David

Interesting Overview of Chinese History

Revisado: 12-16-23

I thought it was interesting. It's cool learning history. I like that it was free! I think it was a good use of my time. At 2x speed, I understood it well and finished it in 5 days.

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Well done!

Revisado: 12-12-23

What a breath of fresh air it is, getting a non-judgmental history course!
I loved this course.

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Great!

Revisado: 12-06-23

Funny, educational, enjoyable.
Thanks for including all those cases and reviewing them for us. Your sense of humor made them fun.

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2004 Gold

Revisado: 12-05-23

It's nice to read a book actually about fascism. This was a great read. The only other book I've read that actually tried to categorize fascism was the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises' book "Omnipotent Government", in which he analyzed in great detail the economic policies of fascism and communism, and concluded that they were not very different-- thd only disputes were about who would be in charge.

I'll give some quotes from this audiobook below that I thought were worth taking note of.

Introduction
"Fascist movements varied so conspicuously from one national setting to another that some even doubt that the term 'Fascism' has any meaning other than as a smear word. The epithet has been so loosely used that practically everyone who either holds or shakes authority has been someone's fascist. 'Perhaps', the doubters suggest, 'it would be better just to scrap the term'."

Chapter 1. Strategies
"The classical 'isms' rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them. Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicity upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system-builder like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence like Mill, Burke, or Toqueville."

"Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of fascism. The will and leadership of a duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for 10 years, and when he wanted to normalize his regime, did Mussolini expound fascist doctrine in an article partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile for the new Encyclodepia Italiana, 'Power came first, then doctrine.'"

"Hitler did present a program, 'The 25 points of February 1920', but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say 'Show us the details of your program'. 'I have refused ever to step before this folk and make cheap promises."

Where do we go from here?
"The term fascism needs to be rescued from sloppy usage, not thrown out because of it. It remains indispensible. We need a generic term for what is a general phenomenon, indeed, the most political novelty of the twentieth century, a popular movement against the left and against liberal individualism."

Chapter 5.
Nazis were pro-natalism, pro-scientific research, and pro-eugenics. The medical powers loved the Nazi party.

Accomodation, Enthusiasm, Terror
"The Italian fascist pattern of violence was the opposite of the Nazi way. Mussolini spilled more blood coming to power than Hitler did, but his dictatorship was relatively mild after that. The main form of punishment for political dissidence was forced residence in remote southern hill villages. About 10,000 serious opponents of the regime were imprisoned in camps or on off-shore islands. The regime sentenced to death a mere nine opponents between 1926 and 1940."

The concentration camps of Nazi Germany were first made for the communists and socialists, not the Jews.

6. The long term: Radicalization or entropy?
"Virulently hostile to democracy, liberalism, secularism, Marxism, and especially Freemasonry, Franco joined Hitler and Mussolini in April 1939 as a signatory of the anti-commenturn(?) pact."

Trying to account for the holocaust
The original plan was expulsion, but leighway was given to the directors of the expulsions of the German Jews into Poland.

Chapter 8. What is Fascism?
"...which are the real fascisms?"
"An influential current considers fascism a developmental dictatorship established for the purpose of hastening industrial growth through forced savings and a regimented workforce. Proponents of this interpretation have looked primarily at the Italian case.
It could well be argued that Germany too, although already an industrial giant, needed urgently to discipline its people for the immense task of rebuilding after the defeat of 1918. This interpretation goes seriously wrong, however, in supposing that fascism pursued any rational economic goal whatever."

What is Fascism? (The final five minutes of the book.)
"The moment has come to give fascism a useable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Written in 2004, made an audiobook in 2017. I highly recommend, along with the Mises book "Omnipotent Government".

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Two-star book by Herbert Hoover re-incarnate

Revisado: 11-30-23

This book is a two-star book, in my opinion.

Chapter 4 was the only chapter with anything I could agreeably enjoy, namely, stories of business entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs' idealism helping to make work environments more friendly, end foreign slavery, meet consumer needs that had never been met before, and pursuing cleanliness and preventing wastefulness to the benefits of the community and the companies doing these great things.

The political philosophy of Rebecca Henderson is nearly identical to that of Herbert Hoover (the US President before FDR). She makes the same arguments as him for cartelizing industries, including using his distinct vocabulary, such as "moral suasion". She doesn't understand how high minimum wages laws cause unemployment like Herbert Hoover, and if she were Queen, she'd cause a Great Depression II with all her cartelizing fantasies, income tax schemes, minimum wage (p)raising, "moral suasion", musings about the potential political opportunies to be gained in a new world war, and put people on meat rations.

She muses that someday an international confederacy of nations will make a cartel agreement to implement a monopolized global wealth tax, and that good would come of it. (Early in the book, she complains about drug patent owners gauging prices to maximize revenues. What does she expect a world monopoly on taxation to look like? Not oppression?)

Chapter 6 was interesting. I liked listening to it because I found the history parts in it informative, even though I disagreed with the policy plans she was endorsing.

Overall, this book wasn't a complete waste of time to read-- some of it is interesting, and Chapter 4 is delightful and worth reading. The rest isn't good in my opinion.
If you do read this book, I suggest you read a companion book about Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression called "America's Great Depression", by Murray N. Rothbard, which can be found free on YouTube. You will laugh when you see the similarities between Hoover and Henderson.

Given opportunity cost of credits and time, I'd say try a Thomas Sowell book instead, or a (free on YouTube) Hans-Hermann Hoppe book. If you don't like their political stances, at least you will have experienced a break from the usual echochamber and hear arguments you have never heard before.

So overall, two stars. Performance and story get five stars each.

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Excellent

Revisado: 11-15-23

I really appreciated chapters 9 and 10, which were about natural monopolies not being a problem (only government monopolies), and on how the theory of public goods is nonsensical.
I loved this book. His "Democracy: The God That Failed" is very good too.

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An outline of my 4 years of College in one sitting

Revisado: 09-27-23

The main question of this book is, "Are you really better off trying to start your own business, or are you better off just working for someone else?" And this is an important question. If you're not cut out for business, a failure to recognize that fact could cost you everything.

I read this book in one sitting while at work at 1.4x speed. It struck me how much it was like my Finance Major business courses I took in college. I think if I had read this at the beginning of my college education, for instance, as an audiobook textbook for Business 101, which was my first class in my major, then the rest of my college work would feel like it all fit into a big picture rather than just seeming like random concepts all thrown at me, one concept after another. This book shows the whole entrepreneurial equation, and goes through it factor by factor. Do you know about this aspect of running a business, and this? Do you know that you're on the hook for everything when you own the business? Have you considered how risk-free it is to just work for someone else? Do you realize that you have to compete against producers all over the world? Do you know about finances, financing, and financial statements? Are you prepared to work 3000 hours or more a year instead of the 2000 hours that most employees work? Why not just work 3000 hours a year at your current job? You might make more than you could reasonably expect starting a business, which would require you to work like a workaholic.
Are you trying to make your hobby your job? That's probably not a financially profitable task. Don't quit your day job for that, but if you like doing that in your free time, that's cool.

I like the marriage analogies in this book.
Business is like marriage. Maybe you're not ready to go into it yet-- but with solid preparation, it could be a great idea and is the best thing you could do. It comes with a lot of risk, and requires a lot from you, including patience, service, and hard work, but it could possibly be the most rewarding and valuable decision you ever make. But don't go into it with delusions, or you will be disillusioned after a failure or near-failure. This book can help cure your delusions and educate you into a better position. If you somehow gain nothing as it relates to business by reading this book, you may find it helps you with marital advice, which is much like business advice.

There is a summary of the chapters in the final chapter of this book, which perhaps some people may find to be a nice outline of the book before they read it.

"Think of this book as a prequel to "The E-Myth Revisited."

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Helping Sincere Helpers to Know How to Help Best

Revisado: 09-22-23

Review:
Social Justice Fallacies have serious real-life consequences. Sowell appeals to your sense of reason and personal decision-making throughout this book with rhetorical questions. That way, you see for yourself why these consequences are something that you should be concerned about and seek to understand fully. Here is an excellent example he gives near the end of Chapter 1:
"Do you want airlines to have pilots chosen for demographic representation of various groups, or would you prefer to fly on planes whose pilots were chosen for their mastery of all the complex things that increase your chances of arriving safely at your destination?"

Thomas Sowell has been interested in the Social Justice movement for many years, being concerned about the well-being of the poor (which he shares in common with many in or outside of the Social Justice movement), but he is not a part of it-- for these many years, he has been sounding the alarm bell at the many fundamental flaws in the misconception of human action that people in the Social Justice movement unquestioningly assume to be true, but which fatally misconstrue reality. Here is an example in Sowell's words:
"The seemingly invincible fallacy at the heart of the social justice vision is that large categories of people (classes, races, nations) would tend to be either equal or at least comparable in their outcomes in various endeavors if it were not for some discriminatory bias that has intervened to produce the large disparities we see around us."
Contrary to this fallacy, the fact is, statistical inequalities are natural and ubiquitous. Giving a commonly known set of examples, Sowell reminds the reader, "...different ethnic groups dominate different American sports." (His examples include blacks dominating basketball, whites dominating tennis, hispanics dominating baseball, and Canadians dominating hockey.)
Sowell cites statistics about engineers being mostly males, and teachers being mostly females, so to expect that either a school or an engineering workplace would have 50% male and 50% female teachers or engineers is absurd. Yet many judges are now demanding this type of workplace data to "prove" nondiscrimination, which in an ironic twist, requires employers to discriminate. Thus, in order for an engineering employer to maintain a 50-50 male-female workforce, they would have to refuse to hire qualified men for simply being men, and recruit many more women for just being women, and this would be actual sex discrimination. A school would do the reverse for teachers, hiring men for simply being men, and refusing to hire qualified women for simply being women. So for the sake of true justice and non-discrimination, Sowell is trying to debunk this fallacy, so that people recognize the basic fact that different people groupings can be and are over-represented or under-represented naturally in different fields without it being the fault of anyone-- thus, judges should forsake their discrimination witch hunts of employers, which otherwise drive employers to discriminate to escape discrimination lawsuits. (How ironic and pitiful!)

As much as I'd like to give the whole book away, I'd also like you to buy it and read it yourself. If you are a seasoned Thomas Sowell fan (as I am), then you will discover that this book is a compact assembly of many of his previous books, including "Basic Economics", the "Race and Culture" trilogy, "Vision of the Anointed", "A Conflict of Visions", "Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One", and also includes a new thorough comparison Sowell makes (new, meaning he hasn't made this comparison before in previous books) between the Progressive Era of the beginning of the 20th century and the progressives of today, which will be very interesting for those familiar with the rest of Sowell's work.

Excellent book. Highly recommend. Anyone could benefit. This is probably the best book I've ever read written by a nonagenarian.

Don't forget to ask questions. Seek the truth, and nothing but the truth. Think. Read some of Sowell's other books on Economics and History too. Understanding Supply and Demand can help you avoid whatever the next pitfall of popular intellectual error may be.

Note to the publisher:
Chapter 4: Knowledge Fallacies
Oof! In the Benjamin Jowett poem at the beginning of chapter 4, the reader pronounced Benjamin Jowett's last name as to not rhyme with "know it" but with "plow it". Yikes! The rhyme is so good when it is pronounced correctly. If there's a way to correct the audio there, that would significantly improve the recording. It is pronounced correctly near the end of Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics" audiobook, where the same poem is used to illustrate the same point about knowledge.

"My name is Benjamin Jowett.
If it's knowledge, I know it.
I am the master of this college.
What I don't know isn't knowledge."

It's a hilarious poem, but it lost all its flare in this version when Jowett wasn't pronounced the way the poem's author intended it to be. It should be pronounced (/ˈdʒoʊɪt/), like "poet" with a "j". Hopefully an amendment is possible at this point.
Other than that, I didn't find any hiccups in the audio. Great reading. Great book.

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Fantastic book!

Revisado: 07-26-23

This book is loaded from end-to-end with brilliant insights into the latest economic developments and government ambitions to encroach upon our liberties and control our every action. Carol Roth, an intellectual giant and economic genius in her own right (you can see her previous books), has been bringing wisdom to the common regular person to help them improve their lives for her whole writing career, and this book does so relating to what you should know about political matters.

I would like to share a few parts of the book in this review so that you get a taste of the insights of the book. This book is loaded with wisdom from end to end, in a way that can make sense to you.

From Chapter 3:
"There's a famous vintage 'Twilight Zone' television show episode in which aliens arrive uninvited to earth. The aliens communicate that they came to help humanity with their more advanced technology, promising to solve earth's hunger and wars. Unsure whether to trust the aliens and their supposed noble cause, the people of earth interrogate them, and are comforted when the aliens' technology pans out. Then a special government agency decodes the title of a book that an alien representitive has left behind: they find that in English, the book's title is 'To Serve Man'. 'To Serve Man' seems like a noble and worthy intention. Based on that and the aliens' stated vision, people line up to visit the aliens' planet and expand cooperation with them. Ultimately, the woman who helped break the code of the book's title figures out the rest of the book's text, screaming to her boss as he boards a spaceship, 'To Serve Man' is a cookbook!
There are lots of people looking 'To Serve Man' these days."

Chapter 3: The World Economic Forum wants to rent you your own things
"These elites want you as an indentured servant. They want to take your life, or at least take your life and rent it back to you.
In August 2021, the WEF published on its website an article about a recent study they found enlightening enough to highlight. The article was titled, 'Psychologists say a good life doesn't have to be happy or even meaningful.' Either the WEF employs the best click-bait trolls on the planet, they can't read the room, or something is seriously wrong with them. You can choose your favorite theory; I have mine."

Chapter 5: CBDCs: You won't even own your money
"Or, what if the government wanted to stimulate the economy? They could give you currency that disappears if you don't spend it right away, perhaps incentivizing you to shop at the businesses of cronies by only making it expendable at certain retailers. Again, this is not a stretch. China is already exploring a 'use-it-or-lose-it' feature with its ECNY digital currency. The power inherent in how a CBDC can be used is unlimited and unjust, and that is why so many people who see what a CBDC could lead to are pushing back now before it is too late."
Chapter 5, on the dangers of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies)

Chapter 6: Big Tech against ownership
"The CCP does not believe in individual rights, and for that reason, it does not believe in property rights. For example, in China, nobody owns land other than the government. The government then leases it out to individuals and developers via leases that range in duration from 20-70 years. This gives an illusion of ownership; we can perhaps draw a similar line to US property taxes, but with nuanced distinctions. At any rate, getting people used to the benefits of leasing and comfortable with non-ownership is telling, like the tech companies have done with their products, and the CCP has done with their land-leases rather than their deeds."

I highly recommend this book-- hopefully the quotes from it here help it to recommend itself to you as well.

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I recommend this book as part of a trilogy

Revisado: 07-21-23

It's interesting that I read this book when I did. I was recommended this book by a friend of mine.

Meanwhile, I just finished a book that was just like this one, except the complete opposite in perspective in basically every way. This book goes very far back into history and features a lot of research of many different thinkers in the last 2,000 years, and has maybe an 80% similarity in the cast of characters to this other book, which casts them in the opposite light.

So for example, in this book, "Free Market" by Jacob Soll, one finds that Colbert is praised for his significant intervention in France's economy, and that Alexander Hamilton's visions of city-favoritism, (fractional-reserve) banking, paper money, and inflation are seen in a favorable light, and one gets the impression that Soll believes that people who believe in free markets are anarchists (which is a little annoying, because it is almost never true), so Soll is constantly commenting on every time in history when the government ever did its country a useful service, as if that is evidence against free markets, as if free markets and the existence of governments are incompatible.

Meanwhile, this other book is like the reverse of everything I just mentioned, covering so many of the same people, and having the complete opposite perspective of the same research and information-- this other book happens to be "An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought" by Murray Rothbard, a literal anarchist and Austrian economist. So in Rothbard's book, one finds that Colbert is criticized for his relentless intervention with France's economy, that Thomas Jefferson's visions of laissez-faire, anti-(fractional reserve)-banking, hard money, and noninflation are seen in a favorable light, and one is constant reminded that anarchy is Rothbard's desired form of "government" (no government) because in anarchy, markets are free. (Yet Rothbard is very interested in legal matters, such as his insistence that natural law should be upheld through 100% cash reserve banking laws for deposits. Apparently anarchists have strong opinions on how the legal system should work in a country without a government.)

Anyway. Rothbard is the exact strawman-charicature that Soll seems to be writing to persuade, and yet from what I can tell, Soll has never heard of him, otherwise Rothbard would probably have made it into Soll's discussion of Menger, Mises, Hayek, and the Austrian School in the final chapter. This is no fault of Soll's, of course-- it's impossible to hear of everyone-- but I find the irony of this coincidence to be rich, that Soll hasn't heard of a man, Murray Rothbard, who wrote the exact same yet exact opposite book as him.

Both of these books I am mentioning (praising) are clearly slanted books, as a reader of either of them will easily observe, but fortunately, reading them both cancels the slanting-effect while still revealing insightful history. The people and the events in both books match to a tee, so neither is making up stuff, so that's good. The only similarity in perspective is that they both slam Adam Smith (and they slam him for good true reasons, like his plagerism and hypocrisy late in life). But it is my opinion that Adam Smith is still a good writer and is worth the reading too, if one has never read his works and has the time to read him.

So! You want to understand the history of this stuff? I recommend a trilogy:
This book, "Free Market, by Jacob Soll"
also "An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought" by Murray Rothbard,
and finally Adam Smith's works, particularly "The Wealth of Nations".

This trio of books presents a balanced view of these topics which none of them provides as a stand-alone book.

There is another book that I would recommend as an optional pre-qual to this "trilogy", and that would be "A Conflict of Visions", by Thomas Sowell, which will help you reconcile data from conflicting storytellers' slanted perspectives and help you understand people who you disagree with. It's a wonderful book, and probably a necessary read before taking on a challenge like this trilogy, where at every turn, there is a conflict of visions.

Anyway. I'm grateful that my friend recommended this book to me. I recommend it to you as part of this unofficial trilogy.

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