Newfoundland Edition Before he could find that economic wizard, [Joey] Smallwood [first premier of Newfoundland, which became a Canadian province in 1949] made his first investment alone on Christmas Eve 1949 when four “wise men” appeared from the east (or so they appeared to the premier). They were actually Icelandic herring fishermen who promised to move their boats to Newfoundland and establish a giant herring fishery and processing industry. The original eastern travellers with their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh could not have been more welcome than these modern-day entrepreneurs. Smallwood gladly gave them a contract to establish the precious herring fishery, some cash to get their boats out of hock, and seed capital for equipment and a processing plant. The next spring, they returned with four herring boats, which experienced Newfoundland fishermen deemed ready for the scrap heap. The Icelanders spent nine months in their dilapidated craft searching for the elusive fish, but after catching just nine barrels of herring and spending $412,000 in government money, they gave up and went home. The provincial government spent three years trying to sell their abandoned boats. When it finally found a buyer the government had to lend him the $55,000 purchase price. So ended Smallwood’s first attempt at developing a new industry. This is from Brian Slemming, “The Mad Mad Schemes of Joey Smallwood,” The Next City, Spring 1999. I found the magazine sitting around in my cottage. The article on Smallwood is long, detailed, persuasive, and depressing. I grew up in Canada memorizing his name as the premier of Canada’s 10th province. People often made fun of him, but I had no idea how corrupt and harebrained he was. Of course, it’s easy to do that with other people’s money. The excerpt above is not the worst example of his industrial policy schemes. As with all industrial policy, the incentives are all wrong: government officials don’t pay for bad decisions and don’t get rewarded for good decisions. Whether it’s done by innumerate people like Smallwood [his innumeracy comes out in another part of the article] or done by relative sophisticates like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttegieg, industrial policy ends up in disaster. One more example that’s stunning but believable: Smallwood hoped the great machinery plant outside St. John’s would become the diamond in his industrialization crown. In a parliamentary statement, he claimed the plant would need 58,000 blueprints of the machinery it would produce. Flour mills, crushing machinery, oil drilling machinery–if you could name it, the new mill would manufacture it. Initially the plant would train and employ 500 people, but Smallwood promised that the workforce would expand to 3,000and then 5,000; its 1952 payroll would be $2 million. He told the House, “It seems likely to become the largest single labor-giving enterprise in Newfoundland, apart from the fishery.” As with the tannery, the province built the plant away from the main railway line and failed to follow through with a link. In 1958, six years after the grand announcement, the St. John’s Evening Telegram reported: “The five million dollar ‘machinery plant’ has been sitting on the shores of Octagon Pond these six years, but has never turned out a machine.” Unfortunately, I can’t find the publication on line: it’s long since gone out of business. But I did find this article in Maclean’s magazine from 1956 that covers some of the same territory. Here’s the entry on Industrial Policy in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. The picture above is of Joey Smallwood. (0 COMMENTS)

This set of twitter comments caught my eye: I agree with all three comments.  Nonetheless, it might be helpful to explain this issue in my own way.  Here are three claims: 1.  There is no such thing as the “true” elasticity of aggregate demand. 2.  It is possible for aggregate demand to be appropriate, even when NGDP growth is unusually high. 3.  In this particularly case, however, the fast growth in NGDP is indicative of excessive AD. Let’s take the three claims one at a time: 1. I prefer to define AD as a rectangular hyperbola, where at each point along the AD curve the total nominal expenditure (i.e., P*Y) is exactly the same.  In that case, the elasticity of aggregate demand is always exactly one.  But many economists define AD in a different fashion, and end up with a different estimate of the elasticity of aggregate demand.  So if someone asked me, “What’s the actual elasticity of AD?”  I’d respond, “How are you defining AD?”  It depends what you are holding constant along a given AD curve. 2.  Suppose Kuwait’s NGDP is 50% oil and 50% other goods and services.  Also assume that 5% of Kuwaiti workers produce oil and 95% of Kuwaiti workers produce other goods and services.  Now assume that global oil prices double almost overnight.  Should Kuwait’s central bank maintain a stable NGDP?  I’d say no, as doing so would require a big reduction in non-oil nominal output.  Because 95% of workers are in the non-oil sector, and because nominal wages are sticky, this would result in much higher unemployment.  It would probably make more sense for Kuwait to target aggregate nominal labor income. 3.  Clearly the Kuwaiti example has some bearing on the recent events in the US.  We produce a lot of oil and the price of oil has recently doubled.  Nonetheless, the recent NGDP data in the US does seem to correctly indicate that there is excessive aggregate demand.  We know this because we also see signs of excessive demand in other indicators such as rapid nominal wage growth and high job vacancies, which are not distorted by oil prices. To conclude, fast growth in NGDP doesn’t always signal excessive AD.  But in the case of the US, fast and above trend NGDP growth is almost always is an accurate signal of overheating. We shouldn’t be wasting time trying to figure out some mythical concept like the “true” elasticity of AD.  Instead, we should focus on what sort of path of nominal spending produces a stable economy. (0 COMMENTS)

Do you really own your smartphone? Michael Heller and James Salzman claim that we are hardwired to bring our physical notions of static ownership to our real and virtual lives. In reality, our increasingly online world involves licensing access to a series of ones and zeros. Our “own” data isn’t even “ours”. In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts engages the authors of Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, in a discussion about their taxonomy of the six characteristics of ownership that may challenge how we think about the topic. The authors propose ownership as a choice, not a given, that law isn’t always the answer to our different claims, and that a common language of ownership might enhance our ability to understand and address ownership debates. Please tell us how this conversation prompts your own thoughts about ownership.      1- Elinor Olstrom identified and described the “closed community with reciprocity of sanction”. Salzman uses the South Boston parking space story of an identifying object (parking chairs) as an example and blames its disintegration on gentrification.  Could this norm be degrading for other reasons? Explain.    2- The authors suggest that all of the stories people use to claim every resource in the world are captured in the six categories of: Attachment, First-in-Time, Possession, Labor, Self-ownership, and Family changes. Can you identify an example of each story in your life? What ownership debates or clashing stories have you experienced?   3- According to Heller and Salzman, the history of American westward expansion went from foraging to “No Trespassing”. How did the invention of barbed wire in the 1860s change the nature of property ownership to the attachment version that is familiar today?   4- How do the tragedy of the commons, fugitive resources, unitization, and the transaction cost of monitoring explain the way that we have engineered ownership in the U.S.?   5- How does Roberts’ point about reciprocal harm clarify the Coasean approach to property rights disputes? Why is the Coase theorem allegedly misconstrued? (0 COMMENTS)

Prominent writers and investors have described today’s economy as being addicted to loose monetary policy, especially the QE variety. There may be something to that analogy. After all, the Fed has barely commenced tapering, and some of the economy’s withdrawal symptoms are acute. Things are especially interesting, or troubling, when we look at how intertwined monetary and fiscal policy have become.     For example, the Fed’s current holdings of Treasuries are more than double their previous highs during World War II. The accompanying chart shows federal debt held by the public as a percent of GDP, split into debt held by the Federal Reserve and debt held by the non-Fed public, from 1940 to the most recent data. As the top line in the chart shows, total debt held by the public has risen sharply since 2001 and now exceeds 100% of GDP. As for the Fed’s share, it exceeded 10% during World War II, yet in the post-WWII period, Fed holdings hovered between 5% and 6% every year up to 2010. Then, in a clean break from the trend, the second half of 2009 saw Quantitative Easing become utilized toward the direct purchase of medium- and long-term U.S. Treasuries. Consequently, as the chart shows, Fed holdings more than doubled in 2011 and have remained historically elevated above 10% of GDP for all years through 2019. In 2020, the Fed’s share more than doubled a second time. By the time of the most recent data available in 2021, the Fed’s share had reached 24.3% of GDP, far exceeding its peak of 10.4% during WWII. The chart might even understate the magnitude of the Fed’s public debt holdings when looking more closely at medium- and long-term Treasuries. According to a May 2022 New York Federal Reserve report of open market operations, as of December 2021, the Fed owned 38% of 10-30 year bonds. From this point forward, there is a long way to go in winding-down to roughly pre-pandemic levels. Some economists say that a ballooning Fed balance sheet is nothing to worry about, and the Fed itself has vowed to sterilize QE from affecting bank reserves. However, George Selgin, John Cochrane, James Dorn, and others have been arguing that very high Fed holdings of public debt compromise the central bank’s independence while risking inflation. Today’s inflation is caused partly by historic expansions of the money supply needed to finance Washington’s spending sprees. As St. Louis Fed economist Fernando M. Martin has shown (see figure Money and Deficits), since 2016 the growth rate of M2 closely tracks the growth rate of budget deficits. Even the floor system of paying interest on excess reserves (IOER) faces exposure. As Thomas Hogan argued recently on Econlib, during the Great Recession the Fed could have met its unemployment target by doing less QE, had it opted to lower IOER. Now, after holding down interest rates for nearly a generation, the shift to quantitative tightening combined with rising yields will squeeze the federal budget. As we recently showed, net interest is projected to exceed 10% of the budget within the next five years. The financial pain of winding down from 24.3% of GDP might be too much to bear, prompting fiscal policymakers to again pressure the Fed. Can Congress quit the Fed’s easy money policy that has allowed them to push debt levels well above 100% of GDP, or will the addiction demand more QE to support Washington’s spending habit?   Peter Calcagno is a Professor of Economics at the College of Charleston and director of the Center for Public Choice & Market Process. A Public Choice and Public Policy Project Fellow with AIER. He is the Treasurer of the Public Choice Society, a Voting Member of AIER, a Board Member of the Classical Liberals in the Carolinas, and has served on the board of APEE. His areas of research are applied microeconomics, public choice, and political economy. He is the author of dozens of journal articles and book chapters, and the editor of Unleashing Capitalism: A Prescription for Economic Prosperity in South Carolina. Edward J. Lopez is Professor of Economics, BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism, and Founding Director, Center for the Study of Free Enterprise at Western Carolina University. He is the Executive Director and Past President of the Public Choice Society, Past President of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Entrepreneurship & Public Policy. In 2008-09 he was a Resident Scholar at Liberty Fund. (0 COMMENTS)

At my cottage in Minaki, Ontario, Canada this last weekend, I came across a November 1956 edition of National Geographic. What I found most interesting was not the articles but the ads. I’ll highlight two. The first is in the picture above. This Copyflex machine makes up to 300 copies per hour. That’s 5 per minute. And the price is “only” $498.50. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $5,430.55 today. Need I say more? The second is an ad for long distance phone calls across the Atlantic. The fine print states that “The daytime rate for the first three minutes from anywhere in the United States is $12, not including the 10% federal excise tax.” $12 then would be $130.73 today. There was one ad that did make me miss the good old days. It was for a beautiful Lincoln. I’m sure it was a substantial worse car than today, so my general point in the title holds. But car companies cannot legally make cars with the graceful lines of the 1957 Lincoln or, if they do, they would have to pay a huge CAFE fine. The regulators are more involved in dictating many aspects of cars than they were then. Without that regulation, our cars would be better than in 1957 and, in many ways, better than the 2022 cars, and there would be much more variety in car shapes. (2 COMMENTS)

An article in The Economist reviews the issues surrounding the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public schools. It is an instructive report, although, I will argue, not correctly related to the economic way of looking at the social world. (See “‘Critical Race Theory’ Is Being Weaponized. What’s the Fuss About?” July 14, 2022.) Originally focused on racial discrimination, CRT is now often seen as encompassing all “woke” ideas, including sex and “gender.” I am not sure that The Economist is right in attributing this extension only to conservatives who are fighting CRT. It must noted that CRT is an application of a more general and older strand of analysis called “critical theory,” which challenges classical liberal institutions with a Marxist-influenced methodology. The Economist estimates that some CRT is part of the curriculum for at most a third of pupils in American public schools, generally on an optional basis; it is on the contrary restricted by state law in a third of the states. What passes as CRT is certainly biased against individual liberty, but The Economist claims that its threat has been exaggerated by conservatives. The magazine explains: The origins of CRT go back to the 1970s. The legal theory stressed the role of “structural” racism (embedded in systems, laws and policies, rather than the individual sort) in maintaining inequality. … Progressives stretched the scope of CRT before conservatives did. The theory has spread into concepts like “critical whiteness studies”: read “White Fragility”, by Robin DiAngelo, and you might think white people can hardly do anything about racism without inadvertently causing harm to non-whites. … Opponents claim that pupils are being taught that white children are inherently racist, and that white pupils should feel anguish about their skin colour because of their ancestors’ actions. … Whether framed as CRT or not, educators are incorporating progressive ideas about race, gender and more into the classroom. Like many people, the authors of the story seem seem stuck in the alternative between, on one side, ignoring injustice to racial or other social groups and, on the other side, emphasizing group-identities and embarrassing or humiliating the pupils who don’t “belong” to them. Also, they do not mention the inescapable dilemma of public schools between propagandizing the majority’s views and teaching the basic tools that will allow each pupil to start understanding the world. (Note that we are talking about primary and secondary schools, not universities, as emphasized by Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder in an invited opinion.) To this intellectual, educational, and political mess, a simple solution path exists, inspired by a normative value that is closely associated with economics (while admitting that normative values must be distinguished from positive analysis). It would suffice that public schools teach—not in a dogmatic or proselytizing way—one basic idea of Western civilization, more clearly formulated by, and during the run-up to, the Enlightenment: only individuals count and they are or should be all equal holders of liberty. Why neither the left nor the right think that this principle is sufficient or even simply agree with it provides a key to understanding our troubled times. An implication is that nobody should care whether a pupil is black or green, whether he has been born in a rich or poor family, whether the person has or not (to speak like the White House) birthing capabilities, etc. Another implication is that the state should neither ban nor promote CRT or any ideology, except for some minimal individualist idea as proposed above. This seems to be the way economists, with their characteristic respect for the individual and his preferences, would naturally think about the issue. Ideas along those lines can be found in James Buchanan’s book Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative. Tyler Cowen wrote a relevant piece in the New York Times several years ago: “A Profession With an Egalitarian Core” (March 16, 2013). (0 COMMENTS)

When it comes to the COVID-19 vaccination, is the risk of myocarditis greater than the benefit to a healthy male teen? Is natural immunity really better than vaccination–and were we right to mask the kids? Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California San Francisco talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about what we learned […] The post Vinay Prasad on the Pandemic appeared first on Econlib.

Wealth taxes have become an increasingly popular policy in recent years, though there is some confusion among their advocates. On the one hand are those, like the economist Thomas Piketty, who propose wealth taxes with the goal of eliminating concentrations of wealth. He has argued for a graduated wealth tax of 5% on those worth 2 million euros or more and up to 90% on those worth more than 2 billion euros so that “there won’t be billionaires anymore.” To Piketty, the wealth tax will have succeeded if nobody is rich enough to be liable to pay it and revenue is $0. On the other hand are those, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who believe a wealth tax could fund vastly increased government spending. Her proposed ‘Ultra-Millionaire Tax’ would levy: …an annual 2% tax on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and a 6% tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion…this small tax on roughly 75,000 households will bring in $3.75 trillion in revenue over a ten-year period. Yet despite this increased prominence, wealth taxes have become less common. In 1996, twelve OECD members collected revenue from net wealth taxes: by 2020, just five did. Even Piketty’s native France ditched its wealth tax in 2017. Britain’s failed attempt to impose a wealth tax indicates why. In February 1974, the Labour party was elected promising to “fundamentally redistribute income and wealth”. They proposed increased pensions, a new child benefit, and reductions in public housing rents. Their manifesto pledged “an annual Wealth Tax on the rich” to help pay for this. The Inland Revenue was initially positive, reporting that: “…although there will of course be many problems to be resolved we see no reason why a wealth tax should not be introduced reasonably quickly” But they did not believe it would raise much revenue. This had been the experience of Britain’s inheritance tax, raised to 75% in 1949 but generating revenues of just 0.6% of total personal wealth by the mid-1960s as people quite legally avoided paying it, mostly by giving it away. While this might reduce wealth inequality – Piketty’s goal – it would not raise the revenues Labour needed to fund its new spending plans – Warren’s goal. The Select Committee which examined the proposal was much more skeptical of the practicalities than the Inland Revenue. Countries with wealth taxes had imposed them at low rates when most wealth was held in the form of land; neither was the case with Labour’s proposal for mid-1970s Britain. As Howard Glennerster notes: “The several thousand civil servants needed, depending on the valuation level at which the tax began, the numerous regional offices required and the process of regular valuation that might fall on individuals came as a surprise to the politicians and, indeed, to the Treasury when it got to think about the question properly.” But if Labour’s wealth tax wouldn’t have achieved the Warren revenue goal, it would have helped achieve the Piketty goal of equalized wealth. The Treasury concluded that the wealth tax: “1. Will lead people to seek non resident status, result in a considerable outflow of funds in the form of dividends and interest. Since it will apply to all wealth held world wide foreign employees in foreign companies resident here would be subject to tax. This would result in a big movement of banks, insurance and shipping business moving out of the UK. Assets held here would be affected. This would reduce the level of business in UK.” They had good reason to think this. Britain imposed a top income tax rate of 83% and 98% on investment income. This was the era of the Tax Exile, which The Rolling Stones acknowledged with their LP Exile on Main Street, partly recorded in the south of France in 1971-1972. Their guitarist, Keith Richards, explained: “The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws…It’s why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not. We left England because we’d be paying 98 cents on the dollar. We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all.” Britain’s punitive tax rates did help reduce wealth inequality just as Piketty would hope, but they did so by pushing the wealthy – and their wealth – out of the country. In November 1976, Labour abandoned their plans for a wealth tax. Denis Healy, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote: “We had committed ourselves to a Wealth Tax: but in five years I found it impossible to draft one which would yield enough revenue to be worth the administrative cost and political hassle.” So has everybody else. Richard Fulmer worked as a mechanical engineer and a systems analyst in industry. He is now retired and does free-lance writing. He has published some fifty articles and book reviews in free market magazines and blogs. With Robert L. Bradley Jr., Richard wrote the book, Energy: The Master Resource. (0 COMMENTS)

Populist rulers face a dilemma. Since they embody “the people” and realize “the will of the people,” they cannot lose elections. The people cannot vote against itself. My Independent Review article on “The Impossibility of Populism” explained this in more details. But here is a current illustration. Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian president, faces the same dilemma as Donald Trump did: there is a good probability that he will lose the forthcoming presidential election in October. So what does he do? Something similar to what Trump did in both 2016 and 2020: he warns his followers in advance that if he loses, it will mean that the election was rigged. The Economist explains (“Might Jair Bolsonaro Try to Steal Brazil’s Election?” July 14, 2022): [Mr. Bolsonaro] is also sowing doubt about the electoral process. He tells supporters he can only be defeated if the contest is rigged. This suggests he may dispute the result if he loses. … On July 7th Mr Bolsonaro insinuated that Mr Fachin [the president of the electoral court] “already knows” the outcome of the election. He peddles such twaddle while insisting that Brazil’s electronic-voting system is susceptible to fraud. The system has been used in Brazil since 1996 with no evidence of irregularities. … His opponents fear that if the vote is close, he may claim he was robbed of victory and try to cling on by foul means. Supporters of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro during a Labor Day protest in Natal. May 2, 2022, Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil Credit: Jose Aldenir/Thenews2 (Foto: Jose Aldenir/TheNews2/Deposit Photos) (0 COMMENTS)

Eric Hoffer was born 120 years today. Or 124: as Tom Bethell argued in his biography of Hoffer, the latter’s youth was kind of a mystery. He was parsimonious with information and often self-contradictory. He famously maintained that he was blind for a number of years and that later such blindness went away, as suddenly as it came. But what it is clear a from Hoffer’s biography is that he was a most interesting and rare case among 20th century intellectuals. He had little formal education, if any. He was always a manual worker and, after trying unsuccessfully to join the Army after Pearl Harbour, he landed a job as a longshoreman in San Francisco. He loved to read and one day picked up in a library Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. As many before and after him, he was enchanted by the beauty of Montaigne’s prose and by his ability to look into himself. That planted the seed which would blossom in his own determination to become a writer. Such a determination was pursued casually, until he sent a long letter to the magazine Common Ground. The piece was rejected, but Margaret Anderson encouraged his talent and forwarded his essay to an editor at Harper Brothers. Ultimately they published his great book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature of Mass Movements. Dwight Eisenhower allegedly considered The True Believer  his favourite. The book also prompted Lyndon Johnson to call Hoffer to the White House. Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It caused quite a sensation  and was favourably commented upon by many of the heavyweights of the time. It is a great book which digs into the “demand side” of political mass movements. Hoffer quoted Hitler saying “the petit bourgeois social-democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist will.” He looked at great, all-embracing mass movements as sources of meaning for the individuals who became “true believers.” It is one of the Hofferian themes: “blind faith is no substitute for lost faith in ourselves.” The True Believer is still a very famous book and pops up routinely, when a new political movement needs to be scrutinised and its followers became a subject of interest to the press. It has been mentioned in connection with Jihadism and with populism. Google “Eric Hoffer and Donald Trump” and you’ll stumble upon very different ways to use Hoffer to read Trumpism. I am relatively new to Hoffer, but tremendously impressed by him. His other works, beginning with his aphorisms and with The Ordeal of Change deserve to be better known. The latter is a truly thought-provoking read. A few years ago, Thomas Sowell wrote this beautiful appreciation of Hoffer. Now, Sowell on Hoffer: that’s the Dictionary definition of self-recommending. Sowell reminds us of a key point in Hoffer’s thought: Hoffer’s strongest words were for the intellectuals — or rather, against the intellectuals. “Intellectuals,” he said, “cannot operate at room temperature.” Hype, moral melodrama, and sweeping visions were the way that intellectuals approached the problems of the world. But that was not the way progress was usually achieved in America. “Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.” Since the American economy and society advanced with little or no role for the intelligentsia, it is hardly surprising that anti-Americanism flourishes among intellectuals. “Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America,” Eric Hoffer said.” Hoffer’s insights on the hubris of professional intellectuals is as profound as his reading of mass movements. Actually, the two are connected. “Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited. The discrediting is not an automatic result of the blunders and abuses of those in power, but the deliberate work of men of words with a grievance.” This impatience for wordsmiths went together with a profound appreciation of the common person and of that society built by “unheroic” people that Hoffer understood the America of his years to be. “What is the uppermost problem which confronts the leadership in a Communist regime?”, he asked himself. His answer was: “how to make people work.” Communism wasn’t capable of nurturing that “readiness to work” and that “practical sense” that, for Hoffer, came naturally being in the American capitalist society. This was at least in part due to a wrong reading of people’s motivations and desires: I remember how scornful I felt when I first Marx’s description of the worker’s attitude toward work in a capitalist society. The worker, he said, feels physically and orally debated by his work. He is like an exile in his place of work and feels at home only when away from is job. Marx never did a day’s work in his life, and never took the trouble to find out how a worker reply feels when on the job. He naturally assumed that works were a lesser breed of intellectuals. Having a job, being a productive part of society, wasn’t “the meaning of life” for Hoffer, but he believed it gave people “a sense of usefulness and worth”. If people need “certificates of value”, it is way better if a society awards such certificates to them for things they make, rather than for slaughtering enemies. In Hoffer, you find enlightening pages on the trade; “trading is a form of self-assertion congenial to common people – a sort of subversive activity; undoctrinaire, unheroic and uncoordinated, yet ceaselessly undermining and frustrating totalitarian domination”. You also find surprising and thought-provoking observations: “the business atmosphere of the workshop is more favourable for the awakening and unfolding of the creative talents of the masses than the precious atmosphere of artistic cliques”. I wish I read Hoffer earlier; I look forward to reading and pondering his works as much as I can. (0 COMMENTS)