Unputdownable

Books are anathema to me. But this one is just unputdownable. A few excerpts:

An empire is like a bull market. It grows, it develops . . . often it passes into a bubble phase, when
people come to believe the most absurd things.
We don’t know what stage the American empire has reached . . . but
we look around and see so many degenerate and absurd things, we guess:
We must be nearer the end than the beginning.

This kind of madness is hard not to like; it is like an aging woman who thinks she becomes
more fetching with each passing year. The gap between perception
and reality grows wider every day, until finally, the mirror cracks.

They went to the polling stations in November 2004 and believed they
were selecting the government they wanted, when the choice had already
been reduced to two men of the same class, same age, same schooling,
same wealth, same secret club, same society, with more or less the same
ideas about how things should be run.

Each generation seems to think they are the f irst to stand upright, that
their mothers and fathers walked on four legs and howled at the moon!

Another dead man, James Madison, made it even clearer: “Democracies,”
he wrote, “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention;
have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of
property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been
violent in their death.”
So, we leave you “a Republic, if you can keep it,” added Ben Franklin.
Well, we couldn’t keep it. Now, we have a curious empire, with a
constitution as flexible as its money.

Distilled information tends to be expressed as moral interdictions.
Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t buy expensive stocks or sell cheap ones. Don’t
expect to get something for nothing. Don’t neglect your spouse. Don’t forget
St. Patrick’s day. Don’t spend too much. Don’t eat too fast. Don’t drink
before 6 PM. Don’t mess around with the boss’s wife. Each don’t represents
lessons learned by previous generations. For every don’t, there must be a
million sorry souls burning in Hell.

American spending created a boom in China, where the average person
works in a sweatshop, lives in a hovel, and saves 25 percent of his earnings.Meanwhile, in the United States, the average man lives in a house he can’t pay for, drives a car he can’t afford, and waits for the next shipment from Hong Kong for distractions he can’t resist. He saves nothing and believes the Chinese will lend him money forever, on the same terms.