In print at last!

Congratulations! My copy of your book arrived three days ago! You are now in line to be read right after other great company: Gunnar Myrdal (The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory) and Jean Tirole (Economics for the Common Good).

Congratulations, John. Very best wishes. My news – I very much hope Peter Buttigieg wins the 2020 nomination and the election. He won’t, of course. Too young and too gay.

And then there’s the matter of economics, about which you write so eloquently – but to a highly select audience. That’s not a critique but rather an observation. Economics matters more than ever, as David Siders notes in Politico: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/28/democrats-economy-2020-trump-1291371

In his own campaign announcement video, Biden did not explicitly mention jobs or the economy once. “We don’t really have a robust national message right now” on the economy, said Celinda Lake, a leading Democratic strategist and pollster. “We will tend to talk about things like paid leave and equal pay — and those things are all very popular policies. But they don’t add up to an economic message that is robust enough to win the presidency and beat Donald Trump, who talks about a very robust economic policy.” She said, “You may agree or not with it, but you know what [his message] is. And Democrats, you don’t know what it is. And that’s a recipe for disaster in 2020 – And that’s a recipe for disaster in 2020. Ahem.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party and media elites (same diff) are still huffing Brennan and Clapper’s media glue – slapping each other on the back and claiming the Mueller report confirms all the good work they’ve been doing since 2015. The Dems and the Republicans failed to find an economic message to compete with Trump in 2016. They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The Versailles liberals in their palaces boast of their interest in the plight of the lower orders and shriek about the vulgarian hordes destroying ‘their’ country via the ballot box. Where are the millionaire celebrities who will lead Dems to the promised land? How about a free concert with Springsteen like in 2008?

Pete is calm and thoughtful. He’s got my support for the moment, for all the good it will do him. Right now it looks like Trump will crush him.

Hope the book is a best-seller! Really!

I don’t recall any previous comments here appearing under the screen-name pk, but somehow something about the style of the comment is familiar to me: does anybody else get the same feeling?

I have just started the audio book version – just the intro so far. I really like the narration – perfectly measured for my drive time enjoyment but also speeds up well for those with a faster mind than mine.

I will come back at some point with further comments. I have some prior knowledge of economics (PPE) but the angle this book is coming from makes it interesting already.

@JQ:

My Dog, man! You mean it’s been eight years since ZE?

Apart from the general shape of our politics, we have something else in common: We are growing old together much faster than is healthy for us!

I will def order EI2L*

*I clearly recall reading the Hazlitt when I was a youngling ( around twenty, perhaps). I think I might have been rather impressed by it (the neat, clean, apparent logic of “the broken window fallacy—opportunity cost !—, of “Do Unions Increase Wages?”) I got over it fairly quickly. Within a few years I was a lefty union activist.