"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

The best antidote for that kind of thing is an understanding of what
money is, in a modern society, and how the supply of it is
constrained. I don't know of anything to recommend that gets right
to
the heart of it, but the primary insight about what money is was
explained in 1776 by Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations. My
edition
is 1072 pages of 18th century English, and I don't recommend it.
However, the satirist P.J. O'Rourke has written an excellent (no
kidding), readable, condensed version:

http://tinyurl.com/pmm7vfw
...
Ed Huntress

What do you thnk of Wiki's synopsis?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations
This was a remarkable prediction of the Internet:

...."the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily
formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is
spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are
perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to
exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out
expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally
loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as
stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or
bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any
generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any
just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private
life... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state
into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people,
must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent
it."