None of My Business: P.J. Explains Money, Banking, Debt, Equity, Assets, Liabilities, and Why He's Not Rich and Neither Are You

by P. J. O'Rourke

Overview

After decades covering war and disaster, bestselling author and acclaimed satirist P. J. O’Rourke takes on his scariest subjects yet—business, investment, finance, and the political chicanery behind them.

Want to get rich overnight for free in 3 easy steps with no risk? Then don’t buy this book. (Actually, if you believe there’s a book that can do that, you shouldn’t buy any books because you probably can’t read.) P.J.’s approach to business, investment, and finance is different. He takes the risks for you in his chapter “How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other.” He proposes “A Way to Raise Taxes That We’ll All Love”—a 200% tax on celebrities. He offers a brief history of economic transitions before exploring the world of high tech innovation with a chapter on “Unnovations,” which asks, “The Internet—whose idea was it to put all the idiots on earth in touch with each other?” He misunderstands bitcoin, which seems “like a weird scam invented by strange geeks with weaponized slide rules in the high school Evil Math Club.” He closes with a fanciful short story about the morning that P.J. wakes up and finds that all the world’s goods and services are free! This is P.J. at his finest, a book not to be missed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802147769
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	520,999
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

P. J. O’Rourke has written nineteen books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He is a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me, and editor-in-chief of the web magazine American Consequences. He lives in rural New England, as far away from the things he writes about as he can get.

Read an Excerpt

From None of My Business:

“Many ‘classical liberal’ and libertarian economists are skeptical about the Central Banks that issue fiat money. Not me. I like them. I want one. Of course I don’t want an enormous Central Bank like the Federal Reserve. Where would I put it? No, what I want is a small, handy ‘Central Bank of O’Rourke’ that would fit in the laundry room or in the mudroom between the dog kennels.”

“We’d like someone to develop an app that gets rid of all apps, a no-app app, call it a ‘napp.’”

“Crypto-currency adds a kind of unwelcome mysticism to the already baffling material and philosophical aspects of money. Some regard the blockchain with almost religious awe, as if it were the work of mythical ‘Geek Gods’ high upon Mount Laptopus.”

Table of Contents

Foreword: Why I'm Not Rich and You Aren't Either 1

Section I How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other

Introduction 9

Lesson 1 The Power of the Economic Impulse 12

Lesson 2 The Real Secret Behind All Investment Scams 17

Lesson 3 (Topic for Discussion) If You Want Hard Money, How Hard Do You Have to Be to Get It? 22

Section II Money and Banking

Introduction 29

The Strange, Shape-Shifting Symbol of Value 32

My Own Personal Central Bank 38

Negative Interest Rates-Not Only Wrong but Evil 44

Debt Jubilee 48

Section III Mutant Capitalism

Introduction: The Mutants 57

One Good Thing About Mutant Capitalists: They Aren't Playing Monopoly 69

What Are Corporations For? 75

Section IV The Transition

Introduction: The Digital Age and Which Digit It's Giving Us 81

A Brief History of Economic Transitions 87

A Blockhead Confronts the Blockchain 92

What's the Connection? 100

What Has the Digital Revolution Done to Print Media? 106

Five Lessons About the Digital Economy from a Member of the Digital Generation 112

Innovation-It's All in Your Head 118

Innovations That Get No Respect 125

Unnovations 131

Six Geniuses (Plus Some Cartoon Animators) Try to See into the Future 135

A Ray of Hope in the Contest Between Man and Machine 144

Section V Consumption

Introduction: Some Thoughts on the History of Trade 151

The Price of Being Middle Class 157

Armchair Predictions About Consumer Trends 164

Consumer Trends Among the "Grumpies" 169

Consumer Trends Among the "Grumpies," Part 2 173

Summing Up American Consumer Trends … 178

All the Money in the World 182

Section VI Random Walk

Introduction 193

Five Things I Know About China 195

Doubts About Asia 202

Thoughts While Cleaning the Chicken Coop 209

Six Lessons from a Man on Horseback 214

Sympathy for the Devil 219

Reform or Deform? 223

Free-for-All! 231

Acknowledgments 239

Editorial Reviews

Praise for None of My Business

"[O'Rourke] has a razor-sharp intellect, and he writes without a shred of pretension or pontification. Another winner from an A-list humorist."—Booklist

Praise for P. J. O’Rourke:

“The funniest writer in America.”—Wall Street Journal

“Whether you agree with him or not, P.J. writes a helluva piece.”—Richard Nixon

“P.J. O’Rourke is like S.J. Perelman on acid.”—Chris Buckley

“Shakespeare, Hemingway, they’re okay, I guess, but my next guest—he’s better . . . . [P. J. O’Rourke’s] writing really changed my life.”—Greg Gutfeld

“If [O’Rourke’s] wry essays have a mission statement . . . it’s this: Starchy Republicanism is really, really fun.”—New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher