None of My Business - Hardcover

O'Rourke, P.J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802128483 ISBN 13: 9780802128485

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.”

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0802128483
• ISBN 13: 9780802128485
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304