While Three Economic Books is not the most exciting title in the world, I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting some of my recent reading has been.

The FairTax Book is a light, but interesting read on taxes – a phrase I never thought I would write. It was written by Congressman John Linder and talk show host named Neal Boortz. Until I read the book, I had never heard of Boortz, but Linder is a socially conservative congressman from Georgia who has promoted tax reform for many years. This book did a great job convincing me that a consumption tax on all new sales and services to the final consumer (e.g., unlike the European VAT, resellers would not pay it) is a viable and superior solution to reforming our income tax. The proposed consumption tax would eliminate all corporate and personal income taxes in exchange for the consumption tax. I have previously opposed consumption taxes because they regressively target the poor. The FairTax proposal has an answer to that. All citizens in the US (rich and poor) would receive a monthly check to cover the expected amount of taxes a poor family would pay on necessities. Thus, the poor would end up paying no tax (and if they spent less than the government estimated, they would even come out ahead).

Under the FairTax proposal, the IRS would be eliminated (yea!), and all the people who deal with income taxes could find better uses for their time. When the book was published, over 600,000 people had signed a petition for the FairTax. Since then, many others (including yours truly) have done so online. You can learn more by reading the book (which was at my local library) or by going to the FairTax website.

I finally got around to reading Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and greatly enjoyed the experience. Steven Levitt, a famous economist, got into a little hot water because he was careless with the data in one claim. He stated that legal abortions reduced crime because the disproportionably large number of abortions performed on impoverished minority women. Levitt's mistake will not be of interest to non academics as he still stands by his conclusion (the mistake was in how he did his statistics, he has since redone them and obtained the same conclusions.) Some other economists disagree with this finding, but I think the finding should not be controversial. If you abort/kill/vivisect/otherwise destroy millions of unborn children, you can expect these dead unborn will be incapable of committing crimes in the future. The killing of these unborn is (and should be) controversial, but given million of children, some would have become criminals. Some would have become doctors too and most would have paid taxes to help support our aging population. For better and for worse, all of this potential was snuffed out by abortionists. I do not see why people are giving Levitt a hard time over this claim.

However, the abortion claim is just a small part of the book. Levitt uses economic tools to evaluate a host of issues, such as identifying teachers who encourage cheating on standardized tests and analyzing the business operations of crack gangs.

Last, but not least, I recommend Pietra Rivoli's The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. It was a fascinating story of the life cycle of a T-Shirt. Who knew that many Chinese T-Shirt firms used cotton grown in Texas? That's right – in today's crazy economy, cotton is grown in Texas, shipped to China and turned into yarn then into fabric, then sent to whatever poor country is high on the current US quota list where expatriate Chinese "reside" and assemble the shirt before shipping it to United States. Rivoli does a fair job presenting the views of free market economists and that of protectionist activists and looks at the results over time.

All three books are wonderful reads and should be part of every politician's library. Recommended reading for all voters.

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