My current reading pile includes a heaping helping of Austrian Economics. I love this stuff. A sense of economics on this scale rewires your brain circuitry (what a crappy, ubiquitous brain-as-turing-machine metaphor) in subtle and not so subtle ways. It is some of the best non-fiction reading I’ve engaged in in years.

I have to lend these books out. I simply must. I’ve attempted to get others interested in them, with a little success. My brother, who is reliabel in returning books I’ve lent him unread, raved about Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto, which got me started on this kick. I’ll next lend him Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. And I’ve gotten better about lending out other sacred cows; after the Watchmen trailer hit the web I lent my copy to a friend at work.

The realization, which has been slow in coming, dawns that I’ve read book X once, and the odds of me rereading it in the next few years are pretty slim. I can, therefore, safely risk the copy into the hand of others, where they can better and more frequently fulfill their functions as books. A book is at its best when its being read, when a man is bending his soul to the shape of another’s thought. The more capital I can pump into the marketplace of thought, the better served the consumers of that capital; not humanity, but flesh-and-blood humans. I’ve a couple books, mostly reference, that others can read only in the confines of my abode, but they are now the exception rather than the rule.