Eat the Rich by P.J. O'Rourke

 I don't read enough of O'Rourke. Those books of his which I have read, however, I have enjoyed, and Eat the Rich is no letdown, either. O'Rourke takes us on a journalistic journey through the wilds of Wall Street, Albania, Sweden, Russia, Tanzania, Cuba, Hong Kong and Shanghai, touring the economic landscape in his understated humorous way.

His conclusion, after all his exploration, seems to be that the worst people to put in charge of an economy...are economists. The best thing a government can do for an economy is just to get the heck out of the way, it appears.

Interesting factoids from around the globe:

Though we all think that the stock market is either all in a bear cycle or all in a bull cycle, with shares changing hands everywhere, "There are 207 billion shares registered on the Ne York Stock Exchange. In an absolute buying and selling frenzy, less than 0.6 percent of those shares changed hands. Investment usually stays invested."

In O'Rourke's dry humor "...the study of economics is divided into two fields, microeconomics and macroeconomics. Micro is the study of individual economic behavior, and macro is the study of how economies behave as a whole. That is, microeconomics concerns things that economists are specifically wrong about, while macroeconomics concerns things economists are wrong about generally."

An interesting method for teaching economics was related by nineteenth century expert Alfred Marshall,

"(1) User mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of enquiry. (2) Keep to them until you have done. (3) Translate into English (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics."

A treatise on the nature of money,

"Anything that's used to measure value, if it has value itself, is commodity money. Societies that didn't have fifty-dollar bills picked one or two commodities as proto-simoleons. The Aztecs used cocoa beans for money, North Africans used salt (hence salary), medieval Norsemen used butter and dried cod, and heir ATM machines were a mess."

On dining in a Russian restaurant,

"The next night I went to Uncle Gillie's, which had California cuisine in perfection. My chicken had not only been allowed to range free, it had been given aroma therapy and stress counseling."

and Russian business practices,

"Russia does not yet have an effective system of civil law. The only way to enforce a contract is, as it were, with a contract - and plenty of enforcers. What would be litigiousness in New York is a hail of bullets in Moscow. Instead of a society infested with lawyers, they have a society infested with hit men. Which is worse, of course, is a matter of opinion."

The money quote, wherein according to Marx's theory of Surplus Value, anytime you hire someone, you are exploiting him.

"The terrific corruption that now exists in Russia was not caused by the collapse of Marxism-Leninism. It was caused by Marx and Lenin."

Experts occasionally blame lack of education for Tanzania's woes, but Tanzanians,

"were exposed to science, math, and technology by Muslims, beginning in the eighth century. That's 800 years before anyone who could read or recite multiplication tables arrived in North America. True, Arab traders came for the purposes of stealing slaves and pillaging ivory. But the harbingers of civilization rarely arrived anywhere in order to deliver Girl Scout cookies."

On baboons,

"I wondered if this troop was us four million years ago. If so, the baboons are probably plotting revenge upon thepredators. 'Soon as we evolve, we take the natural habitat and pave its ass.'"

On Hong Kong,

"Laissez-faire isn't Tanzanian administrative sloth or Albanian popular anarchy. Quite a bit of government effort is required to create a system in which government leaves people alone."

All joking aside, O'Rourke's sum total of what is required for a person or a nation to prosper is the following six ingredients:

• Hard work
• Education
• Responsibility
• Property rights
• Rule of law
• Democratic government

A good and entertaining read, though a bit dated, being published in 1998, though my impression is that what we've seen in the last decade and a half is pretty much more of the same from these countries and areas where he traveled.

Don't Vote - It Just Encourages the Bastards by P.J. O'Rourke

Somewhere in my online travels, I ran across a mention of P.J. O'Rourke's book, and thought it sounded interesting. I've never read anything by him before, but I think I might have to make a habit of it. O'Rourke has been a journalist covering politics for many years, and his take on things in this book is savage, biting, and often spot-on.

You may need to turn off your obscenity meter while you're reading it, as it's about as irreverent as anything I've read since Rape of the A*P*E*, by Allan Sherman, about the sexual revolution and its aftermath. Politics is a dirty game, and O'Rourke doesn't seem to mind getting down and talking dirty.

You can't take all of it too seriously, as the author doesn't, and has some pithy commentare about statement by the founding fathers, such as "Tom Paine...exhorted us to 'receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.' Calling America an asylum may have been a poor choice of words, or not." He has some great sarcastic bits, like "Science is deterministic and its special needs stepsister social science is not." Special needs stepsister? Is that a politically incorrect image for you, or what?

You'll forgive me if I continue to highlight some great quotes from the book.

"Freedom of speech is important - if you have anything to say. I've checked the Internet; nobody does."

He quotes Adam Smith, in a speech, "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice." How many countries around the world can say that they've enjoyed long periods of all three? Does it make you think about the plight of third world nations a little differently. I don't know a whole lot about taxes in Somalia, but peace and justice left that place to go on world tour a long long time ago.

Speaking of irreverence, he puts a little different slant on some events from Exodus (the biblical version, not Leon Uris') when he's talking about committees. "Moses goes to a business conference with God and the next thing you know, 'the people gathered themselves together' And someone says, 'All in favor of worshipping a golden calf...'"

We've all heard our kids whine at some point about how "things aren't fair" right? O'Rourke replies to his daughter, "Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. You're smart. That's not fair. You were born in the United States of America. That's not fair. Darling, you have better get down on your knees and pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you."

O'Rourke seems to have a pretty libertarian slant on things, and he tears into politicians from both major parties. The general idea is that we, the people, have allowed the government train to run out of control for far too long, and it's going to take a massive effort to stop it from rolling right over the top of us, our rights, and our freedoms. The book bogs down a bit towards the end, as I think, like most of us, O'Rourke doesn't really know how to stop this thing, but he's hoping that working together, we all can.