On my reading list are the following:

  • Writing somewhat on poverty last week, I emailed Michael D. Tanner to see if he had any updated stats. As always, the good folks at Cato responded promptly. Then what to my wondering eyes should appear, but an email advertising a new book published just one week later. It is Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths about Global Poverty, by Deepak Lal. If it is like other Cato books, it will argue the foregone conclusion that free markets create more prosperity than megalomaniacal control freaks with stats that make one’s eyes pop out of one’s head.
  • Speaking of control, I expect Glenn Beck’s book by that name will be good, as I expect Beck will agree with me that the root of all evil is not money so much as attempting to subjugate others. The flip-side, of course, is dependency, along with the convoluted notion, “If you want something done, go get somebody else to do it.”
  • I enjoyed the excerpt from Lee Iacocca’s Where Have All the Leaders Gone that has been going around on the Internet today. It’s an old book, but the problems of a hollow economy with people believing government programs are making everybody prosperous persist. I’ve taken the liberty to excerpt and rearrange, in an attempt to get the key points into a little bit of space:

    Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the **** is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder! We’ve got a gang of tax cheating clueless leftists trying to steer our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even run a ridiculous cash-for-clunkers program without losing $26 billion of the taxpayers’ money, much less build a hybrid car. I have news for the Chicago gangsters in Congress. We didn’t elect you to turn this country into a losing European Socialist state.

    The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. We’ve lost the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Our schools are in a complete disaster because of the teachers union.

    The middle class is being squeezed to death every day. Gas prices are going to skyrocket again, and nobody in power has a lucid plan to open drilling to solve the problem. This country has the largest oil reserves in the WORLD, and we cannot drill for it because the politicians have been bought by the tree-hugging environmentalists.

    We’ve spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened. Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? While we’re fiddling in Afghanistan, Iran is completing their nuclear bombs and missiles and nobody seems to know what to do. And the liberal press is waving ‘pom-poms’ instead of asking hard questions.

    That’s not the promise of the ‘America’ my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, ‘trust me the economy is getting better.’ Everyone’s hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping the government will make it better for them.

  • The last item on the list addresses concerns about how the economy is supposed to be expanding when production is contracting. Not too long ago, the mention of purchasing bad debt or derivatives would have been considered crazy talk. A couple years ago, the derivatives market was twenty times the size of the global economy. Who can survive on a desert island by exchanging electronic notes? Just as Greece was walking on air after its economy passed the dropoff but before the Socialists published a more truthful assessment of the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio – America is feeling fine because of all the lies, spin, manipulated statistics, glossy coverups, and who knows what-all passed off to shareholders in annual reports. The last but not least read is a US Senate report entitled, “JP Morgan Chase Whale Trades: A Case History of Derivatives Risks and Abuses.” A summary of the findings published by the Motley Fool is ghastly. It leaves the reader wondering how much of the economy is bogus boardroom gaming and if an even greater deception machine wasn’t at work at whatever organization instigated the JP Morgan Chase investigation.