Ten Holiday Gift Book Suggestions
By P.J. O'Rourke
'Tis the season to be shopping! There's Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Mawlid (the birthday of the prophet Muhammad), and for Seinfeld fans, Festivus. No matter who you are, you're on the hook for a gift for someone this time of year.
The best presents are books. Of course, I'm prejudiced – I write them. But even putting aside the hope of personal gain from holiday sales, books are excellent gifts. They're easy to wrap. They cost a lot less than a Porsche Panamera. And I've never seen a book that was as ugly as the matching set of necktie, hankie, and socks decorated with glow-in-the-dark reindeer that my kids usually pitch in to buy me.
I have three children to shop for: two daughters (19 and 16) and a son (12). You probably have some children to shop for yourself – kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews.
I want to give the children on my list books about the blessings of individual liberty, the duties of personal responsibility, and the fact that private property is the foundation of human freedom. They should know there's nothing "greedy," "unfair," or "wrong" about success and the hard work that creates it.
(As opposed to the junk they're assigned to read in school, which is – as far as I can tell – mostly about individual victimhood, collective social and governmental responsibility, and the idea that private property is a form of theft that causes climate change.)
But I'm not going to get very far unless I give the kids books they will enjoy. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith doesn't fill the bill, even though it would make for a nice big package under the Christmas tree.
Then, I got a clue in a text I just received from the 19-year-old...
I love this paperback I'm reading 'cause I got bored with my homework and it was laying around in the dorm lounge and it's called The Fountainhead by somebody named Ayn Rand and have you ever heard of her?
As my daughter would say, "Well, duh."
The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
Personally, I find Ayn Rand somewhat heavy going. She tends to over-argue social, economic, and political ideas I already understand. But I'm not 19. What a perfect book for a youngster during her freshman year in the boring groupthink liberal-quibble, dull, squishy world of academia.
The Fountainhead is wildly romantic. Individualist architectural genius Howard Roark would rather pull the world down around his head than submit to the diktat of collectivist mediocrity.
In fact, given the fiery romance between Roark and Dominique Francon, The Fountainhead is even a bit of a bodice-ripper. But what really gets torn to pieces is communitarian socialized soft-headedness of the very kind my daughter is being exposed to at school.
She's also going to love Atlas Shrugged. It's a little longwinded, but it has what's probably the best plot premise ever – the geniuses of capitalist creativity all go on strike.
Twenty-five years ago, my wife and I took the Trans-Siberian Railroad across the former Soviet Union. My wife had always been conservative. But until then, she hadn't been particularly interested in economics or politics. She took Atlas Shrugged along to read on the trip. And she kept glancing up from the book, looking out the window, and saying, "So that's what happened to this country!"
For Christmas, my 19-year-old daughter is getting: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.
My 16-year-old daughter prefers fantasy to romance. Here's a good one:
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain
The manager of a New England factory, with all his mechanical and entrepreneurial skills, time travels to the Middle Ages, where ignorance, superstition, and a violent aristocracy rule. Also, everything turns out to be filthy dirty back then. The Connecticut Yankee shows the Knights of the Round Table a thing or two.
At high school, my daughter hears about how the world today is full of injustice, prejudice, poverty, and pollution, and is about to be full of even worse stuff because sea levels are rising. It's probably hard for her to believe in progress.
Twain reminds his readers how much the world owes to free enterprise, ingenuity, reason, scientific inquiry, and all the other wonderful things that have happened since people escaped serfdom and slavery and became self-actuated and self-interested individuals.
Twain's fantasy makes progress a reality.
My son is more of a realist than his sisters. So I'm giving him a realistic adventure:
Captains Courageous, by Rudyard Kipling
A spoiled young brat about my son's age, scion of a railroad magnate, is out on the fantail of a luxury liner puffing on an illicit cigar. He gets dizzy and sick, falls overboard, and is rescued by a fishing boat.
The fishermen couldn't care less who the brat's father is. They have fishing to do. And they won't be back to port for months. If the brat wants a bunk and three meals a day, he'd better learn how to fish.
Capitalism is a coin with two sides. The brat knew about "heads" (capital). Now he learns about "tails" (labor).
In the end, the successful dad rewards the fishing boat crew for saving his son. And the son is rewarded with an education in the kind of hard work that made his dad a success.
I'm not saying my own son is a spoiled brat. But after he reads Captains Courageous, if he does act like a spoiled brat, I can tell him, "Go Fish."
Now for the adults on your holiday gift list...
(By the way, I've Googled to make sure that the books, above and below, are all available to be shipped before December 25. They're on sale in a variety of editions, new and used. You can get inexpensive dog-eared, well-thumbed paperbacks if you're feeling like Scrooge. Or if your kid really is a spoiled brat, you can score an 1897 first edition of Captains Courageous for $1,000 – still cheaper than a Porsche Panamera.)
The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer
Speaking of hard work, America once had a longshoreman philosopher, a Socrates of the docks. Eric Hoffer had no formal education, but he had a brain. He used his brain to promote the dignity and the sanctity of the individual.
Hoffer opposed every kind of ideology that attempts to crush the individual – from the hobnailed boots of fascism to the floppy sandals of the 1960s New Left.
Hoffer's most important work was his analysis of anti-individualistic mass movements and the kind of people who are drawn to them, The True Believer, published in 1951.
There was entirely too much true believing going around during this election cycle – coming from both the political left and right.
Open The True Believer almost at random, and you'll find something that is as true in 2016 as it was when Hoffer wrote it 65 years ago. One of my favorites...
A man is more likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other peoples' business.
One person who minded his own business was the French essayist Frederic Bastiat. Bastiat's business was to make fun of economic idiocy.
Economic Sophisms, by Frederic Bastiat
A couple hundred years ago, people didn't understand economics very well... a couple of hundred years later, they still don't. Furthermore, the way people don't understand economics is the same as it was in Bastiat's time.
Then, as now, politicians fretted about the balance of trade. Bastiat had a suggestion for vastly increasing France's balance of trade: "It suffices merely to pass its products through the customhouse, and then throw them into the sea." France, having nothing left to trade, would have zero imports while its exports would be great as its whole GDP.
My favorite Bastiat satire is a petition to the government to blot out the sun...
From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, Candlesticks, Street Lamps...
To the Honorable members of the Chamber of Deputies.
Gentlemen: We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price...
Bastiat's 20th-century disciple was financial journalist Henry Hazlitt.
Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt
Hazlitt's "one lesson" is that economics is the only science that suffers from the special pleading of the subjects that it investigates.
Being an economist is like being a botanist getting trolled on angry blog postings by lichen. Or a chemist with an element from the periodic table that has organized a protest outside his lab: "Molybdenum Matters!" Or a physicist who discovers that quarks have a lobby in Washington pushing for this subatomic particle to play a greater role in electromagnetism.
Hazlitt updates Bastiat's sophisms and shows how they re-emerge in contemporary policy issues such as minimum-wage laws, farm subsidies, rent control, and the role of central banking.
You can get the flavor of Hazlitt's brilliance in one brief quote: "Printing money is the world's biggest industry – if the product is measured in monetary terms."
Where do economic fallacies lead? They lead to economic failures, as detailed in:
Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, by Charles Murray
Murray is an old friend and one of the world's few libertarian sociologists. His ground-breaking 1984 book proved exactly how and why America's anti-poverty programs fail. His work was the basis for the 1988 and 1996 attempts at welfare reform. Losing Ground is still relevant because another attempt at welfare reform is badly needed.
Murray explains that the core problem with anti-poverty programs is the same as the core problem with many government programs. The "experts" are immune to common sense.
Ordinary people understand poverty, and we understand what can and can't be done about it. But as Murray says, "To the minds of many professional social analysts, the explanations of the popular wisdom are too simple, too unsubtle, to be true."
Murray then outlines three common-sense observations – "three core premises of the popular wisdom" – which should shape all welfare reform:
- "People respond to incentives and disincentives. Sticks and carrots work."
- "People are not inherently hard-working or moral. In the absence of countervailing influences, people will avoid work and be amoral."
- "People must be held responsible for their actions. Whether they are responsible in some ultimate philosophical or biochemical sense cannot be the issue if society is to function."
Senate, House, and Mr. President, listen up!
If Charles Murray seems to lack the Christmas spirit (he doesn't really – he hates poverty programs because of the harm they do to poor people), then let me suggest more of a "gifty" gift – a coffee-table book about...
Money: A History, edited by Jonathan Williams
The illustrations are splendid, as well they should be. The book was published by the British Museum to accompany the opening of the museum's Money Gallery in 1997.
We all agree that money is beautiful. Sometimes it's an unobtainable beauty. Sometimes it's a homey, utilitarian beauty. Money can also have a fatal beauty if people are desperate for it, and a faded beauty when inflation sets in. It even has an innocent beauty like the framed "first buck" hanging on the wall of a newly opened business.
But money also turns out to be pretty to look at – from a Phoenician silver coin bearing the likeness of a god riding a winged seahorse, circa fourth century B.C., to the intricate Persian rug-like patterns of an Uzbekistan "5 sum" note from 1994.
The extensive and detailed text of Money shows that the British Museum also has a firm intellectual grasp on the subject. Why did government-issued coins replace unadorned weights of precious metals? Was it a guarantee of purity? No, it was more like a guarantee of politics-as-usual: "Considerable... revenue would accrue to the states by taking over the production of silver and imposing an overvalued and state-regulated coinage."
And lastly, I'd like to retract that statement I made about "putting aside the hope of personal gain from holiday sales." Stansberry Digest readers are the last people who'd object to a little "enlightened self-interest." So I'm going to recommend a book I wrote:
On The Wealth of Nations, by P.J. O'Rourke
This also solves the problem of giving someone a copy of Adam Smith's original The Wealth of Nations, while knowing that the person getting it will never finish all 1,000 pages. (No matter how much he or she needs to.)
I've done it for them... I read The Wealth of Nations so that person doesn't have to. Smith wrote a wonderful book, but he wrote it in dense and difficult 18th-century prose.
A couple of other things make Smith's work daunting to today's reader. He was inventing the whole concept of economics, and you have to hold his hand while he's doing it. There are inevitable false starts and long digressions as Smith experiments with the ideas upon which all of capitalism would be built.
Also, there are whole chunks of The Wealth of Nations – some as long as 70 pages – that could have been summed up in one or two paragraphs. Smith's problem was that graphs hadn't been invented yet.
I tried my best to boil down Smith's wisdom and show how his thinking about free enterprise is still the best thinking that has ever been done on the subject.
How good a job I did is not for me to judge. But as a present, think of it the way I used to think of the finger-painted, blob-shaped ceramic things that my children would bring home from grade-school arts-and-crafts class and proudly give to their parents. It was made with love.
Regards,
P.J. O'Rourke