s observation – that you must consider that which is seen and that which is unseen, when you make an observation about economics.  Much of economic policy is about moving money around, taking it from one group and giving it to another, and then looking at the latter group and saying “see how much better off they are!” And that’s true. But you need to balance the equation by seeing how much worse off the former group is. And the sum tells you whether you’ve made society as a whole poorer or richer.

Hazlitt’s book first appeared in 1946, but it sounds like it was written today. He tackles the ideas that we can tax ourselves into prosperity, that labor-saving machinery and advanced manufacturing techniques make us poor, and that the government needs to stabilize the market, among other things. In other words, he demolishes almost every dumb thing that politicians and journalists believe in. Read this so you can laugh at your TV.

Every politician should be required to read this before they take office!

Hormegeddon

I really enjoyed this book.  It’s easy to read and entertaining, yet it really makes you think about the way our society is arranged.

The central concept in the book revolves around “negative marginal utility.” Bonner explains it like this: if you are starting to learn French, and you spend a minute and learn “Bon jour”, you have increased your vocabulary from 0 to 1 – an infinite amount!  If you spend another minute and learn “Je m’appelle Bill”, you have doubled your vocabulary: 100% increase!  If you keep doing this for, say, a year, when you do one more minute of study, the gain is very small, maybe 0.1%.  The “marginal utility” (how much extra benefit you get) of an extra minute of study is declining.

Bonner’s thesis is that for many activities, marginal utility can actually go negative – what used to help now can hurt.  Take eating: if you are on the verge of starvation, a mouthful of food could save your life.  Getting good, complete nutrition could add years to your life. But pigging out on 5000 calories a day will likely kill you very quickly – the marginal utility of the extra food is definitely negative!

I’ll reproduce Bonner’s recipe for Hormegeddon (negative marginal utility pushed so far it blows up):

1. It is the result of rational thinking
2. It is the result of large-scale planning, usually backed by the police power of goverment.
3. The feedback loop is twisted.  Those who make the mistakes are isolated from the pain.
4. It creates its own support.  Rather than self-limiting, public policy disasters are self-perpetuating.

He then goes through several examples: economics, government, war, healthcare, and demonstrates declining or negative marginal utility.  (Government, for example, dpends 1610X more money per capita, and has 11,000 times more debt per capita, than a century ago – and still growing!) For the example of war, he uses Hitler’s Germany, where unemployment went negative and GDP was soaring – the only problem was the people were starving and eventually the entire economy collapsed.  Hormegeddon.

Maybe a few quotes of his will illuminate it more. After discussing what a disaster the Iraq war was, in terms of money and lives, as well as not coming close to achieving its objectives, he writes:

And where were the intellectuals who pushed the [Iraq] war? Were there no gallows? How come they walked around and still made TV appearances?

They claimed US troops would be greeted as liberators. They claimed the war would pay for itself with Iraqi oil. Thomas L. Friedman said an invasion of Iraq would be one of the great revolutionizing events of history.  The American GIs weren’t really fighting men, they were ‘nuturing’ a great new democracy. Surely there is some corner of Hell, dark and hot, reserved for these miscreants.

One of the phenomena that he notes is that these bad, hormegeddonistic policies usually attract “zombies” – people who benefit (draw a salary) from the program, but actually contribute nothing to the wealth of the nation.

How much of the world’s trouble is caused by guys with hammers or wrenches in their hands?  How many bakers cause depressions? How many masons are mass-murderers? How many steelworkers or cabinetmakers or deliverymen cause mass starvation?

The common workingman may be a bumbler and a fool, but he is rarely responsible for anyone’s troubles but his own.

They guy who causes trouble is the fellow in a suit. …

In all, this book is a great read and offers a very interesting, and seldom-heard, perspective on our society and the source of our troubles.  It’s very much worth reading!

That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen

Bastiat has become one of my all-time favorite authors.  Writing from early 19th-century France, his words still ring so true.  This, book like his masterwork The Law, is very short, less than 50 pages. So it’s very easy to read.  This one is a bit less accessible than the Law, because the English translation feels a little older and Bastiat refers to several contemporary events and personalities.  But it’s still a great read.

This set of essays contains the great fallacy of the broken window.  The story goes that a fellow ends up with a broken window, and has to pay to have it fixed.  This “stimulates the economy”, because it provides jobs for the glassmakers, and for the carpenter that install is.  So this is a great thing.

That is what is seen.  What is not seen is what might have been.  Had the window not broken, the fellow might have bought some new shoes with that money, thus providing jobs for shoemakers and leather tanners.  The “stimulation of the economy” is the same level as with fixing the window.  However, in this scenario, our lucky protagonist ends up with a window and a nice pair of shoes.  Obviously, he is better off in this scenario. And since “society” got the same stimulus from his spending (assuming there that the prices were the same), then society as a whole is better off not breaking the window.

Here in 21st-century America, almost 200 years after Bastiat wrote, economic “journalists” still don’t understand this simple argument.  We just experienced Hurricane Harvey in Texas, and they tell us with a straight face that it will “stimulate the economy”.  Please send them a copy of Bastiat next time you hear that.

Destruction of capital is never, ever, ever good for society.  In fact the wealth of the entire civilization is entirely bound up in how much capital they have saved. If you don’t get it, start reading Austrian economics!

 

 

The Creature From Jekyll Island

I started this book with great trepidation – it’s almost 600 pages!  But it actually is a very quick read.  And, as advertised, for a book that is about banking and government monetary policy, it really is a entertaining read.  You won’t be bored.

The author covers how the Federal Reserve was created.  At the turn of the 20th century, most of the country’s wealth was concentrated in NY banks.  Financial panics were a recurring theme.  This annoyed the citizens. So the idea to create a central bank was, for the third time in American history, put forth. Only the people who set it up were Wall Street bankers! It turns out that Wall Street was starting to lose business big-time to small and regional banks out of their control. The Federal Reserve act was intended to preserve New York’s stranglehold on the nation’s money supply, which it did.  Ten years later an even larger percentage of the country’s wealth was held by Wall Street.  The author tracks down exactly how the whole thing went down.  It’s a fascinating whodunit.

If the book stopped there, it would be fun.  But it goes on to give a brilliant explanation of what money is, and what the Fed does to our money.  It’s a longer version of what you can read about in this book.  This is something that every citizen should read, because the Fed is used to take some of your money, every day. It’s a way for government to fund itself without raising taxes, which might be unpopular.  You can read my feeble attempt to explain the process here.

What was amazing to me was that all of our money in modern America is backed by debt. If everyone paid all their debts back, there would be no money left!  A sobering thought.  It gets worse – since almost all the money in circulation is created by Wall Street banks as debt, that means that every dollar in existance is paying a stream of income (the interest on its originating debt) to Wall Street.  The banks collect a permanent rent on all the money you use.  No wonder they can pay themselves such big bonuses.

There are some great quotes in the book.  For example, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

It is a wise rule never to borrow a dollar without laying a tax at the same instant for paying the interest annually and the principal within a given term. … We shall consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves. … The earth belongs to the living, not the dead. …We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right to … bind themselves, but not the succeeding generation….

The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating. – Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson always seems to get it right.  He also said “A private central bank issuing public currency is a greater menace to the liberties of the people than a standing army.”  Ha!  We got both!

The author also exposes a lot of conspiracies, and postulates a lot of others.  You may or may not agree with him when he spots a possible conspiracy, but he seems to have all of his facts documented and correct (I have heard that in 20 years, not one fact in the book has been successfully challenged).

If you are interested in how the Fed works, and how Wall Street chokes the life out of you, this is a must read.

 

The State in the Third Millenium

This book is a treatise on government by Prince Hans-Adam II, the Reigning Prince of Liechtenstein.  That alone makes it interesting.

Prince Hans-Adam’s family has been a monarchy for centuries.  From a small age, dinner conversation has been political theory and history.  He’s been a businessman, monarch, student, and even worked as an intern in a US Senator’s office! He is overall a student of different forms of government, and offers here what he thinks the state needs to become in order for mankind to live peacefully in the third millenium.

Two mantras appear over and over: that the business of the state is “maintaining the rule of law, and foreign policy”; and that the state must become “a well-managed and solid service company run for the benefit of the people”.  He says “the state has to become a service company facing peaceful competition, and not a monopoly giving the ‘customer’ only the alternatives of bad service at the highest price or emigrating.”  He recommends that the central government be as small as possible, and that as many functions as possible be pushed to local communities.  And anything that can be done by the private sector (like the post office) should be divested (FedEx rather than USPS).

It is in this spirit that the 2003 revision of Liechtenstein’s constitution granted every community in the country the right of secession.  If the government gets too intrusive or violent, each village can vote to leave the country.  The ultimate check on Power.

The Price has one really intruiging line of thought that I’ve not seen elsewhere.  He discusses monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy as forms of government, and recommends a combination of all three as the most stable form.  At the end of the book he presents a template constitution for such a third-millenium state.  And he backs up his recommendations with history, philosophy, sociology, and more.  He really is a kind of old-world scholar.

While America’s rulers are trying to figure out how to spy on its citizens even more, in order to tighten the noose, or how to extract more wealth from the citizens, The Prince really appears to be concerned about building a humane and stable society, even if it costs him money and power.  What a nice change!

Note that Prince Hans-Adam says you can skip chapters 2-9 and go straight to chapter 10 if you are not interested in a history lesson.  I would still recommend chapter 9, but for the most part you won’t miss much if you skip chapters 2-8, except for a demonstration of the Prince’s command of the history of government throughout time.  However, if you like history, it’s a great exposition.

This book is even-handed and very learned in tone. The Prince calls no one a Nazi or a facist, and he doesn’t scream or foam at the mouth.

That’s why I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in America to read it.

Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?

Wow.  Wow wow wow.

This book is a work of genius: the author explains the business cycle, and the origin of inflation, so simply and logically.  So many people have explained this, or tried to, but I’ve never seen anything this brilliantly clear.

The book is written as a series of letters from an economist to his nephew/niece Chris.  Each letter is short, sweet, and incredibly easy to understand.  He explains inflation, the boom/bust cycle, the wage/price spiral, and many other things that you hear on the news. Even a middle-school student would have no problem understanding the concepts in this book.

And the book is chock-full of extra charts, statistics, explanations, references, etc., so that if you want to continue on learning it’s easy.

After you read this book, you’ll realize that what you hear on CNN is complete and utter nonsense (you probably suspected that already) and that the newscasters really don’t have the foggiest idea of what they are talking about.

The author has written a series of books; I might have to buy them all.

In Order To Live

Yeonmi Park is an extraordinary person telling an extraordinary story.  She was born and raised in North Korea and eventually escaped to the West.  You may have seen her video on You Tube.  If you need a good cry, watch it.

Read her story. And then tell me about the “problems” you have in the US.

The Law

Written in 1850, this incredible book discusses the proper role of the law, and how it has been perverted.  In fact, the first line is “The law perverted!”

Bastiat was a French economist in the 19th century, but the book speaks clearly to modern times.  He starts from the basic natural rights (basically life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but Bastiat is a little more concrete), and determines that the proper role of law is to protect our life, our liberty, our property from those who would take it from us.  Duh, you might say.

Then he goes on to show how politics and goverments pervert the law to favor one set of people over another, how the law becomes the mechanism for taking the life, liberty and property of innocent people.

He makes a great point that if the law had stuck to its basic responsibility, it would not be a source of much excitement. There are no big arguments about whether theft should be legalized, or murder.  Everyone “knows” these things are wrong (heck, even the Ten Commandments, from millenia ago, have the same rules).  So if that’s all the law does, what is there to fight over?  But once the law starts favoring one group over another, it sets the people against each other, everyone either trying to take someone else’s stuff or trying to keep their own stuff from being taken. Almost all social strife can be traced back to this.

This book, a mere 53 pages, was an exhilarating read for me. I’ve heard of Bastiat before, and I knew of his wit and intelligence, but this book is so logically argued and beautifully written (ok, except for the part about the old books).  I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone.  It is a Red Pill for the modern age.

Anatomy of the State

Rothbard’s classic about the state is mandatory reading for anyone who muses over political philosophy.  Here, Rothbard reviews the history of the state, and what the state is and isn’t.

Human beings need stuff to survive (food, clothing, shelter) and to enjoy life (phones, laptops, Air Jordans, etc.).  There are two ways to get stuff: through the economic means (meaning, produce it yourself, or trade what you produce with someone else who makes what you want), and the policitical means (meaning, take what you want from someone else forcefully).

The state is “the organization of the political means.”  The state is the only entity in society that takes what it wants coercively from others, and unilaterally determines it’s own income.

This book is a kind of “red pill”.  Rothbard, in his clear, simple, and logically forceful ways, demonstrates that the emperor indeed has no clothes.

If you think at all about the nature of government, how much obedience we owe, what kind of government is best, where did governments come from, etc., you owe it to yourself to read this 55-page book (pamplet, really).  The way you think about the public sphere will never be the same.