Nowhere to hide

Book reviews for the ages

It seems that some things on the Internet ARE true

On May 22, 2021 in these pages, I showed my two readers how to compute the time it would take for the price of eggs - then $2 a dozen - to reach $8. Bought a dozen eggs lately? I also asked my readers to mark their calendars so they could calculate how long until the price of eggs reaches $20. It was then and is today a good idea to know how to do that.

More Light reading

Here is a book I need not read: David Stockman’s latest: How to Cut $2 Trillion: A Blueprint From Ronald Reagan’s Budget Cutter To Musk, Ramaswamy And The DOGE TEAM. Not because I think it is a bad book, but because I already know the ending. I read Stockman’s other book on the same subject with a different name but the same outcome, The Triumph of Politics, in 1984. Nothing has changed in 40 years.

I also read Isabel Paterson’s 1943 book The God of the Machine, in which she quoted John Maynard Keynes:

"Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction."

I have also read Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How not to Fight Inflation, which is based on Henry Hazlitt’s 1949 article in Newsweek. Everyone should read it. The PDF is available free at this link. How many will?

I am now reading Ray Dalio’s latest Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail. More of the same. 600 pages of history that proves the maxim “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” applies equally to societies as it does to families.

People never learn

These books all tell the same story. The only things that change are the location and the time. The outcome is never different. They are the same message about adults exhibiting the mentality of teenagers with car keys: It can’t happen to me. Well, it can. If you stop working and saving and replace those activities with indolence, improvidence, profligacy and slothfulness, you will forfeit your legacy. End of story.

We are still not safe

You thought November delivered respite. Not so. The crowd we got just has a different route to the same result: Printing ENORMOUS amounts of worthless paper money. To think the outcome will be different this time is, at best, fanciful.

The reason all these scenarios have the same ending is that there is no other ending available. Human frailty added to the math of compound interest is unforgiving. AND, please DO NOT believe cost of living stats fed to you by the same people who brought you COVID. Look here instead for the truth.

More from Isabel in 1943:

If a financial system is unsound, it can only be so by the possibility of over-extension of credit, and paper currency. A true remedy could only consist of limiting such facilities. Government "guarantees" merely put the property of prudent men at the disposal of speculators in case of loss.

And:

“…when a dictatorship gains power, it is by various groups conceding the power piecemeal, not perceiving what it must add up to in the end. Men enslave themselves, forging the chains link by link, usually by demanding protection as a group. When business men ask for government credit, they surrender control of their business. When labor asks for enforced ‘collective bargaining’ it has yielded its own freedom. When racial groups are recognized in law, they can be discriminated against by law.“

There is a sh*t load of inflation ahead.

Nobody can say we were not warned.