Next Chants

Reader! - yes, you who hold this manuscript with fingers that have not yet learned to tremble before the economic abyss - before you plunge into these pages written with ink extracted from the brain of an eagle that read economic treatises while devouring the entrails of Prometheus, I must warn you! It is not without preparation that one enters this labyrinth where minotaurs wear ties and calculate compound interest on your soul! There are three subterranean currents beneath the stones you tread: the voice of Isidore Lucien Ducasse (Lautreamont, that inventor of literary typhoons), the narrow path where Friedrich Hayek raises warnings against the fascination of universal planning, and the anatomy of cold evil studied by Andrew Lobaczewski. If you combine these waters, you will see the outline of an abyssal fish: market, freedom, and psychopathy vying for the same sea, with your conscience serving as the boat. First, you must know me, or my literary father, who is the same: Isidore Lucien Ducasse, born in Montevideo as I was born from the rib of a lucid nightmare, who died in Paris at the age of twenty-four after vomiting upon the world the Songs of Maldoror-that treatise of lyrical cruelty where the ocean copulates with mathematics and produces monsters more real than men! Count of Lautreamont only on paper, for his nobility comes from the sewer where poetry rots until it becomes phosphorescent! My style-which now contaminates your retinas-is a razor blade soaked in laudanum: it cuts the flesh of common syntax and injects into it the controlled delirium of one who has seen God playing dice with tyrannies! But beware, thinking worm who believes you understand economics by reading newspapers! To decipher the tale that follows, you will need to tattoo on your cortex the lessons of Friedrich August von Hayek-that Austrian whose mustache hid theorems sharper than bayonets! In 1944, while bombs were redrawing the map of Europe, he wrote "The Road to Serfdom," a dynamite book that shattered the collectivist illusion! Hayek-blessed be his 1974 Nobel Prize!-demonstrated how central planning is a prostitute dressed as a virgin: it promises security and delivers shackles; it swears equality and breeds tyrannies!