Along the way, Bonner and Wiggin cast a wide angle lens that looks back in history and ahead to the coming century: showing how dramatic changes in the economic power of the United States will inevitably impact every American.Reveals the financial realities the United States currently faces and what the ultimate outcome may be Weaves together the worlds of politics, economics, and personal finance in a way that underscores the severity of the situation Addresses the events leading up to the implosion of the U.S. financial system Looks ahead to help you avoid the pitfalls presented by a weaker United States Other titles by Bonner: Empire of Debt, Financial Reckoning Day, and Mobs, Messiahs, and MarketsOther titles by Wiggin: I.O.U.S.A., Demise of the Dollar, and Financial Reckoning DayThe United States is heading down a difficult path. The New Empire of Debt clearly shows how this has happened and discusses what you can do to overcome the financial challenges that will arise as the situation deteriorates.

    In 1923, with its currency effectively worthless (the exchange rate in December of that year was one dollar to 4,200,000,000,000 marks), the German republic was all but reduced to a barter economy. Expensive cigars, artworks, and jewels were routinely exchanged for staples such as bread; a cinema ticket could be bought for a lump of coal; and a bottle of paraffin for a silk shirt. People watched helplessly as their life savings disappeared and their loved ones starved. Germany’s finances descended into chaos, with severe social unrest in its wake. Money may no longer be physically printed and distributed in the voluminous quantities of 1923. However, “quantitative easing,” that modern euphemism for surreptitious deficit financing in an electronic era, can no less become an assault on monetary discipline. Whatever the reason for a country’s deficit necessity or profligacy, unwillingness to tax or blindness to expenditure it is beguiling to suppose that if the day of reckoning is postponed economic recovery will come in time to prevent higher unemployment or deeper recession. What if it does not? Germany in 1923 provides a vivid, compelling, sobering moral tale.

    The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

    Dent Jr., bestselling author of The Demographic Cliff and The Sale of a Lifetime, predicted the populist wave that has driven the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, and other recent shocks around the world. Now he returns with the definitive guide to protect your investments and prosper in the age of the anti-globalist backlash.The turn of the 2020s will mark an extremely rare convergence of low points for multiple political, economic, and demographic cycles. The result will be a major financial crash and global upheaval that will dwarf the Great Recession of the 2000s—and maybe even the Great Depression of the 1930s. We’re facing the onset of what Dent calls “Economic Winter.”   In Zero Hour, he and Andrew Pancholi (author of The Market Timing Report newsletter) explain all of these cycles, which influence everything from currency valuations to election returns, from economic growth rates in Asia to birthrates in Europe. You’ll learn, for instance:   • Why the most-hyped technologies of recent years (self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, blockchain) won’t pay off until the 2030s.    • Why China may be the biggest bubble in the global economy (and you’d be a fool to invest there).    • Why you should invest in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, and pull out of real estate and automotive.    • Why putting your faith in gold is a bad idea.   Fortunately, Zero Hour includes a range of practical strategies to help you turn the upheaval ahead to your advantage, so your family can be prepared and protected.

    Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.ContentsThe PurposeOf Means and EndsA Word about WordsThe Education of an OrganizerCommunicationIn the BeginningTacticsThe Genesis of Tactic ProxyThe Way Ahead

    From Kapital sprung the economic and political systems that at one time dominated half the earth and for nearly a century kept the world on the brink of war. Even today, more than one billion Chinese citizens live under a regime that proclaims fealty to Marxist ideology. Yet this important tome has been passed over by many readers frustrated by Marx’s difficult style and his preoccupation with nineteenth-century events of little relevance to today's reader.Here Serge Levitsky presents a revised version of Kapital, abridged to emphasize the political and philosophical core of Marx’s work while trimming away much that is now unimportant. Pointing out Marx’s many erroneous predictions about the development of capitalism, Levitsky's introduction nevertheless argues for Kapital's relevance as a prime example of a philosophy of economic determinism that "subordinates the problems of human freedom and human dignity to the issues of who should own the means of production and how wealth should be distributed."Here then is a fresh and highly readable version of a work whose ideas provided inspiration for communist regimes' ideological war against capitalism, a struggle that helped to shape the world today.

    When it was published in 1943, Isabel Paterson's work provided fresh intellectual support for the endangered American belief in individual rights, limited government, and economic freedom. The crisis of today's collectivized nations would not have surprised Paterson; in The God of the Machine, she had explored the reasons for collectivism's failure. Her book placed her in the vanguard of the free-enterprise movement now sweeping the world.Paterson sees the individual creative mind as the dynamo of history, and respect for the individual's God-given rights as the precondition for the enormous release of energy that produced the modern world. She sees capitalist institutions as the machinery through which human energy works, and government as a device properly used merely to cut off power to activities that threaten personal liberty.Paterson applies her general theory to particular issues in contemporary life, such as education, .social welfare, and the causes of economic distress. She severely criticizes all but minimal application of government, including governmental interventions that most people have long taken for granted. The God of the Machine offers a challenging perspective on the continuing, worldwide debate about the nature of freedom, the uses of power, and the prospects of human betterment.Stephen Cox's substantial introduction to The God of the Machine is a comprehensive and enlightening account of Paterson's colorful life and work. He describes The God of the Machine as "not just theory, but rhapsody, satire, diatribe, poetic narrative." Paterson's work continues to be relevant because "it exposes the moral and practical failures of collectivism, failures that are now almost universally acknowledged but are still far from universally understood." The book will be essential to students of American history, political theory, and literature.

    Similarly, the upward spiral of college tuition fees is cause for serious concern. In this concise and illuminating book, the well-known economist William J. Baumol explores the causes of these seemingly intractable problems and offers a surprisingly simple explanation. Baumol identifies the "cost disease" as a major source of rapidly rising costs in service sectors of the economy. Once we understand that disease, he explains, effective responses become apparent.Baumol presents his analysis with characteristic clarity, tracing the fast-rising prices of health care and education in the United States and other major industrial nations, then examining the underlying causes, which have to do with the nature of providing labor-intensive services. The news is good, Baumol reassures us, because the nature of the disease is such that society will be able to afford the rising costs.

    They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest”—or even their subjects—unless they have to. This clever and accessible book shows that the difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching. The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: what leaders can get away with, and the quality of life or misery under them. The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance.

    How Capitalism Saved America explodes the myths spun by Michael Moore, the liberal media, Hollywood, academia, and the rest of the anticapitalist establishment.Whether it’s Michael Moore or the New York Times, Hollywood or academia, a growing segment in America is waging a war on capitalism. We hear that greedy plutocrats exploit the American public; that capitalism harms consumers, the working class, and the environment; that the government needs to rein in capitalism; and on and on. Anticapitalist critiques have only grown more fevered in the wake of corporate scandals like Enron and WorldCom. Indeed, the 2004 presidential campaign has brought frequent calls to re-regulate the American economy.But the anticapitalist arguments are pure bunk, as Thomas J. DiLorenzo reveals in How Capitalism Saved America. DiLorenzo, a professor of economics, shows how capitalism has made America the most prosperous nation on earth—and how the sort of government regulation that politicians and pundits endorse has hindered economic growth, caused higher unemployment, raised prices, and created many other problems. He propels the reader along with a fresh and compelling look at critical events in American history—covering everything from the Pilgrims to Bill Gates. And just as he did in his last book, The Real Lincoln, DiLorenzo explodes numerous myths that have become conventional wisdom. How Capitalism Saved America reveals:• How the introduction of a capitalist system saved the Pilgrims from starvation• How the American Revolution was in large part a revolt against Britain’s stifling economic controls• How the so-called robber barons actually improved the lives of millions of Americans by providing newer and better products at lower prices• How the New Deal made the Great Depression worse• How deregulation got this country out of the energy crisis of the 1970s—and was not the cause of recent blackouts in California and the Northeast• And much moreHow Capitalism Saved America is popular history at its explosive best.

     He is speaking not in the colloquial sense of the phrase "making money," but rather the actual production of money as a commodity in the whole economic life. The choice of the money we use in exchange is not something that needs to be established and fixed by government. In fact, his thesis is that a government monopoly on money production and management has no ethical or economic grounding at all. Legal tender laws, bailout guarantees, tax-backed deposit insurance, and the entire apparatus that sustains national monetary systems, has been wholly unjustified. Money, he argues, should be a privately produced good like any other, such as clothing or food. In arguing this way, he is disputing centuries of assumptions about money for which an argument is rarely offered. People just assume that government or central banks operating under government control should manage money. Hulsmann explores monetary thought from the ancient world through the middle ages to modern times to show that the monopolists are wrong. There is a strong case in both economic and ethical terms for the idea that money production should be wholly private. He takes on the "stabilization" advocates to show that government management doesn't lead to stability but to inflation and instability. He goes further to argue against even the theoretical case for stabilization, to say that money's value should be governed by the market, and that that the costs associated with private production are actually an advantage. He chronicles the decline of money once nationalized, from legally sanctioned counterfeiting to the creation of paper money all the way to hyperinflation. In his normative analysis, the author depends heavily on the monetary writings of 14th century Bishop Nicole Oresme, whose monetary writings have been overlooked even by historians of economic thought. He makes a strong case that "paper money has never been introduced through voluntary cooperation. In all known cases it has been introduced through coercion and compulsion, sometimes with the threat of the death penalty. ... Paper money by its very nature involves the violation of property rights through monopoly and legal-tender privileges." The book is also eerily prophetic of our times: Consider the current U.S. real-estate boom. Many Americans are utterly convinced that American real estate is the one sure bet in economic life. No matter what happens on the stock market or in other strata of the economy, real estate will rise. They believe themselves to have found a bonanza, and the historical figures confirm this. Of course this belief is an illusion, but the characteristic feature of a boom is precisely that people throw any critical considerations overboard. They do not realize that their money producer the Fed has possibly already entered the early stages of hyperinflation, and that the only reason why this has been largely invisible was that most of the new money has been exported outside of the U.S... Because a paper-money producer can bail out virtually anybody, the citizens become reckless in their speculations; they count on him to bail them out, especially when many other people do the same thing. To fight such behavior effectively, one must abolish paper money. Regulations merely drive the reckless behavior into new channels. Hulsmann has provided not only a primer in understanding our times, but a dramatic extension of the work of Menger, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and others to map ou

    Introduction by Barry Goldwater. [adapted from jacket blurb]

    Drawing on the seminal volume by the “Austrian School” economist Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, and comparing classical and neoclassical approaches, Choice is a creative, comprehensive, and unusually lucid book on economic science and market processes. The book illuminates free economies as underpinning civilization, the folly of government central planning, the primacy of entrepreneurship and innovation, the nature of money and banking, the causes of the business cycle, the failures of government intervention, and more. As a result, Choice teaches economic principles and exposes economic fallacies, and any reader will learn both the important truths about economics and the crucial value of individual choice, entrepreneurship, and free markets.

    We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward "thought leaders" who redefine "change" in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity.Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.

    Includes details on how private sector institutions can support social order, foster cooperation and reduce violent confrontations.