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If You Read One Book This Year

sowellkd

Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell

This new year, please take the time to read this book, one of the most important books for my thinking in my lifetime.

It speaks to my observation on war being a collision of complex adaptive systems informed by “institutional mechanics”, the systems they have in place before collision.

And humans are built on incentives.

Here’s a great review.

Besides resting on a backbone of the Hayekian understanding of the use and role of knowledge in economies and societies more generally and Alchian’s evolutionary framing of economic issues and phenomena; the biggest comparative advantage of this book compared to other great books by other great economists is Sowell’s insistence throughout the text to refer to political systems, social phenomena, and economic issues exclusively by characteristics as dynamic processes, or has he often puts it, their institutional mechanics rather than their hoped for goals.

And for the record, Hayek reviewed this book in 1983 (3 years after it was published) for Reason magazine and called it the best book on general economics published in many years and really sung its praises to a surprising degree for Hayek.

I gave this book a five out of five Marlen-Starrs because five is the maximum amount I was allowed to rate it, if I could have given it six out of five stars, I would have! This is tied for my favorite book of all time with Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.

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Knowledge and Decisions

Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me

 

Which Came First: The Individual or the Group?

“It is illusory to believe that it is possible to visualize collective wholes. They are never visible; their cognition is always the outcome of the understanding of the meaning which acting men attribute to their acts. We can see a crowd, i.e., a multitude of people. Whether this crowd is a mere gathering or a mass (in the sense in which this term is used in contemporary psychology) or an organized body or any other kind of social entity is a question which can only be answered by understanding the meaning which they themselves attach to their presence. And this meaning is always the meaning of individuals. Not our senses, but understanding, a mental process, makes us recognize social entities.

“Those who want to start the study of human action from the collective units encounter an insurmountable obstacle in the fact that an individual at the same time can belong and—with the exception of the most primitive tribesmen—really belongs to various collective entities. The problems raised by the multiplicity of coexisting social units and their mutual antagonisms can be solved only by methodological individualism.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

You Apes Want to Live Forever?

comfort

The New Orleans incident is just the beginning.

And as always, Boppers, head on a swivel and ready to rock; if you don’t have a rifle in your vehicle, you are overlooking a tool option.

My “Storming America” series on my podcast gives you an in depth appraisal of what this mass attack will look like and what you need to do to prepare (episodes 37, 41-43 and 48-50).

Buckle up and Happy New Year.

Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me

The Socialist Spirit

“Of course, not Marxists alone, but most of those who emphatically declare themselves anti-Marxists, think entirely on Marxist lines and have adopted Marx’s arbitrary, unconfirmed and easily refutable dogmas. If and when they come into power, they govern and work entirely in the socialist spirit.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, Preface to 2nd German edition

Production for Profit Is Production for People, part 2

“In his capacity as a businessman a man is a servant of the consumers, bound to comply with their wishes. He cannot indulge in his own whims and fancies. But his customers’ whims and fancies are for him ultimate law, provided these customers are ready to pay for them. He is under the necessity of adjusting his conduct to the demand of the consumers. If the consumers, without a taste for the beautiful, prefer things ugly and vulgar, he must, contrary to his own convictions, supply them with such things. If consumers do not want to pay a higher price for domestic products than for those produced abroad, he must buy the foreign product, provided it is cheaper. An employer cannot grant favors at the expense of his customers. He cannot pay wage rates higher than those determined by the market if the buyers are not ready to pay proportionately higher prices for commodities produced in plants in which wage rates are higher than in other plants.

“It is different with man in his capacity as spender of his income. He is free to do what he likes best.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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