Since the unraveling of the U.S. economy you hear many people shouting from the rooftops “I want my country back”. At the gist of this statement is a need to capture the greatness of a previous moment in U.S. history that was for the betterment of the individual. As many would say, “the good ole days”. For many, the current economic and political environment has created a lot of uncertainty in their lives. However, I have a couple issues with this statement. First off, who are the individuals who want to go back in time? Second, how far back would they like to go? Third, who do they feel took the country from them? Fourth, where do they live? Five, what is their current economic level? Six, what was their current economic level at the time they would like to go back to? If you posed this question to a million people you would probably get a million types of answers.

A lot of people in this U.S. have had their heads in the sand for a while (On certain things I can include myself in this category). To be honest, I have been part of the problem in one way or another, so these criticisms are not only leveled at others, but also myself. We have now become so delusional and desperate for an economic antidote that recent polls show that 36% of Americans wish for the economic policies of Ronald Reagan. I would like to know who these people are, but that’s quite a considerable number knowing the “Gipper’s” economic policies were pretty disastrous. Although many have debunked the merits of the “Reagan Revolution”, many romantic nostalgists just won’t let go. That’s not to say there weren’t people who benefited from the policies of Reagan, but collectively his policies were a disaster. Just ask former budget Director David Stockman on how ‘wonderful” the economic Reagan era was.

The disruptive social and economic “bullet” was fired decades ago. Let’s paint a picture. Just imagine millions, maybe even billions of people lined up after one another. An individual fires a bullet (economic instability and social disruption) from a gun. When you get hit with that bullet it’s economic anarchy for you. In that same line, many folks were, lets say number 10267 to get fired upon. Some were even in the hundredth and millionth or billionth.  If you were towards the back of the line it wasn’t your problem because  33,  672, 45976, 273192, 834165, 5938200242 are getting socially and economically “murked” way before you. Many even thought, “oh it will never get to me” or even “Maybe the bullet will lose its momentum and velocity” before it gets to me. Or maybe in denial about the destruction of the bullet, “Maybe the bullet won’t hurt when it gets to me”. Maybe they felt it was someone else’s problem.

Now that the bullet is racing forward and it’s, as O.C. said, “Times Up“, people are clamoring around for answers as to what happened.  Of course it would be “nice” to go back in time when the bullet wasn’t so close to home. The net of economic disruption had already been cast. Now that person is in the net with everyone else.

This reminds me of the Columbine father that said the following:

I am here today because my son Daniel would want me to be here today. If my son Daniel was not one of the victims, he would be here with me today. Something is wrong in this country when a child can grab a gun, grab a gun so easily, and shoot a bullet into the middle of a child’s face, as my son experienced. Something is wrong. But the time has come to come to understand that a Tech-9 semi-automatic -bullet weapon like that, that killed my son, is not used to kill deer. It has no useful purpose. It is time to address this problem.

It’s sad to see any father lose their son to such horrific violence, but at the time, we had already reached the tipping point where guns were in the hands of our youth. The carnage has now reached “everyones” doorstep, but many doorsteps have already been visited by gun violence. The anarchy is now more widespread. Now that we have shared economic grief, we are harking back to the “good ole days”. Keep in mind that there were many before you that have been living with these wounds, but your wounds are now fresh.

I remember a discussion I had with a close family member in the mid 90s and we were talking about the gang violence that had been prevalent in a neighborhood right next to ours. The town was Roosevelt, Long Island in New York. At the time the Bloods and Crips had made significant inroads into the neighborhood. We lived in Uniondale, about a stones throw away. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Wow, we really need to do something about this gang violence. A lot people getting killed in Roosevelt
Family Member: Well that’s Roosevelt, you know how THEY are
Me: Hmmm…well what happens when the gangs come to Uniondale?
Family Member: No, that won’t happen. This is Uniondale, gangs don’t come to Uniondale
Me: I don’t think so. If we don’t take care of the surrounding communities around us, we are definitely going to have gangs here
Family Member: [blank stare]

As expected, the Bloods and the Crips made their way into Uniondale and although the degree of our gang problem was lesser than Roosevelt, we still had people getting shot over gang violence and whatnot. In short, when the economic plane goes down it won’t matter that you paid $5000 dollars for your first-class ticket. Irrespective of your seating arrangement, we are all going down. It’s just a matter of who hits the ground first.

In September 2009 I wrote a post about learning the roots of the 2008 Financial Crisis. It really gets to the crux of why I was compelled to go on somewhat of an economic “expedition” to find out what went wrong with the U.S. economic system in 2008. Prior to the crisis there I wasn’t aware of any body of economic work that intelligently outlined the causes (not just the symptoms) of the financial crisis than the Austrian School of Economics. As I’ve said in earlier posts, I truly believe that the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) is by far one of the most complete descriptions of the “science”, if you will, of economic booms and busts. In addition to the ABCT, I believe that the Austrians have a way of interweaving a healthy amount of skepticism when it relates to the government intervening in the broader economy.

Unfortunately many other economic disciplines make wild assumptions, often very overly optimistic assumptions about the value of government intervention. At the same time, I have my own skepticism on the benefits of a 100% Libertarian approach to our social and political problems, but they clearly have the right pulse on many of the causes of how financial markets and economic incentives can be distorted by “well intentioned” governments. Private corporations don’t get off the hook, but in the context of the financial crisis, they worked in tandem with the government to completely destroy the economy.

I want to make a couple of points:

1. Be an economic policy skeptic. All policy isn’t created equal. As a matter of fact, many of the policy “prescriptions” by the government were completely backward and financially destructive and/or these policies were instituted to benefit a few while impoverishing many.
2. Read some of the suggested resources below. As a matter fact, read as much economic policy as you can. Many times you’ll get to the “real” intentions behind a lot of these policies.
3. Your Congress is bought (Thank you Dylan Ratigan from MSNBC). Please watch the video below and make sure you listen to every single word. If it’s not clear after you watch this video that voting for these cronies is a waste of time, then just off yourself. Okay..that was a joke..don’t off yourself but really understand that depending on our “do nothing” Congress is a waste of time.
4. The only option left is civil disobedience. What I like to call “soft” anarchy. Be an active participant in the economy. Vote with your pocket. Our government was not always enslaved to corporate interests. This can be undone, but it’s going to take a lot more than marching, waving hands, and holding creatively snark protest signs in different cities. There’s trillions of dollars at stake and if a high level of creative destruction doesn’t take place by the people, then we are playing a very dangerous, albeit participatory charade of musical “armchair revolutionary” chairs. Instead of sitting at home or in a cafe we are sitting in the streets.

Books

• Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi
• Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry by Dylan Ratigan
• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
• Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
• The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman
• America’s Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard
• Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Ron Paul

(AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

At the root of every social movement is the will to change the present situation for something better. At the root of the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now moved to other cities around the country, the intention of this movement is to unhook the almost parasitical tentacles of Wall Street from government policy (Washington). More on this here

I don’t believe ANY significant changes will happen via government policy or Washington’s intervention. Washington is an entity that is in the last stages of terminal “political” cancer. At the end of the day, this has to result in the banking firms that were responsible for this crisis to be reprimanded for their corporate malfeasance. We should reward (with our business) those financial institutions that are fiscally responsible, and move our money out of those financial institutions that contributed to the financial crisis.

I’m not convinced that the TBTF banks really understand what they did, nor does our government really care to prosecute these banks who irresponsibly unhinged the global economy for their narrow benefit.

So what we truly need to occupy, is our apathy. It’s our apathy and reluctance to being properly engaged in our political process that has contributed to Wall Street usurping power from the laymen and laywomen. In short, we kept our eye off the ball for too long. This corporate takeover has been happening for decades. Some would say it’s been happening since the inception of the Federal Reserve Bank. Regardless of when you think international banks started unsettling our political process, we are clearly at a tipping point where banks have complete control over our political process.

My suggestion is we engage in a bit of creative destruction to bring the balance of power back into the hands of where it belongs. the Proletariat and many of the hard working people of America (and around the world) who watched their jobs, wealth, financial security and personal livelihood go up in flames by the Wall Street, Federal Reserve Bank, Government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) doomsday machine.

We should start with the following approach:

1. Remove all your assets and loans (checking, savings, IRA, Mutual funds, Brokerage accounts, credit cards, car loans, mortgages, etc) from all banks that were given a bailout from the government.
2. Take all those assets/loans and transfer them to a credit union or firm that was not given a bailout.
3. Everyone who did the first 2 steps should draft a personal letter using their own words and explain to the banks/investment firms (who no longer have your business) why you removed all your money. In addition to that, explain why you moved your assets to the other bank/investment firm.

It’s time to transform our thoughts into action. Show these banks and our “absentee landlord” government that they cannot push our society to the edge of financial oblivion, while profiting off that same financial destruction.

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it. – Bob Hope

Related Links

This blog post below was a comment I posted from an article my wife shared on her Facebook wall. My boy Clarence, suggested I turn the comment into a blog post. The article, Black Unemployment Highest in 27 Years appeared on Roland Martin’s magazine/blog website. It seems like you have three typical responses when someone sees these type of “Blacks have a more destitute situation than __________ (insert race of choice here)” articles. The first response is “America is racist, ergo if there wasn’t racism we wouldn’t have such high unemployment”. The second response is, “Blacks are a bunch lazy fry chickin’ eating watermelon cologne wearing, hip hop lovin’, overspending, loud mouthin’ government lovin’, drag on the economy havin’ monkeys that are unemployable who will continue to be the last hired and the first fired.” The third response is, “Oh these ____________ (insert race of choice here) keep taking our jobs. They’ll take so much less to work ______________ job”.

These absurd responses don’t get us any closer to solutions. They are simple knee-jerk reactions to a long-standing problem. I have seen these types of “high unemployment among blacks” headlines since I graduated from college (and before college) and it’s getting worse. The technology shift was supposed to be our golden parachute into prosperity. Didn’t happen. Happen for some but not many and clearly not enough. I wish I finished my If I Had My Own Black Leadership Forum series, but I still have 2 parts left to do. If you’re interested in reading the first 3 parts, you can start here However, I give you My Thoughts on Black Unemployment.

There are no short turnarounds for the high black unemployment rate but at the root of our problems is a misallocation of economic resources. Whether you believe the misallocation of economic resources was driven by a bunch of klan sympathizing racists in corporate america (and the general workplace) and our political system or self inflicted by the black community, we are clearly dealing with a misallocation of economic resources in the black community. This situation has been going on since our “inclusion” into the main economy. Many of you have heard me say this before (and I’ll say it again):

The total GDP of the African-American community makes us the 13th largest economy in the world. That’s right, only 0.6% of planet earth (African Americans) represents the 13th largest economy in the world. The African American/Black Market profile from the Magazine Publishers of America has slated the purchasing power of African Americans to hit the 1 trillion dollar mark by 2012. How can the 13th largest economy in the world, have one of the highest unemployment rates in America? Umm..misallocation of economic resources. (I said it in my quiet e-typing-voice so you don’t get annoyed by me saying this a billion times. I might say it a couple more times)

There are only a few individuals that have actually outlined real solutions and they are the following:

• Powernomics: The National Plan to Empower Black America by Dr. Claud Anderson
• Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown by Tony Brown
• Blueprint for Black Power: A Moral, Political, and Economic Imperative for the Twenty-First Century by Amos N. Wilson
• The Entrepreneurial Secret To Starting a Business: Without A Bank Loan, Collateral or Revenue (Volumes 1, 2, 3) by Cedric Muhammad

Although I have huge issues with their past prejudice/religious theology, the other organization is the Nation of Islam. With all it’s past faults, prejudices, and warped theology, Message to the Blackman by Elijah Muhammad was the first book that had me thinking about how my income and productivity in the economy made other folks rich and not my local community. I repeat, the book’s religious theology is rife with shirk, misinformation, hatred and black supremacist theology. However, it’s economic prescriptions are 21st century. The book should be republished, minus the hatred. If I was part of the NOI, I would include a public apology in the introduction of the book.

If you look at many black media communication vehicles, including Black Enterprise mag and BET (Viacom), many of them [black owned or not] have never mentioned any of these individuals. If they mentioned them, there hasn’t been any real effort in promoting their ideas. The average black person has no idea who these individuals are. That is not a simple oversight. It’s intentional. Not in a conspiratorial way, but in a “these individuals will upset the apple cart” type of way. Unfortunately, Amos Wilson has passed on but his rich wealth of economic information lives on in his seminal work, Blueprint for Black Power. It might be tempting to dismiss many of these individuals as a bunch of black supremacist separatist who long for a day when the black seperation movement will transform itself into a 21st century authoritarian movement. No, this is a immature characterization of their intent and economic ideas. They were concerned with the flimsy social contract that America promised it’s black citizens and wanted to usher in a concrete economic platform which we could depend on with certainty. Clearly we are in uncertain times and the social contract that America had with it’s black citizens is gone.

If Black America studied these ideas in these books with vigor and dedication, I believe we can significantly lower black unemployment into the lower single digits in about 20-30 years while becoming a viable and powerful economic engine for growth. There are no easy answers. It’s going to take time, skill reallocation, and a lot of money from those wealthy black individuals to invest in this plan. The government and non-black corporations have already moved on. This is what many of the individuals I mentioned above were trying to say 50 years ago. There will come a time when African Americans will be completely on their own. No jobs programs, no social institutions, no nothing. So in short, they were saying we have to build our own institutions and local economies of scale because the “support window” is going to eventually close. Now that the American economy is in such disarray, its going into hardcore economic Darwinian mode.

Obama and any other government employee can do very little for the black community. His jobs bill cannot overturn hundreds of years of economic mismanagement and social degradation. The government and too many “black leaders” are absentee landlords, time to look within our own community for answers. If they had your back, you would of been out of this mess a long time ago. We are on our own.

Over the last couple weeks, my wife and I have been clearing out the house in preparation to move overseas. As we are going through our waterfall of stuff, we realized something “Wow we have a lot of crap!”. To be honest, I don’t know where all this crap comes from. Since my wife and I have been in the apartment, we go through our annual ritual of clearing out the closet(s) and for some odd reason we end up with 5-10 garbage bags of..well..crap. From old electronics to shoes to comforters to old CIA files of assassination targets. I just wonder if there is a hidden portal in the back of our closets that meticulously adds stuff from other people’s closets.

This recent ritual of getting rid of stuff resulted in about 10 bags of stuff that we’ll send to the salvation army (or some thrift shop) and about 6-7 garbage bags of..well..garbage. If that wasn’t enough we have 6 bags of mail that will be shredded tomorrow. (we have so much we had to hire a professional shredding company to come to our apartment so we dump the stuff into the truck). I was shocked. Keep in mind that we have a 1 bedroom apartment. This mysterious “closet accumulation” phenomenon reminds me of the mysterious “lose 1 sock in the dryer” phenomenon. Is this some conspiracy between the cotton sock suppliers and the dryer manufacturers? Are the dryer manufacturers getting kickbacks from the cotton sock companies (Hanes and Fruit of the Looms) for randomly destroying single socks in the dryer? Do they evaporate after 20 washes?

All this industry conspiracy speculation reminds me of the the assumed conspiracy that Adam Carolla so humorously talked about in his book, In Fifty Years We’ll All be Chicks…And Other Complaints from an Angry Middled-Aged White Guy about the toaster and bread manufacturers. From pg 184 on Toasters:

Where’s the toaster technology? Toasters haven’t progressed since Lucy and Ricky were on TV, but now we’ve got an ankle monitor to make sure Lindsay Lohan hasn’t taken a drink. Imagine traveling back in time to the forties and telling someone sitting around their kitchen, “in 2010 this toaster isn’t gonna toast bread one second faster than it does now. Not one %$%^&*$# second. But there will be a thing the size of a pack of cigarettes you strap to your ankle that will contact a satellite if you’ve had a thimbleful of Kahlua”. They’d slam your head into their Formica tabletop and bury you in a backyard.

And half the time the toast comes out burned. Why was it built with the ability to burn the toast anyway? Do we need the ruin-my-breakfast setting? There are degrees that people enjoy, from lightly toasted to dark brown. But nobody wants briquette. Jacuzzis go from warm to hot, but not enough to kill a human or poach a salmon. The heater in your car can get pretty warm, but it will never go up to blast furnace and melt your face. Why do I need to smelt ore in my toaster? I bet the toaster manufactures have some kind of unholy alliance with the bread companies. I picture a guy who looks like Karl Rove, wearing a gold Toaster Manufactures of America blazer and smoking a cigar, saying “What if I could guarantee that every seventh piece of bread ends up in the garbage? It would increase your sales by fifteen percent. “Then we see the Pillsbury Doughboy laugh, slide a briefcase full of cash across the desk, and say “I think this is the beginning of beautiful relationship.”

With all that said, my wife and I still don’t own a flat-screen television, so maybe our carbon-consuming footprint is not so huge after all.

This post was inspired by Langton Hughes’s A Dream Deferred.

Rather than go through the typical romanticization of our founders on July 4th while gushing over the 1st Amendment like a first born son, I’m going to write about some of the pressing issues of an America that has broken it’s promise with it’s citizens. Some contemporary patriots might scoff at me for suggesting such a thing, but my audience are for those who have been left behind, and not those how have fortunately benefited from the American fruits of liberty. Contrary to popular belief, everyone has not reached the promise land. Let me be careful with that last line. I’m not suggesting we start helicoptering pallets of money down to the masses. I’m suggesting that upward mobility is becoming more elusive and contrary to popular belief America does not have more mobility than other nations. In fact it has one of the lowest.

Some might say I’m being too hard on America and I should tone the “anti-patriotic” language down. When your country is at Defcon 1 in regards to social and economic issues, you have to ring the alarm to let everyone know that that we have a 10 alarm fire. Why should I save “patriotic” face when we are not living up to what this country has promised since the ratification of the Constitution? I see America as a country that is slowly losing it’s way. We hear a lot of lofty speeches from politicians, but when the citizens are asked to make hard choices we fall back to our ideological political camps.

Below you’ll find a video that is extremely telling in regards to the current economic shift that is happening globally. James Wolfensohn, former president of The World Bank and CEO of Wolfensohn and Co. does an eye-opening presentation for Stanford Graduate School of Business students on the coming global economic shift. In short, America and some of it’s Western compatriots are running out of time. It has debt to it’s eyeballs and waning political leverage on the global stage. It has financial obligations (Healthcare, Social Security, etc) that’s depressing it’s ability to leverage it’s internal resources. China, India, Africa and many other GCC countries are gobbling up global GDP faster than the cookie monster disintegrates cookies. If that wasn’t bad enough, we have a populace that does not have the 21st century education and skills needed to complete on a global scale.

Without further ado I give you James Wolfensohn, who asserts that in the next 40 years, a global power shift will see today’s leading economic countries drop from having 80% of the world’s income to 35%.

• Documentary: Citizen U.S.A.: A 50 State Road Trip
• Half of Americans say that they definitely or probably couldn’t come up with $2,000 in 30 days
• Van Jones Launches Movement To Rebuild The American Dream
• Think Again: American Decline by Gideon Rachman
• Busts Keep Getting Bigger and Bigger. Why? by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells

So who are the “Bickersons”? (the first time I heard this used is from the book Spousonomics) In my view this is any couple who quarrel a lot. It’s like walking around with steel shoes through a field of egg shells laced with magnetic dynamite. No matter what the topic, an argument is going to pop off and more than likely it will be explosive. It’s taking the most nuanced issues and blowing them up into stellar battles of galatic proportions. In most instances the root of the “bickering” is something else, but these smaller issue serve as “death by a thousand cuts” to the relationship which can leave both people extremely unhappy.

I’m reaching the last couple books to round out my research on my beige paper (We’ll it’s actually a white paper but I’m not a professor or a man with a P.h.d so it will be a beige paper for now) on the Science of Relationships. What started out as an idea for a blog post on some of the neurology and psychology behind how men and women interact in their relationships eventually grew into a “beige paper” on this same subject. One of the books is called Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes by Paula Szuchman. Wait…now before you run to the hills and say “There’s no way I’m taking relationship advice from some economist”, you should realize that out of the 15-20 books that have contributed to my research over the last 3 years, this book is one of the most pragmatic and helpful books on rooting out some of the underlying dysfunctions of many relationships. I’m not saying this because I love economics, I’m saying this because the information is very straight forward, honest and pragmatic.

Many of the problems that are identified in this book have been painstakingly researched over decades and although the book has a “economics” wrapper, you don’t have to know anything about economics to understand how to run your relationship like an economy that is experiencing robust growth instead of a depression (which unfortunately many relationships are). Below you’ll find two audio snippets from the book that highlight a couple issues that bring about much angst in too many relationships. Suprisingly one of the biggest pain points for most relationships (that eventually lead the decline of the relationship) is household chores. Before you dismiss this as some strange aberration, check out this quote from the book Spousonomics:

If arguing over chores seems petty to you, consider this: In 2007, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey that asked “What makes a marriage work?” The number one answer was faithfulness, followed by sex. Makes sense. But third, ahead of everything else, including kids, money, and religion: sharing household chores.

Other research backs this up. According to a 2009 survey of working women by the Boston Consulting Group, the second most common thing people argue about with their partners are household chores. That’s behind money but ahead of sex, work, and raising kids. In our own Exhaustive, Groundbreaking, and Very Expensive Marriage Survey, 73 percent of women said they did more than 50 percent of the housework, whereas only 40 percent of men said they did more than half the housework (you have to a least give the men credit for honesty)

A couple days ago I was on a thread talking about relationships and many of the complaints were related to the roles and responsibilities of the house. To be honest, that was about 50% of the complaints. There seemed to be a wide dichotomy (of Grand Canyon proportions) on who should do what in the house. However, enjoy the audio snippets:

50/50 Household chores vs Comparative Advantage

The importance of changing the Rules in your relationship

I’ve spent the last couple weeks cruising through the documentary Collapse on my IPhone. The documentary is on Michael Ruppert, a police officer turned independent reporter who predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter, From the Wilderness.

There is some pretty scary stuff in Collapse. Mr. Ruppert goes way beyond just fractional reserve banking, fiat currency and Federal Reserve monetary policy, but spends a substantial amount of time on the potential societal impacts for the human population because there are limited resources on planet earth.

This documentary serves more of reality check than another boilerplate conspiracy theory piece. As Mr. Ruppert so eloquently stated:

Of course I’ve been called a conspiracy theorist but I don’t deal in conspiracy theory, I deal with conspiracy fact

The audio above is by far some of the truest and honest reality check I’ve heard since Alan Moore’s Culture of Steam quote regarding the doubling of information.

Another other choice quote from the documentary so you know what we are dealing with:

If your in a camp with a bunch of campers, and a bear attacks, you don’t have to be faster than the bear. You only have to be faster than the slowest camper. – Michael C. Ruppert

Hello, my name is Malik Abdul Rasheed and I’m a recovering Software Pirate and File Sharer.

Maybe we should start a public SPFSAAI (Software Pirate File Sharer Anonymous Amnesty International) program because the only way you are going to get honesty about what people are doing when they download (steal) software or music they haven’t paid for, is for the forum to allow anonymity and a general pardon for past piracy offenses. Otherwise we are stuck with the denial of what has been going on since the inception of Napster. Let’s just call it “shealing” (a hybrid of stealing and sharing), less I be hunted down with pitch forks by millions for calling people thieves. Don’t be offended, it takes one to know one. . A friend of mine just gave me the audio book for Freakanomics yesterday. I don’t feel that guilty because I bought a copy of that book for my brother and have given endless promotion of that book in many social circles, so for now, let’s just say I gave Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (authors of Freakonomics) free advertising.

What inspired me to write this post was a wonderful book called the The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do by Eduardo Porter. Yes, I paid for it from Audible. He has a chapter called the Price of FREE where he goes into the history of intellectual property and public copying dating back to the lithograph in the 1800s. If you have 44 minutes I would suggest you listen to the audio above, which really gets into some of the social psychology and economics behind software and music piracy. If you want to go the media page directly, you can go here. You’ll get a taste of what happens when piracy meets the likes of Radio Head, Saul Williams, and the Dark Knight, not to mention many other interesting ideas behind file sharing and software piracy. No, I’m not going to give you the .mp3. (dang you piracy addicts, always looking for a sharing “hit”). Back up off me, I got no product for you today. You’ll have to find another dealer.

Let me get couple a things off my chest, I’m a recovering pirate. Although you’d have to torture me to tell you how I got around Audible’s DRM and was able to upload and share with you 44 minutes of Eduardo Porter’s audio book, I believe that my “sharing snippets of product with the world” via social media, pales in comparison to the relentless downloading of terabytes of music and movies that sit on servers, ipods, smart phones, and the like. I’m not saying I’m right, nor am I saying this is okay. As of 2011 I have not downloaded any software that I did not pay for. Trust me, I’ve been tempted. I’ve taken a stand, and I’ve decided that I’m not going to pirate any files, whether they be related to audio books or software (Okay Freakonomics was my last “sheal”)

Below, Eduardo Porter sums up the transformation of power very succinctly:

The information revolution didn’t make information FREE , what it did, was transfer the money from the producers of information to the owners of the technologies that deliver it to their audience.

At the root of my change of heart comes down to intellectual property and economics. There is a “robin hood psychosis” that people seem to hold on to when it comes to justifying piracy. Regardless if the theft is from a independent artist, mega-mogul artists, small software company, big software company, book publishers etc. At the root of it, it seems that there is $100 dollars sitting on the side walk and people have decided to take it without asking “Hey did anyone lose $100 dollars?”.

However my purpose of this post is not to admonish those individuals who part-take in this behavior. My intent is to get people to sit in the “product creation” driver’s seat, and think about how you’d feel if the time, effort, money, and personal utility you invested in producing something was sold for nothing while crowds sourced your product for FREE with the fervor of a meth addict looking for their next hit. Whether you are considering the economics or ethics of piracy there is something to be said when we’ve become accustomed to discounting the value of someone’s time and creative efforts because we believe our actions fall in the long-term “borrowing” category.

In this new world of free data entitlement, the few have to shoulder the cost of many. Once again, not an easy task to consider when access to terabytes of data is at your fingertips while the distance between you and the same data is fractions of an inch away via a mouse click.

I’ll close with this excerpt from Eduardo Porter’s The Price of Everything from the section Stealing Sneakers:

It’s little bit like stealing sneakers, he observed. It is not possible that a street gang that steals a shipment of sneakers might ultimately boost sales of the footwear if it happens to be a trendsetting paragon of coolness in the neighborhood. A kid how shoplifts steak might mean more business for the butcher over the long term if the theft induces in the thief a lifelong taste for prime beef. Stiill, Leibowitz, pointed out, “I have never seen these types of argument put forward in a serious way to suggest that society might be better off if the prohibition on theft were overturned.”

On the Internet, the thief is trying to convince the butchers it is in his best interest to hand the steak over to influence his dietary habits.

• Podcast: This American Life – See No Evil
• The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales An Empirical Analysis

Let me be frank, understanding economics (at least U.B.E.P Understanding the Big Economic Picture) takes a lot of reading, patience and a hellava lot of googling archaic economic vocabulary that on the surface seems to make absolutely no sense. However, once you are able to get past the mysterious language of economics and understand the context of this vocabulary U.B.E.P becomes more concrete and eventually you’ll get the “Ahah” moment.

So why am I so relentless when it comes to economic stuff? Well for starters, the economic policies of government have very deep impacts on the amount of money we take home. From taxes, to interest rates, money in circulation, to how much our government spends on certain mandates and a slew of other things that would probably give me carpal tunnel syndrome in my fingers if I attempted to write out all the thousands of circumstances.

Below are 3 books which I believe are good starters or as I like to say “launch pads” into more sophisticated economic fields of thought. I believe there are several critical areas that each of these books cover. One is macro-economics (understanding how the sum decisions from individuals, firms, and governments impact trends, incentives and movements in the broader economic market), then personal economics (how your behavior fits into the larger scheme of the broader economic market), and how maximizing your personal utility is by far one of the most productive acts you can do to make your skills scarce, hence increasing your value in the broader economic market. These 3 books are as simple as it gets. No fancy language, no crazy complex charts, and lots of objectivity to give us an untarnished and balanced perspective needed to tackle many economic issues that challenge us on a day-to-day basis.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan

What is there not to like about this book? So simple and concise minus the ideological hyperbole of free markets vs government. Naked Economics strips away all the fancy rhetoric and explains economics in a language that just about anyone can understand. Don’t be discouraged if you bump into something that sounds unfamiliar. A simple “googling” of the particular word or phrase will get you back on track and it’s extremely rare that you’ll run into this issue. The author wrote this book because he was tired of all the “ivory tower” economist explaining economics in such a drab and complex way. If these mainstream economist are the only ones who understand each other and not the general public, what is the point? This book will clear the fog of economic misunderstandings, not to mention it’s pretty darn funny.

The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J Stanley and William D. Danko

One of the first books that really helped me understand the difference between saving money instead of looking like you have money was The Millionaire Next Door. This book is the ultimate “Anti-Joneses” personal finance doctrine. What’s extremely helpful is this book attempts at destroying a lot of the myths and urban legends that surround wealthy people. Want to know why most millionaires are NOT entertainers and athletes? How is this possible..uh read the book. You’ll be shocked to know how much the average millionaire spends on his/her watch. Want to know? Read the book. Or how about how much the average millionaire spends on a car? Want to know? Read the book. I promise you, you’ll walk away with a new understanding of why saving is so important, especially when it comes to your own personal utility. Too many people carry a fictitious narrative about what wealth is and who are the fortunate few who’ve been able to reach the status of wealthy. I must read for those who are interested in finding out where the seedlings of wealth begin and how those seedlings grow into wealthy roots.

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

One of the most difficult concepts to understand is the dynamic “magic” that keeps the economy chugging along. In short, incentives and human capital. Incentive is the factor that motivates an individual to do a particular act. In the context of economics, it’s usually more money and quality of life. In some instances aspiring for more money might not be tied to just material objects, but could be tied to savings which breeds financial security or other philanthropic aspirations. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers is all about the circumstances, timing, and incentives that allowed select individuals to do extraordinary things in the economy, while explaining what happens when people master the art of aligning their personal incentives with their stock of human capital. This is the driving force behind our global economy.

Honorable Mention

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

Once you finished with the first 3 books above, you can’t move forward with understanding economics before you read Economics in One Lesson. Although written within a Libertarian vein (I say this as a compliment), it’s does a pretty good job of removing a lot of the “economic myths” that seem to never go away. The language is a bit heavier than the books above, but it’s still a good read. Although written almost 60 years ago, the content is as relevant today as it was then. A must read for those who want to rise above the cloud of economic confusion and fallacious punditry.