Bart:

What the hell is this?

Lisa:

It’s one of those campy ’70s throwbacks that appeals to Generation Xers.

Bart:

We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little.

Almost four years ago, as we were preparing to move to Pennsylvania for what turned out to be a 3-year stay, we found ourselves purging every possession we could bear to part with. Part of this process meant separating our library into the books we had to store and the books we were going to get rid of. Having held onto my books since the days when all I could afford were trade paperbacks, I found that the majority of my books were yellow and crumbling.

My wife still found it a horrifying prospect to throw books away, especially good books, no matter how unreadable. To my surprise, I shared her reluctance. It didn’t make any sense. I knew I could buy new and better copies of these books if they mattered enough — that I’d have to, in fact, if I wanted to reread them — but the idea of throwing books away seemed only one step short of the sacrilege of book burning.

That’s when I decided to burn my books.

It was meant to be a liberating act, a symbolic display of the victory of reason over irrationality, my declaration of independence from the secular religion of book lovers. (Or you could think of it as a sacrament to the more abstract version of the religion, where the immaterial contents are worshipped, and not their temporal incarnation.)

I want to describe for you the catharsis, the exultation, the giddy sense of irreversibility as I watched the flames engulf my decades-old collection of tattered volumes … but that’s not at all what happened.

It was a bust. Very anticlimactic to take a flame to a book only to discover that books don’t burn very easily. Awkward and disappointing to apply lighter fluid only to find that they still burn slowly. I had too damn many books to burn.

So I threw them out after all.

I’m remembering this story because the synchronistic theme for today seems not to be taxes, but books.

First this pointer from iceberg to a Washington Post article on New York’s Library Hotel, where your room number is Dewey decimal and your room is filled with more books than you could possibly read on your chosen subject:

“Your Room Is Booked”

Then The Writer’s Almanac informs us:

It was on this day in 1926 that the Book-of-the-Month Club shipped out its first selection, Lolly Willows, or, The Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner, to just about 5,000 members. Within a few decades, the Book-of-the-Month Club would become one of the most influential publishing forces in the history of American literature.

The Book-of-the-Month Club let customers sign up to buy one book a month at $3 apiece. The books were selected by an independent panel of experts, but if members didn’t like the book chosen each month, they could choose an alternate.

Numerous literary critics thought the book club was a terrible idea, that it would result in a standardization of literature, and that readers would lose their ability to think or make decisions. But the Book-of-the-Month Club was being launched at a time when there were very few bookstores outside of big cities. Buying new books through the mail was the only way that most Americans could get their hands on those books.

In just its first 25 years, the Book-of-the-Month Club shipped more than 100 million books, averaging about 200,000 copies of each selection. Among the authors whose careers were launched in part by the Book-of-the-Month Club were Margaret Mitchell with Gone with the Wind (1936), John Steinbeck with Of Mice and Men (1937), Richard Wright with Native Son (1940), J.D. Salinger with The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Harper Lee with To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960), and Toni Morrison with Song of Solomon (1977).

[emphasis added]

It’s telling, isn’t it, that literary critics seemed to assume a general population of city dwellers. Or maybe they were just worried that too many urbanites would use the new club rather than reading literary criticism. I think something similar was going on in the 1990s.

Does anyone else remember when Amazon specifically, and the Internet more generally, were being condemned as the death of independent booksellers and somehow therefore also of a diverse, intelligent, and independent readership? I’m sure the small bookstores were hit hard, just as mom-and-pop shops really are hit hard by the new Wal-Mart in town, but for consumers in both scenarios, the development was an undeniable boon. People are reading a much broader range of subjects and titles because of the Internet, and they’re paying less than they used to to do so.

It’s important to remember that booksellers are a special-interest group. Like organized labor or industrial lobbying groups, they claim to represent the general interest through the pursuit of their special interest — in this case, the literacy, education, and critical intelligence of the general public, rather than the bottom line of their membership’s businesses.

The small booksellers were warning of a new corporate gatekeeper on what was and wasn’t read. In fact, the opposite has happened. The gates are falling and the gatekeepers, corporate or otherwise, aren’t happy about it. The Mises Institute is certainly finding a much broader audience, but I don’t want to give the impression that I’m falling into the special-interest trap of associating my immediate interests with a general interest (although I do, of course, believe that individual liberty is in the general interest); anarcho-socialists, fascists, eco-terrorists — all sorts of fringe groups are finding themselves able to put their literature into the hands of the curious. There are plenty who consider this a terrible thing, but I’m not one of them, and the independent booksellers of the 1990s wouldn’t have admitted to being among them, either.

This week’s theme at A.W.A.D is unusual words to describe everyday things. Example #1 …

I’m afraid the word albedo will always be connected for me with the 1976 Vangelis album Albedo 0.39, which is where I first learned the word: “The reflecting power of a planet or other non-luminous body. A perfect reflector would have an Albedo of 100%. The Earth’s Albedo is 39%, or 0.39.” I’ll probably never be able to hear this word without thinking of the hours and hours I looped this album the summer between freshman and sophomore year in college …

Well, I couldn’t find the video for you, but here are the lyrics:

Welcome to the new variety, sit and relax.
I’m that song and dance phenomenon, Max
Let me sing for you, do my thing for you,
‘Till they give me the axe.

Here’s the song I’m doing, gonna fill in you all about tax.
Tax is that familiar melody, sinful and true.
Hum it if you’ve earned a dollar or two.
Bucks in billions for the government for whatever they do.
Anyone who earns a living gives more than a few.
So schools can be their best, so our roads will have no cracks;
Someone fix those train tracks!
I’m even callin’ you Uncle and I’m payin’ my tax.

Oh, these are my girls. Hello girls.
Hello max. Nice outfit.
There are many different ways we pay what we owe.
Lady’s if you’ll follow the lovely tableau.
Income, property, sales, utility. Candy bars in my show.
Licenses for dogs and cats, and that’s not all you know.
Out of every dollar a person can make,
City, State and Federal governments take…
Take what?
What they think is fair you givin’ your share;
Now and then there’s a break.

Max is talking taxes,
Hey, I kept you awake! For the things your town may need,
For the things a country lacks,
All good things take green backs.
We hear you callin’ Uncle and we’re paying our tax.
People do complain,
Say their taxes are high;
What am I to get in return?

Look around you friend,Max is showin’ you why,
With your taxes you support
How we live and how we learn
Now here’s the good news,
Many things are tax deductible.

Which means their cost can be subtracted from the amount of income you’ll be taxed on. Things like medicine, doctor bills, and supplies for your work.

So keep those receipts.
Be kind to your parents at tax time.
And remember April 15th. April 15th.

What a showman you are Max.
Entertaining us with tax,
In those snazzy plaid slacks.
These slacks are for my business.
I tell you how to fit them.
I hear you callin’ Uncle, and I’m paying my tax.
His tax are max.

And I’m deducting my sax.

www.PiratesAndEmperors.com

Ludwig von Mises at a conference on inflation and war, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, April 5-8, 1951:

I want to ask a question. What is a loophole? If the law does not punish a definite action or does not tax a definite thing, this is not a loophole. It is simply the law. Great Britain does not punish gambling. This is not a loophole; it is a British law. The income-tax exemptions in our income tax are not loopholes. The gentleman who complained about loopholes in our income tax — he did not refer to the exemptions — implicitly starts from the assumption that all income over fifteen or twenty thousand dollars ought to be confiscated and calls therefore a loophole the fact that his ideal is not yet attained. Let us be grateful for the fact that there are still such things as those the honorable gentleman calls loopholes. Thanks to these loopholes this country is still a free country and its workers are not yet reduced to the status and the distress of their Russian colleagues.

I do not want to assert that our laws are perfect and do not require any amendment. Let us discuss this problem in detail and let us examine every instance according to its merits. But do not confuse the issue involved by resorting to the meaningless slogan “elimination of loopholes.”