P.J. O’Rourke’s hilarious and math-free survey of capitalism, socialism and economics. An excerpt:
Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else. And absense of government doesn’t work, either. For a million years mankind had no government at all, and everyone’s relatives were naked in trees. Plain hard work is not the source of plenty. The poorer people are, the plainer and harder is the work that they do. The better-off play golf. 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.
Social Reader