Money and Economics

The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

Where does money come from? Where does it go? Who makes it? The money magicians’ secrets are unveiled. We get a close look at their mirrors and smoke machines, their pulleys, cogs, and wheels that create the grand illusion called money. A dry and boring subject? Just wait! You’ll be hooked in five minutes. Reads like a detective story – which it really is. But it’s all true.

Honest Money

A brilliant exploration of the moral dimensions of money through a judeo-Christian lens: this book provides a compelling explanation of the many ways in which corrupt money (aka fiat currency) contributes to the corruption of human hearts, human minds, and human societies.

The Ethics of Money Production

A dramatic extension of the work of Menger, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and others to map out an economically radical and ethically challenging case for the complete separation of money and state, and a case for the privatization of money production. It is a sweeping and learned treatise that is rigorous, scholarly, and radical.

The Theory of Money and Credit

Mises wrote this book for the ages, and it remains the most spirited, thorough, and scientifically rigorous treatise on money to ever appear. It made his reputation across Europe and established him as the most important economist of his age.

On the Origins of Money

Written in the same year that he testified before the Currency Commission in Austria-Hungary, and published in English in 1892, Carl Menger explains that it is not government edicts that create money but instead the marketplace.

Philosophy

Think on These Things

This book of extemporizations by philosopher Krishnamurti will change the way you look at the world, the way you look at your own mind, and the way you look at the relationship between the two. Deep and profound in many ways, I found myself moved to tears several times while reading this book.

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Meditations: A New Translation

The best translation of the classic by philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius. This book is the personal journal of Marcus Aurelius and was never intended to be published: it will teach you many stoic principles for accepting the uncertainty, impermanence, and adversity of life.

Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic

A dramatic interpretation of Plato’s Republic, this book opened my eyes to just how foundational Neoplatonic philosophy is to Western Civilization.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)

Just as bones get stronger when subjected to stress, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals Mass Market

The lesser known second book from author Robert Pirsig, this is one of the best books on metaphysics and morality I’ve ever read. Framing the world in terms of static and dynamic qualities, Pirsig brilliantly lays out his sophisticated view of the world in this novel which combines elements of literature, non-fiction, and autobiography.

Social Sciences

HUMAN ACTION A Treatise on Economics

Mises’s book is the best defense of capitalism ever written. It covers basic economics through the most advanced material. Reading this book is the best way you could ever dream up to learn economics. Every attempt to study economics should include a thorough examination of this book.

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics

Perhaps the best introduction to economics ever written. This book is as accessible and understandable as it is comprehensive and enjoyable to read. This is a “must read” for those new to economics.

Metaphors we Live By

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects.

Where Mathematics Comes From

For a deeper dive into metaphor as a fundamental mechanism of mind, this book is essential reading. This book argues that conceptual metaphor plays a central role in mathematical ideas within the cognitive unconscious-from arithmetic and algebra to sets and logic to infinity in all of its forms.

The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society

A brilliant exploration of the nature of wealth, economics, and markets through the lens of systems thinking. According to Beinhocker, wealth creation is the product of a simple but profoundly powerful evolutionary formula: differentiate, select, and amplify.

Natural Sciences

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

A relatively simple and accessible introduction to some of the counterintuitive aspects of modern physics.

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (Science Masters Series)

In River Out of Eden, Dawkins introduces readers to some fairly abstract problems in evolutionary biology, gently guiding us through the tangles of mitochondrial DNA and the survival-of-the- fittest ethos. I especially enjoyed Dawkins’ uniquely indelible description of the process of evolution as a digital river of genetic information flowing across time.

The Physics of Life: The Evolution of Everything Hardcover

The Physics of Life argues that the evolution phenomenon is much broader and older than the evolutionary designs that constitute the biosphere, empowering readers with a new view of the globe and the future, revealing that the urge to have better ideas has the same physical effect as the urge to have better laws and better government.

The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism

The book which introduced me to the deep parallels between modern natural science and ancient wisdom. Written in the 1970s, some of the scientific concepts are now a bit dated, and there are some controversial interpretations of Eastern Mysticism by the author, but this book remains eye-opening (for all three of your eyes).

Chaos

The book which introduced me to fractals, complex adaptive systems, and chaos theory. James Gleick is a brilliant author that unpacks these complicated domains in an entertaining way all while telling the personal stories of the greatest contributors to this new science.

Literature & History

Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged is the “second most influential book for Americans today” after the Bible, according to a joint survey of five thousand people conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club in 1991. Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, charged with towering questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus.

The Prince | Niccolò Machiavelli

A book which challenged my moral intuitions and introduced me to the brutal realities of realpolitik.

The Lessons of History

All of world history condensed into 100 pages. With their accessible compendium of philosophy and social progress, the Durants take us on a journey through history, exploring the possibilities and limitations of humanity over time.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

A book which challenged my views on the diseconomies of violence and conquest. The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred; yet he also abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege.

The 48 Laws of Power

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control. The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.

My Books

Thank God for Bitcoin

The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money.

What is Money? The Saylor Series

What is Money? Setting out with the intention to unravel the mysteries of money, Michael Saylor takes us on a philosophical odyssey exploring anthropology, energy, and technology spanning from The Stone Age to The Digital Age in an effort to help people truly grasp the historic significance of Bitcoin.

My mission is to cast light on the corruption of money. As the universal medium of exchange, money is the means by which humans peacefully cooperate and compete with one another in the marketplace to produce more goods than we otherwise could. In this sense, money is mankind’s universal language of value.

Money can only exist so long as there are humans capable of producing and trading goods. Money itself is a good that emerges spontaneously on the free market—it is not a product of government central planning. Most essentially, money is a tool for humans to trade favors, or their productive time, with one another. As such, and like language itself, money is one of the most important tools for humans to communicate toward the building of a peaceful and prosperous civilization. Under the paradigm of centrally planned money known as central banking, money is monopolized, manipulated, and counterfeited at scale. In other words, central banking is the corruption of money. 

Corruption consists in the uneven application of rules, and central banks enforce rules that apply to some humans but not to others. Corruption degrades the utility of money as a tool for trading the products of human effort by making it an instrument for stealing the products of human effort through currency counterfeiting (aka inflation). It is critical to understand that inflation is legalized counterfeiting, and counterfeiting is criminalized inflation: there is no economic distinction between arbitrarily expanding the money supply and counterfeiting currency, there is only an unevenly applied legal framework.

In truth, central banks are nothing more than currency counterfeiting cartels. Money is the most important form of private property, private property is the foundation of civilization, and inflation is a violation of the private property of people holding savings in the corrupted money. As an instrument of theft, corrupt money subverts the process of civilization and poisons the human heart. Money influences how humans think, act, and perceive the world around them. When money is corrupted, humans are thus damaged psychologically, culturally, and socioeconomically. Money is the ultimate tool of economic freedom, and when central banking corrupts this indispensable tool, it instead incentivizes some humans to treat other humans as tools.

In other words, centrally banked corrupt money is an institutionalized system of economic slavery. In this way, the monetary standard and the moral standard are inexorably linked: the extent to which theft is immoral is the same extent to which corrupt money is immoral. The only solution to the pervasive corruption of money in the modern world is the incorruptible money known as Bitcoin. As the only money with a perfectly fixed supply, Bitcoin is not subject to monopolization nor counterfeiting. Uncorrupt money is the basis of a moral existence, and by extension, incorruptible money is the unshakable foundation of a peaceful, prosperous, and impervious civilization. This is why my mission is to cast light on the corruption of money. Hence the mantra often repeated by Bitcoiners: “fix the money, fix the world.”