- To: [email protected]
- Subject: LFB Book News: EAT THE RICH
- From: Russell Hanneken <[email protected]>
- Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1998 17:31:38 -0700
================================================================= Laissez Faire Books - Book News - September 10, 1998 Please forward this message to anyone who might be interested. ================================================================= First 350 with autographed bookplates! A grand slam from P. J. O'Rourke, the best political humorist since H. L. Mencken EAT THE RICH by P. J. O'Rourke (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998) HU7872 (hardcover) 246p. Publisher's price: $24.00 Our price normally $16.95 SPECIAL SALE PRICE, LIMITED TIME ONLY: $14.41 (reviewed by Jim Powell) Everything P. J. O'Rourke writes makes you smile, but I'd rate EAT THE RICH as his best book, better even than his super-seller PARLIAMENT OF WHORES. The political content is very high, and the book is loaded with great lines. Open to a page, any page, and you'll soon find something wonderful--not just wit, but passion as well. O'Rourke offers uproarious commentary about fashionable politicians, intellectuals and dogmas in Albania, Sweden, Cuba, Russia, Tanzania and Shanghai as well as the United States. A sampler: "I had one fundamental question about economics: Why are some places prosperous and thriving while others just suck? It's not a matter of brains. No part of the earth (with the possible exception of Brentwood) is dumber than Beverly Hills, and the residents are wading in gravy. Meanwhile in Russia, where chess is a spectator sport, they're boiling stones for soup." "Microeconomics concerns things that economists are specifically wrong about, while macroeconomics concerns things economists are wrong about generally. Or, to be more technical, microeconomics is about money you don't have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of." "Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else." "And technology provides no guarantee of creature comforts. The most wretched locales in the world are well-supplied with complex and up-to-date technology--in the form of weapons." "Nationalization does to goods and services what divorce does to male parents--suddenly they're absent most of the time and useless the rest." "Altruism towards strangers is mostly a sentimental and fleeting thing, a small check dashed off to Save the Children. Twenty billion dollars worth of it is rare. In the Cold War days, of course, we were giving money to Tanzania on the theory of: 'Pay them to be socialist so they won't be communist and figure out what the difference is later.' But now, I'm afraid, the ugly truth is that we care about Tanzanians because they have cool animals." "The Russian stuff is no good. Even the smallest, simplest items stink. The way you use a Russian match is: After you strike it, you put it back in the matchbox. It's as likely to work as any of the other matches in there. In the old days the soda pop tasted like soap, the soap lathered like toilet paper, the toilet paper could be used to sand furniture, the furniture was as comfortable as a pile of canned goods, the canned goods had the flavor of a Solzhenitsyn novel, and a Solzhenitsyn novel got you arrested if you owned one." "How a peaceful, uncrowded place with ample wherewithal stays poor is hard to explain. How a conflict-ridden, grossly over-populated place with no resources whatsoever gets rich is simple. The British colonial government turned Hong Kong into an economic miracle by doing nothing." "So if wealth is not a world-wide round-robin of purse snatching, and if the thing that makes you rich doesn't make me poor, why should we care about fairness at all? We shouldn't." "If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the poverty and not the difference. Wealth is good." As these delightful selections suggest, nobody today has a more gifted pen than P. J. O'Rourke. You'll love this book. ================================================================= EAT THE RICH HU7872 (hardcover) 246p. Publisher's price: $24.00 Our price normally $16.95 SPECIAL SALE PRICE, LIMITED TIME ONLY: $14.41 ================================================================= How to order from Laissez Faire Books: SALES TAX: If we are shipping your order to California, you must pay sales tax. To learn the applicable tax rate, contact us, or point your web browser to <http://laissezfaire.org/2order.html#tax>. 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If you'd like to receive weekly Book News announcements via email, or if you have any other questions or comments, please contact Russell at <[email protected]>. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Russell Hanneken Laissez Faire Books [email protected] http://laissezfaire.org/
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