THE CONCLUDING THOUGHTS OF UNCLE AL

1. Learning without thinking is useless.
2. No matter how hard you try, you can't baptize cats.
3. The belief that all wealth comes from stealing is popular in prisons and economics seminars.
4. How much fame, money, and power must a woman achieve by her own honest efforts before you may punch her in the face?
5. He who knows the least obeys the worst.
6. Freedom is purchased with lives. If you are not willing to invest you do not deserve the dividends.
7. When a community had a problem they didn't understand they threw some virgins in the volcano. We're more sophisticated. We impress social engineering and burn all the virgins together.
8. The means always justify the cost.
9. To guarantee a good product, bill Customer Support costs to Design Engineering's account.
10. A bad reputation is difficult if not impossible to sustain.
11. I do not work for fame, but for the grudging admiration of a few close enemies.
12. For every kindness there is an equal and opposite terror.
13. When do police become stormtrooppers, government the enemy, and the less fortunate leeches? When compassion and morality are legislated and taxes feed mandatory charities.
14. Excellence means elegant loneliness.
15. Never raise your hands to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected.
16. Economists were invented to make astrologers look good.
17. Doing a job right the first time gets the job done. Doing the job wrong fourteen times gives you job security.
18. Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
19. Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
20. If at first you don't succeed, try management.
21. Don't wear polka-dot underwear under white shorts.
22. A person who smiles in the face of adversity probably has ascapegoat.
23. Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether.
24. I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.
25. Management: We waste time so you don't have to.
26. Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups.
27. Teamwork means never having to take all the blame yourself.
28. Indecision is the key to flexibility.
29. Go the extra mile. It makes your boss look like an incompetent slacker.
30. Succeed in spite of management.
31. You can't trust dogs to watch your food.
32. Puritan Hell is a place where everybody minds their own business.
33. Information is any difference that makes a difference.
34. You can't hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk.
35. Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings. Rome killed all those who opposed it.
36. When your mom is mad at your dad, don't let her brush your hair.
37. If your ideas don't fit through the door, tear down the wall.
38. "Freedom" said the policeman, and played baseball with his truncheon.
39. Those who suppress freedom do it in the name of law and order.
40. We gladly consume those who pursue us.
41. Everyone is unique, that's why they've all got different numbers.
42. Mathematicians, scientists, and engineers require pencils, paper, and wastebaskets. Philosophers and Liberals require pencils and paper.
43. Today is a good day for somebody else to die.
44. Shoot first, shoot again, shoot some more... and if anybody remains alive, shoot them; then ask questions.
45. Volatile and shifting ideas, not heavy and entrenched establishments, constitute the source of wealth.
46. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
47. The best and safest way to gain unearned pay is to convince the State to take it from others.

"We trained hard, but every time we began to embrace teamwork we were reorganized. I learned later in life that we meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it is for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization." Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C.

American business long ago abandoned demanding that employees be honest and hardworking. It even stopped hoping for employees who discern the difference between men's and women's bathrooms absent pictures on the doors.

The Liberal Ten Commandments:

1. Government should protect incompetents.
2. Moral and political censorships are desirable.
3. Statutory law must replace common law.
4. Hiring and college admission must not regard testable ability.
5. Humans are not part of the "environment."
6. Mental illness is an excuse.
7. Government decides how and what children will learn.
8. Declaring a substance illegal reduces its use.
9. Individuals may not control their own bodies.
10. Reason, rational thought, and the scientific method must be altered to honor human needs, rights, and appetites.

"We really don't know how to raise children. If we want to talk about the equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there's no equality. We must take them away from families and communally raise them."
  Dr. Mary Jo Bane
  Clinton Administration assistant secretary of administration for children and families, US Department of Health and Human Services.

First-year accounting students are taught that balance sheets portray the liquidation value of enterprises and provide creditors with worst-case information. But enterprises are not run to be liquidated.

Socialists believe you cannot allow people to succeed lest those who fail feel worthless. Capitalists believe in money - individual appetites will look after themselves.

Owners are besieged on all sides by aspiring spenders - debauchers of wealth and purveyors of poverty in the name of charity, idealism, envy, or social change.

A problem of economics is that despite centuries of effort to predict economic change, it remains oblivious to the vital process of innovation that fuels economic development.

Countries that multiply the production of well defined and catalogued products of the past, from subsidized steel ingots to protected automobiles, will Officially prosper - as opposed to countries that multiply entrepreneurs and innovations and gut the former like trout.

Science and enterprise open vast new panoramas of opportunity as established experts flee in horror to caves and cages, bewildered and terrified by freedom and change.

Demand economics is the vision of human beings as mouths, not minds; as consumers of goods and services but not producers of them; and as users of jobs but not creators of new work.

The wealth of America is an organic, living entity - a fragile pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties, moral commitments, visions, and net retained profits. To vivisect it for redistribution murders it.

The key to growth is straightforward - creative and productive individuals earning wealth. Impressing stagnation is similarly easy - steal from the productive and subsidize the unproductive.

Despite a documented low correlation between money spent and improvement in the quantity and quality of public education, the reform of public education focuses exclusively on stealing ever greater public sums.

RICARDO: An inevitable scarcity of land would eventually abolish a nation's economic growth.
MALTHUS: Population growth would doom society to live forever at a subsistencelevel.
MARX: Exploitation of labor would eventually doom capitalism.
KEYNES: Satiated demand would eventually require government to redistributeincome to maintain full employment.
CLUB OF ROME: Exhaustion of physical resources would cause the world of expansion and prosperity to halt.

...But then a strange thing happened. The world didn't come to an end.

Automobiles not only cause air pollution and accidents and become junked cars; they also reduce the number of horse carcasses in the streets: 15,000/year in New York City alone at the turn of the century: Deaths from horses and runaway carriages: 750,000 injuries a year in 1900 when the population was much lower than now. Pollution from manure in the streets: 45 pounds/horse-day.

"Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Richard Feynman.

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