Books

 From the time I learned to read in first grade, I have been a lover of books.  In fact, it started earlier than that--my parents read to me.  I kept at it through the years.  My kids picked up the habit as well.  During the '90s we lived in Dearborn County, IN; we had the Lawrenceburg Public Library, but because of an agreement between the districts we also had access to the Cincinnati Public Library, which was considered one of the best in the US.  We would go to the Main Library in downtown Cincinnati--me, my wife, and our three kids--and check out as many as 80 books for the five of us.

Even now, while I do a lot of my reading on the Internet, I still go through six or eight library books every three weeks.  Sometime around 8 to 9 in the evening, I shut down the computer screen and read a book before going to bed.  I read some ebooks on my iPad, but I mostly prefer real paper books.

I mentioned several books in my last post that have shaped my thinking over the years.  I am going to recommend a few here that I have read in the last year or two.

"Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer

While most history books pay the most attention to Jamestown and Plymouth, the first major settlements, there were actually four major waves of settlers that came to America after those first two.  Each of those four waves came from different areas of the British Isles, and brought different sets of customs and cultural traditions to America.  Fischer traces their background in the homeland and their history here, and the effects they had on the basic cultures, especially in what are now the eastern states.

"Born Fighting" by Senator Jim Webb

Webb tells the story of the last of Fischer's four groups of settlers, the Scots-Irish (also known as Scotch-Irish and Ulster Scots).  He is of that heritage himself, and includes some stories about his own family.  But he starts with their history in the north of Britain, in the area that became the Border between England and Scotland during the Middle Ages.  In the early 1600s, many Borderers, from both sides of the line, migrated to northern Ireland, which had been largely depopulated during wars and civil unrest under the Tudor monarchs.  Because of ill-treatment by English landlords and the Anglican church, many of them started migrating to America, starting around 1715 and lasting almost to the start of the American Revolution.  They were not appreciated or welcomed by the three earlier groups, and tended to settle in the back country, away from the coastal cities and the government authorities.  To this day, the culture of the Appalachian region is still largely Scots-Irish.  So is much of blue-collar working-class culture as well.  And I must admit, it is a major part of my own heritage as well.

"Dignity" by Chris Arnade

Arnade was a Wall Street trader who got bored with his job and started hanging out at homeless camps in Brooklyn.  Eventually he left his job through a buyout, moved his family to upstate New York, where living costs were lower, and began traveling the country.  He went to the small towns in the Rust Belt, and the run-down neighborhoods in the cities, and talked to people.  His book includes a lot of photos of the people he met.  He would go into a small town, find a McDonalds, and talk to the people of all ages who hung out there.  He went to the run-down and store-front churches in inner-city neighborhoods, and was impressed by how many people he met who got free from drugs and alcohol through those churches.  He sorts people into what he calls "front-row kids"--the elites of business, academia, and politics--and "back-row kids"--the poor, the disadvantaged (of all races), the ones who didn't "make it."  By the end of the book, Arnade admitted moving from being an atheist to becoming an agnostic; he has since returned to the Catholic church of his childhood.

"The Revolt of the Public" by Martin Gurri

Gurri was a CIA analyst, monitoring foreign news media.  What his book documents is that much of the worldwide unrest of the last twenty years or so is rooted in the rise of the Internet and social media.  The mass of the people are no longer dependent on the traditional news media.  In the past, someone had to won the printing presses, the movie studios, and the TV and radio stations.  Therefore, communication was mostly from the top down.   With the Internet, information can go in all directions--top down, bottom up, sideways...and the elites have lost control of the flow of information.  His book was self-published first as an ebook in 2014, then an updated version came out in hardback in 2018.  He discusses the uprisings in various countries of the Arab Spring; at one point, the Egyptian authorities caught a young man who had started the first protests through a Facebook post, and tried to negotiate an end to it with him, only to find out he had no control or authority--he just started the thing and it went on without him.  Gurri covered other disruptions in Spain and Israel, and the Tea Party movement in the US.  The hardback added a chapter on Brexit and Trump's election.  For a while he was writing a blog called "The Fifth Wave" and covered the Yellow Vest protests in France and other events.  I would not describe him as a Trump supporter, but he sees Trump more as a symptom than a primary cause--the dissatisfaction of the people was already there, and Trump stepped up to give it voice and ride it to office.

"War and Peace and War" by Peter Turchin

Turchin is a Russian-American academic, who has written about the rise and collapse of societies.  Two concepts in this book are striking.  One is "asabiyya"--a concept of social solidarity, first described in the Middle Ages by the Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun.  A group with great asabiyya will often defeat a seemingly more powerful enemy--think of the ancient Greeks repelling the invading Persians in the 5th century BC, the American colonists defeating the British in the American Revolution, and possibly today's Ukrainians holding off the Russian army.  Another concept is a problem for nations that he labels "over-production of elites" where the upper-class becomes too numerous to be supported at the level they expect.  There was such a situation in medieval France, until the Hundred Years' War reduced their numbers; the English got their turn at it with the Wars of the Roses just a few years later.  The French again took another turn at it with the French Revolution and Reign of Terror.  I see a possibility that we are in such a position today, with one difference--our modern elites mostly do not send their sons to fight our wars anymore.  While the draft was in force in the US, they had to make some effort; now they do not.

I am going to end this post with a bit about a pair of books that deal with the regional cultures of the US.  One is Joel Garreau's "Nine Nations of North America," published in 1981.  The other is more recent--Colin Woodard's "American Nations" which was published thirty years later.  They both go into the regional cultures of America, which are quite different from the official state lines.  They both look at the history and the early settlers, who usually determined the local culture.  There are some differences in their regions--what Garreau calls "Dixie," Woodard splits into three areas--Tidewater, Deep South, and Greater Appalachia.  He ends up with eleven regions compared to Garreau's nine.  Garreau tended to look more at modern economic differences, Woodard at dealing with ideas and ways of doing things.  Woodard also looks at how the regions interact politically, with the northeast and West Coast usually working together, the southern regions having their own alliance, and the rest switching back and forth depending on particular issues.  Both books are valuable for understanding the US; neither is perfect, because both miss some things and each emphasized some things and ignore others.  But together they help in understanding the background of what is going on.

These are books on secular topics that I have found interesting the past couple of years.  I may put together a post about the Christian books and authors that have influenced my thinking over the years.

An Important Distinction

This post will cover a topic I wrote about twelve to fifteen years ago, but current events seem to me to make it relevant still.  I am not going to reproduce the older post; this one will have some differences because of events and situations since that time.

More than twenty years ago, I read the book "Modern Times" by British historian Paul Johnson.  It covered the twentieth century from the end of the First World War to the Reagan-Thatcher years.  But there was one matter he discussed in that book that has stayed with me ever since.

Johnson wrote that the most important political distinction was not between liberal and conservative, or Labor and Tory, or Republican and Democrat.  It was between those who put a high value on individual freedom and those who saw the power of the state as the solution to every problem.  He went on to add that you can have both liberal and conservative statists, and liberal and conservative freedom-lovers.  (My own observation is that liberal freedom-lovers are getting scarce these days--Tulsi Gabbard might qualify, and maybe Kyrsten Sinema, but not many more.)  At the time, I could see Ronald Reagan as a freedom-lover; his successor, George H. W. Bush, was clearly a statist.  I was willing to give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt when he was elected, but he showed himself over time to be a statist also.  

The difficulty for statists is, not all problems can be resolved through use of government power; in fact, since government often has a tendency to be heavy-handed, it may take a wrong approach and make an issue worse rather than better.  There are some things that may be better to resolve at the grass-roots level, rather than from the top.  But a statist can get so enamored with government power that he fails to see its limitations.  

Clear back in the days of the Roman Empire, the government tried to suppress the new religion of Christianity.  Most of the original apostles were executed; persecutions continued off-and-on for more than two centuries.  But it did not work.  And the Roman Emperors had more absolute power than any American president.  You cannot change all people's minds by government decree.  

But power can be intoxicating.  The English Lord Acton wrote in the late 1800s, "Power tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  And intoxicated persons, whether intoxicated on alcohol or power, will think they can do things that they would not have tried when sober.  (I am afraid some of our modern politicians have not been sober for a long time!)

It might seem more efficient to impose things by government decree.  But it is usually more effective to persuade people, even if it takes longer.  And using authority does have its limits.  I learned this a long time ago--partly from two different bosses that I worked for, and partly from the book "The Velvet-covered Brick" by Howard E. Butt.  Butt wrote this zinger in his book:  "Authority is like soap; the more you use it, the less you have."  If you rely on raw authority all the time, you may not have enough left in an emergency.  It is better to use it lightly, and rely on persuasion and other methods as much as possible, and save authority for when there is no other way.

Another book that illustrates this principle in history is Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly."  Most of the book covers three major historic events, and the results that an intoxication on power produced.  The first was the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, which was triggered by the corruption and immorality of the Renaissance popes.  The second was the American Revolution, which was a direct result of the arrogance of both King George III and his Parliament.  The third was the Vietnam War.  The book is worth reading, because it does show the limits of power, and how it seduces people into making serious mistakes.

How our present situation will turn out, I do not know.  It does seem that freedom-lovers are becoming more evident, some in local and state government, many outside of official positions.  The authoritarians have made some major missteps in the last few years, and I am afraid we can count on them making more, which will just cost them more support.  We shall see how this turns out in the coming years.

Thoughts on Inflation

Inflation is in the headlines again, after a long absence.  For me, this brings back unpleasant memories, because I lived through the "stagflation" of the late '70s and early '80s.  The rising prices of that period made it harder to develop my first small business, and affected our lives in a lot of ways.

But the roots of the problem actually began much earlier.  In 1933, the Roosevelt administration barred Americans from owning gold (an exception was made for jewelry, which is often plated rather than solid).  At that time, the official price of gold was $20.67 per ounce.  The following year, the government reset the relationship of the dollar to gold to $35 an ounce--reducing the value of the dollar by 40%.

In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson made the decision to pursue two expensive goals at the same time--the escalation of the US involvement in the Vietnam War, and his "War on Poverty" programs.  This stepped up the pattern of government deficits--expenditures exceeding revenue--that we have lived with for nearly all the years since--you don't even need two hands to count on your fingers the number of years where the US budget was balanced.  Ever since then, the government has spent more than it received in taxes, and financed the deficit with debt.  For most of US history, the government mostly ran deficits during wars, and ran a balanced budget during times of peace.

Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, took the US off the gold standard completely in 1971.  That action, plus outside factors like the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, set off a long-term inflation that we still live with today.  In recent years, the Federal Reserve system has set a target of 2% annual inflation--they regard that as desirable.  That allows our money to lose only a third of its value in five years!

Today, April 4, 2022, the price of gold is $1931.95 per ounce--96 times what it was in 1933!  Yes, Americans are allowed to own gold again (if they can come up with the money to pay for it).  But the value of the dollar is what we have to live with.  And that affects the prices we have to pay for the things we need.

What difference does this make on the commodities we actually use?  I am old enough to remember what those old prices were.  When I was learning to drive a car in 1966, you could buy gas for 29 cents a gallon.  You could buy a brand-new car for about $2000.  You could get a Milky Way or Three Musketeers candy bar for five cents.  Yes, wages were lower then--but you could buy more with what you earned.  When I was first married, I had a minimum wage job at $1.60 an hour--but if I worked 40 hours a week, we could live on that, because of the low costs for rent, gas, cars and food.

Housing costs and rents were lower then.  My parents bought a brand-new house in a fast-growing suburb on the north side of Cincinnati in 1962.  The price of the house was $16,000.  It was typical of the time--about 1200 square feet, 3 bedrooms, one bath, full basement, attached one-car garage (most families only had one car back then).  In 1970, my bride and I rented a one-bedroom apartment for $110 a month.  Later we moved into another one that was only $100 even.  When we moved to Indianapolis for a year in 1973, we got a two-bedroom apartment with laundry hookups for $150 a month.

In some of these areas, there have been other factors besides inflation affecting prices.  Cars in the 1970s were simpler--most had no air conditioning, no electric locks or windows, simple AM or AM/FM radios, no tire pressure monitors and so on.  New houses have gotten bigger--"master suites" with private bath for the parents and a separate one for the kids (maybe even a half-bath downstairs for guests).  Two and even three-car garages are expected these days.  Building codes have gotten more complex--demanding changes in wiring and plumbing from the old days.  But the cost of housing rose.  In 1977 I bought my first house for $17,000--a run-down 50-year-old house in an older neighborhood.  By then, new houses were costing $28,000 or more.  Now, the median price for a new home in the US is $400,000.  My second house, which I bought in 1979 for $31,000 (built in 1913, a bit larger, brick, but still needing a lot of fixup--I cashed it out in 1990 for $60,000) sold a few years ago for over $200,000.

So the high inflation of the '70s and '80s was not fun to live through.  And I am not real pleased to see it apparently returning.  It looks like the people running our government are just as stupid now as they were fifty years ago.

I saw an item on the news this morning that Putin has put Russia back on the gold standard--they have set a price of gold for the ruble, the Russian currency.  I am not a Putin fan, nor do I have much trust in him.  But in the area of finance, he may be a bit smarter than our own politicians.