Nowadays, of course, writers may be of any gender, their spouses or partners likewise, and their domestic arrangements highly variable. And what modern writers have to say about their spouses or partners is still a load of crap.
Look, we’re writers. It’s what we do. Therefore I will skip the sugared words about you, Tina O’Rourke, and hope that my silence speaks volumes of appreciation, esteem, admiration, obligation, wonder, delight, pride, gratitude, and love (not to mention monogamy).
I would maintain an equally eloquent muteness about the other people I need to thank, but that would mean leaving their names out thereby causing them to read this and learn that writers are deplorable people. Since many of these people work with writers for a living and some are writers themselves, this would be disheartening information.
Thank you everyone at American Consequences, the free political economics web magazine where I am editor in chief.
Therefore I have no one but myself to blame for the twenty-four chapters of this book that first appeared in American Consequences.
The blame is all mine, but if you, kind reader, find anything creditable in those chapters please give that credit to AmCon’s distinguished staff:
Publisher Steven Longenecker—“Publish and be damned,” said the Duke of Wellington when a blackmailer threatened to print shocking letters by the Duke. And Steven must sometimes feel the same way about the drafts we American Consequences writers dump upon his desk. But he never gives into the temptation to send us to perdition. He keeps the magazine on the straight and narrow path to a blessed publication.
Managing Editor Laura Greaver—she can manage everything and edit anything and manages to edit out managerial noise while managing to add editorial authority to every edition. We don’t call her “Managing Editor” for nothing.
Creative Director Erica Wood—an illustrative dream for subjects that are a nightmare to illustrate, a Picasso of pie charts. She brings the light of art to the dismal science of economics. Her bar graphs should hang in the Louvre.
(As I said, American Consequences is free. Just Google us, click on “Subscribe,” and you will hear from us constantly—the way you constantly hear from other best-things-in-life-free stuff, such as your family.)
And we at American Consequences thank our friends at the clear-eyed and far-sighted financial advisory company Stansberry Research. In particular:
Founder Porter Stansberry—Odysseus of the financial seas, navigating between the Scylla of booms and the Charybdis of busts, tied to the mast of wise investment while the Sirens of Wall Street try to lure customers onto the rocks of fatal debt and equity portfolios.
General Manager Jamison Miller—as in Five-Star General. Jamison is Eisenhower planning the investment newsletter D-Day, which is every day because they’re daily newsletters invading the hard-fought market beachheads each morning. What’s more, Jamison is also in charge of making work fun—something Ike notably failed to accomplish on June 6, 1944.
Many of the chapters in this book were inspired by Stansberry Research insights and analysis, and “The Inaugural Address I’d Like to Hear” was originally published in the Stansberry Digest.
A briefer version of the preface and the chapters “It’s Time to Make Rich People Uncomfortable Again” and “A License to Drive (Me Crazy)” were first published in the opinion pages of the Washington Post under the aegis of Associate Op-Ed Editor Mark Lasswell. Mark is the Clark Kent of the Post, yanking off his horn-rims and dashing into phone booths and emerging dressed (metaphorically, I hope) in cape and tights to save the world . . . from my clumsy prose, among other grave threats.
“Woke to the Sound of Laughter” was published by Freddy Gray, editor of Spectator USA. Well done, Freddy, for letting me take a whack at the puzzling gestures of virtue signaling, but, even more, for finally importing the Spectator, published weekly in Britain since 1828, to America, a country with high tariff barriers on intelligence and wit. Freddy, I can only hope that your use of polysyllabic words, references to obscure authors such as Shakespeare, and occasional failure to remove the “u” from color and harbor do not impede your success in America’s marketplace of ideas, such as it is.
For almost forty years, my lecture agency, GTN, a UTA company, has been—try to wrap your head around this—convincing people to pay to listen to me talk. I wish GTN were in charge of my household. I’d be getting an allowance from the kids instead of the other way around, and I’d have all the dogs’ Milk-Bones. But the really great thing would be the listening. Thanks to GTN I’ve experienced a lot of it at venues all around the country. But it’s never happened to me at home.
(BTW, proposed new business model for GTN suggested by my kids and dogs: convincing people to pay me to shut up.)
Thanks to GTN team members Debbie Greene, Kristen Sena, Jen Peykar, and most of all David Buchalter. Put Debbie, Kristen, Jen, and David on the case and they’d have Neil deGrasse Tyson addressing the annual meeting of the Flat Earth Society, Greta Thunberg lecturing OPEC, Dick Cheney giving a PowerPoint presentation to PETA, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making the keynote speech at Davos.
And don’t get me started on GTN founder Don Epstein. His genius is not only in finding audiences for speakers but in coaching and cajoling those speakers into becoming brilliant public orators. Don is so good at it that, if wise heads had prevailed in certain political campaign staffs and Don had been consulted, Mike Bloomberg would have turned into the Demosthenes of Democrats and Bill Weld would have become the Win-One-for-the-Gipper of the GOP, and Mike and Bill would be running neck-and-neck in the 2020 presidential election.
Then there is the matter of public relations. An author wants a book to have a public. And an author wants that public to have a relationship with the book that’s something more intimate than Swipe Left.
