Carl Wells Books

I am a tightwad. At one time it was rumored that I was on the short list for the Nobel Prize in the tightwad category, but nothing came of it. (I’m still here, guys, and I would appreciate the prize money a lot. Consider me for some future year.) Despite being a tightwad I offer for free these ideas about handling one’s personal finances in a wise manner. I will begin with practical ideas, and near the end will offer some more philosophical notions.

1/If you have an electric water heater, you can save a lot of money by turning it off most of the time. My water heater is on much less than 2% of the time–some months around 1%. I turn on the water heater when I get up in the morning, then turn it off after somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes (depending on how cold the weather is). I do my running and/or walking, and have plenty of hot water for my morning shower. This works quite well for one person. If you have a family and therefore have a more constant need for hot water, you could probably get by with having the water heater on 10% or 20% of the time. The water stays hot for quite a while. I did the math on my savings, and it amounted to about $11.00 per month. Not a fortune, but to me $11.00 is a lot of money. In a year it adds up to saving $132.00. In four decades it amounts to $5,280.00 in savings. Small savings add up over the long haul.

2/When you pay your utility bills, consider paying for more than one month at a time. My water bill is usually $22.02 per month. The last time I paid my bill I paid $110.00, paying what I owed and several months ahead. That was in November. It is late March, and I still don’t owe anything. Paying ahead saves in at least three ways: 1/I write fewer checks; 2/I save stamps; 3/I save time.

3/Many items can be bought very cheaply at dollar stores. Dollar General, Family Dollar, and Dollar Tree are three great places to shop. I can buy pens, toiletries, food, laundry supplies, for very little expense. The last time I bought laundry detergent was at Dollar Tree–$1.00 for a bottle that will do 32 loads of laundry. (And laundry can be done successfully with cold water–I’ve done it for years.)

4/When the price of an item is high, buy as little as you can get by with. When the price is low, stock up. A few years ago we had an egg shortage around here. The price skyrocketed. I bought as few eggs as possible for several weeks or months. Eventually the price came down–the free market really works, if we leave people alone–and that was the time to stock up and buy lots of eggs.

5/Hand deliver the payment of some bills, rather than mail them in. This saves stamps, and also provides exercise and a chance to see the world. Walking gives us a different perspective on life. Many decades ago I took a short walk, probably less than a half mile. Immediately I sensed that I was seeing the world in a different way from the way I typically saw it while always driving everywhere. I’ve never forgotten the feeling which was provided by that short walk. I learned something that day.

6/If you have debt, pay it off as quickly as possible, and thus save paying out interest. Debt in general is not a good thing. Get rid of it as quickly as possible, and avoid it as much as possible.

7/Buy less expensive items than the brand name ones. For example, brand name pop is usually much more expensive than generic pop. The difference in quality is slight, perhaps in some cases nonexistent. Occasionally brand name items offer deeply discounted prices; that is the time to stock up if you really think the brand name is superior.

8/The point made in #7 is especially true when it comes to alcohol. If you drink alcohol, do you really think you could pass a taste test proving that the most expensive brand of vodka tastes better than the least expensive vodka? I have a friend who was at one time a bartender. He told me he would challenge his customers to make taste tests. The results were what you would expect–most of us are kidding ourselves to imagine we can taste a difference. If you are one of the few with a refined palate, and really can tell a difference in quality, fine. Most of us are wasting our money if we buy the more expensive brands of most types of alcohol.

9/If you eat at fast food joints, don’t order pop. If you have to have pop with your meal, buy your food to go and take it home to eat where you can drink your inexpensive pop. Also, some of the items on the menu are much better bargains than others. For example, at McDonald’s you can currently buy a McChicken sandwich for a dollar. Two McChickens will fill up most people, or come close, and I think they taste great. Paying the regular price for some of McDonald’s more expensive sandwiches is financial suicide, especially if you add fries and a soft drink. You may as well put a gun to your head and end it all.

10/This suggestion is not for everyone, but it will fit the personalities of some people. That is, record all your income and expenditures. Also write down goals, and try to reach them. For example, you might set a goal of spending less than $30.00 a week on groceries per person. If you make the goal, great. If you miss it, you can try again next year. And maybe you came close even if you missed the goal. I am a record keeping type, so this is fun for me. Other people I realize would rather be torn to pieces by rabid hyenas than write down their daily expenditures. Try this suggestion only if it fits your personality.

11/Buy used clothing at Goodwill stores. You can find astonishing high quality items for almost nothing. The last time I shopped at Goodwill, ties cost $1.00 each. There was a wide selection. How much would one new tie cost at even a relatively inexpensive store such as Walmart? Guessing, $8.00 to $12.00. (Update on April 13, 2017: used ties at Goodwill are now $1.99. The same day a new tie at Walmart was $10.00.) Great prices are available on all sorts of Goodwill clothing. Don’t limit yourself to clothing, however. My Aged Parent bought a used vacuum cleaner at Goodwill. That was years ago so she can’t be sure what she paid, but she thinks it was $15.00. It is a great sweeper. It is still working after quite a few years. I borrow it constantly. (Not that I use it much, of course. But I borrow it.)

12/I have an Amazon credit card. A few years ago Amazon was supposedly offering to pay people to sign up for their credit card. I forget how much they were paying, but it was significant money–at least $25.00, perhaps more. I was skeptical. This sounded like one of those deals which was too good to be true. Usually when something sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. There turns out to be some catch that wasn’t mentioned. But, skeptical though I was, I decided to sign up for the Amazon credit card. It has been an incredible money saver through the years. I got the original $25.00 (or whatever it was) as promised. And every time I use my Amazon credit card, I get points which add up and which can be used to take dollars off any of my purchases at Amazon. I buy lots of books and quite a few DVDs. On my most recent Amazon book/DVD purchase, I subtracted about $74.00 from my bill by applying the Amazon points I had built up as a result of using my Amazon credit card. Through the years I have saved hundreds of dollars. Amazon, of course, sells a lot more than books and DVDs. You are bound to find something at Amazon that you would like to buy. If you have built up points on your Amazon credit card, you can save a lot of money by applying them to your purchase. Do you give away money to charity? Put it on your Amazon credit card, rather than write a check. You save a stamp. Plus you gain points which save you money. If you give a charitable donation of $300.00, the charity gets the money, and you get $3.00 worth of points. It may not sound like a lot, but if you use your credit card often enough the points add up pretty rapidly. Pay your $1,000.00 car repair bill with your Amazon credit card, and you will get $10.00 back on your next Amazon purchase. Free money.

I am going to stop there for today. It’s already the longest blog post I’ve ever done. So this becomes Part I. More eventually, if I am still around.

Shelby Foote (b. 1916-d. 2005) was a successful novelist. When, in the middle of his life, this Mississippi-born author put his literary talents to work at writing history about the Civil War, he didn’t stint. Clearly he gave of his best, in both quantity and quality. The overarching title of his non-fiction trilogy was The Civil War: A Narrative. Volume I was Fort Sumter to Perryville (816 pp.) He was just getting warmed up. Volume II, Fredericksburg to Meridian, was 971 pages. The concluding third volume, Red River to Appomattox, was 1,065 pages. It took him about 20 years of labor–five times longer than the war, but as he correctly noted, “there were a good many more of them than there was of me.” (Red River, p. 1,065) Clearly he did voluminous research reading, to be able to write with such knowledge.

I finished volume I in August of 2015. I knew at that point that I would press on to read the next two volumes. I finished Volume III on Monday. I would heartily recommend these books to anyone who wants to get a real feel for the Civil War. These are not the books to read if you are wondering if the South had a right to secede from the union. That is a great topic, and I encourage everyone to think about it. Foote’s books will leave that issue for you to mull over at your leisure, and perhaps will give you a good deal of added perspective.

What Shelby Foote does is give a, well, he picked the right word, a narrative, of the war as it unfolded month by month.

He respects the combatants on both sides. He tries to be fair, while at the same time he is willing to point out flaws of character or behavior or tactics. I suspect he must have been a genius, to be able to understand and explain the movement of armies so readily. It is a talent that I would guess is extremely rare. The reader senses himself to be in the hands of a master.

Few of us think about the Civil War as much as we should or could. Yes, we know it happened and was an important part of our nation’s history, but hey, it’s in the past. Such a careless attitude toward the war is a mistake. We can’t really understand our current history unless we understand the Civil War. Reading these books will help you understand what both sides were fighting for–and I would contend, why those points of view continue to matter a lot, and continue to shape how we think about what is politically moral, and what immoral.

The traditional figure of Civil War dead is 620,000 total. More recent estimates range up to 750,000 or more. Let’s stick with the lower figure, just to be on the safe side. There were about 31,000,000 Americans in 1861 when the war started–about one tenth as many people as are in the U.S. right now. So for us moderns to lose, proportionately, as many people as died in the Civil War, we would be looking at 6,200,000 dead bodies. This was a big war. That, of course, is leaving aside the approximately 470,000 wounded–4,700,000 for us moderns, in proportionate terms. And leaving aside the property damage, which was enormous.

I don’t think the above numbers really allow us to feel the scale of the war. 620,000 dead is a big number, we know. But we can’t picture exactly how big. When we look at individual battles, especially relatively small battles, we have a better chance of getting our minds around the loss of life involved. I will give one example. As General Sherman moved through Georgia, he rarely had much opposition. Outside Griswoldville, however, a heavy column of Confederate infantry formed for attack. The Union veterans repelled the attack with ease, then repelled two more attacks, before the attackers gave up and retreated. The whooping victors moved out into the field to pick up booty. “Soon, however, the cheers froze in their throats at the sight of what lay before them in the stubble. They saw for the first time, to their horror, that they had been fighting mostly old men and young boys, who lay about in attitudes of death and agony–more than 600 of them in all, as compared to their own loss of 62.” (Red River, p. 646)

Foote then quotes two Union soldiers on the battle. ‘”I was never so affected at the sight of dead and wounded before,” an Illinois infantryman afterwards wrote home. “I hope we will never have to shoot at such men again. They knew nothing at all about fighting and I think their officers knew as little.” A comrade, reacting not only to this but also to the pillage he had seen and shared in, put his thoughts in stronger words. “There is no God in war,” he fumed. “It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.”‘ (Red River, pp. 646-647)

Maybe this battle can help us understand the scale of the war. Leave aside for the moment the 600 dead and wounded of the Confederates, destroyed in a hopeless attack against experienced troops for no good reason either tactical or strategic. Focus for the moment only on the 62 lost on the Union side, and try to put that number in perspective as we think about our own situations. An ordinary sized church might be about 100 people. Picture six churches of 100 members. Now picture the devastation if each one of those six churches lost, all at once in one day, ten men in the full vigor of young manhood. Sixty-two total men subtracted from six churches. It would be an enormous blow to the churches and to the families involved. All six churches would be seriously damaged. And yet the 62 men lost were only the men lost on the winning side! We have yet to speak of the 600 men and boys cut down on the Confederate side. Six hundred families were devastated. At ten men per congregation, 60 congregations seriously harmed. All in one small battle, foolishly conducted on one side, and bringing no particular benefit to anyone. Studying the figures of the dead and wounded in small battles helps me, at least, to gain an understanding of how dramatic was the loss of life in the Civil War. I can’t picture 620,000 dead very well, but I can begin to understand 62 or 600 men lost.

Apparently the last known combat death of the Civil War was a young man named John J. Williams. He died over a month after most Confederate armies had surrendered. He was a Union soldier from my own state of Indiana. May he and all the dead and crippled on both sides rest in peace.

Late in my life, Shelby Foote has greatly helped me to get at least a beginning sense of the Civil War. Don’t wait to be as old as I was to get that understanding. Try at least the first volume. Likely you will want to continue to the end–and this is true whether you side with North or South or both or neither. I am profoundly glad I read the books.

We’ve all heard Adolf Hitler explained as being the representative of the extreme right. This, the story goes, is where conservatism eventually leads: totalitarians behaving horribly, and killing lots of people who should not be killed. Have you ever scratched your head in befuddlement, and said, “You know, there’s something wrong here. The kind of things I believe in should not end up leading to Hitler. I want freedom and safety for everyone, not people being killed.”

If you scratched your head, you were on the right track. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn understood, a generation ago, that Adolf Hitler was a man of the left. The very title of his 1974 book declared the truth: Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn was an Austrian Roman Catholic nobleman born in 1909; he died in 1999 just short of his 90th birthday. (Oddly, he was born in the same year as another distinguished Austrian thinker, Leopold Kohr, author of The Breakdown of Nations.) He was a man of great learning. Apparently he spoke eight languages and read seventeen others. He read voluminously. He was a lover of freedom and responsibility, and those loves showed up in his writing.

I was fortunate to read Leftism in the original version, just about the time of its publication. I have never forgotten it. An updated version followed in 1991: Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot. I have not seen this revised edition. Both versions are incredibly expensive. I trolled through Amazon, Alibris, and AbeBooks just now, and the cheapest price I could find was at AbeBooks for $33.38 plus $3.99 shipping. Other prices ranges from $49.00 to $67.00 to $138.00 and more. If you want to read either book, I hope you are independently wealthy. Another option is to go to your local public library and see if they can find a copy at another library for you. This search is very likely to be successful. This is a very painless way to be able to borrow books too expensive to be purchased. I have had great success with this in the past, and highly recommend the process. I love to own books, but in some cases it is not realistic or possible to do so. Borrowing through inter-library loan is both realistic and possible.

However, there is another option which is also good, and not at all expensive. If you have a Kindle, Nook reader, iPad, or some similar device, the original version of Leftism can be purchased as an ebook for . . . drum roll please . . . the astonishing price of $4.00. Where? At Mises.org, the website devoted to the writings and thought of Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist. (Another distinguished Austrian thinker of world historical importance!) Mises.org also features another famous non-fiction book ebook by K-L, The Menace of the Herd, which I have not read but which sounds fascinating, and it is priced only slightly higher at $5.00. So far the only other book by K-L which I have read was the 1954 book Black Banners, a thought-provoking novel set near the end of World War II. This also is expensive in a paper version right now ($53.00 plus shipping). Maybe someday the people who do print on demand will discover the need to make Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s books available to a yearning public.

Alas, the yearning public does not exactly exist quite yet. But maybe it will someday. If we are to battle to retain or rebuild civilization, we are going to need the help of valuable thinkers who came before us. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is one of the people who has done work which can help us learn to think clearly.

Here is a quote from Leftism, pp. 257-258. It will give you a feel for the type of insights you will find in the book.

“This leftist monopoly on foreign affairs, however, is not only due to a conservative default, to a sour suspicious retreat in disappointment and offense. At the back of it lies something even more tragic: the imminent fear in the American noncommitted right that the left, so nicely rooted in American folklore, after all, is riding the Wave of the Future. How, otherwise, could one understand that temperamentally very conservative boards of trustees of colleges and universities have repeatedly hired professors notorious for their leftist ideas? How could one understand that archconservative American businessmen have sent their sons and especially their daughters to institutions of learning equally well known for their exorbitant rates and their extreme leftism, a leftism pertaining to politics, history, philosophy, economics–and morals?”

The situation K-L described in 1974 is of course humongously worse a generation later. But we keep on sending our children to places where they learn to think and behave like snowflakes, even though the “exorbitant rates” are vastly more exorbitant than when K-L wrote. We pay through the nose to have our children and our civilization destroyed.

Why indeed do Christians and conservatives send their children to leftish colleges? Why do Christians not take a stand for truth? Could it be that our dispensationalism and our amillennialism encourage us to believe that losing is (for us) the Wave of the Future, and that we can only hope for some kind of losing niche in the society growing up around us?

Perhaps. Emblazoned on our shield as our coat of arms should be the single word: Whatever.

Just out is my newest book, The Way to Do a Thing Is to Do It: Essays. It is a book of, uh, essays. There are fifty-four of them, of varying length, amounting to 306 pages. It is a paperback, $19.00, with no shipping cost if you order from me.

The title and the general theme are borrowed from J. C. Ryle. Bishop Ryle (1816-1900) was an English Anglican pastor with a decidedly evangelical bent. He wrote books and articles, and is still remembered and read today–as he well should be.

Many years ago I read his Warnings to the Churches, a collection of his essays written in the late 19th century. One of the things he says in that book is, “The way to do a thing is to do it.” That has stuck with me through the decades. It may seem to be a slightly enigmatic phrase. What does he mean exactly? He was writing about reading the Bible and seeking salvation, but doesn’t that spirit of acting apply to all of life? Don’t we accomplish things by doing them, rather than by just sitting there doing nothing? And this seems to be true even if mistakes are mixed in with our doing. You can’t steer a ship becalmed in the water. You can steer a moving ship, and that can involve correcting course if necessary.

Anyway, I have always admired Bishop Ryle’s feisty but gracious personality and writings, and I hope he will be pleased to know that I have titled a book using his arresting phrase.

My book, then, is about applying our Christianity to how we think and act. (Thinking is a vital part of doing.) One of Bishop Ryle’s best books was entitled Practical Religion. He was on to something profound: our Christianity should be practical. It should apply to how we live. If it does not, if our Christianity is something only good for Sunday, or only good in a few limited spheres of life, something is wrong.

For a long time I have believed that almost all the ills of our modern world come back, ultimately, to the Christian church. If our Christianity were more Christian, our problems (including even our national problems) would begin to be solved. But we prefer a truncated Christianity, which results in the devastation of our churches, of our souls, and also results in great harm to the non-Christians around us. I have written an entire book on that theme–The Christian Betrayal of the United States–a book certain to be enjoyed by masochists of every stripe (2010, 235 pages–a bargain at $18.00).

The Way to Do a Thing, etc., contains essays intended to help us think how life is put together, and how we should think and act in response to reality.

I’ll end with a quote from Ryle’s Practical Religion, a quote which is also in my book:

“It may be very true that wise young believers are very rare. But it is no less true that zealous old believers are very rare also. Never allow yourself to think that you can do too much,–that you can spend and be spent too much for Christ’s cause. For one man that does too much I will show you a thousand who do not do enough.”

My book The Way to Do a Thing Is to Do It is intended to help us all become wise, zealous people who do, people who have a thoughtful, practical Christianity that applies to all of life.

Since the Roe v. Wade decision, handed down by the Supremes oops I mean by the Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, a good many babies have been legally murdered via abortion. (The Supremes might have acted more wisely; they couldn’t have done worse.) Abortion figures vary slightly, but a reasonable figure seems to be about 57,000,000 U.S. abortions in the 44 years since Roe v. Wade.

Adolf Hitler is generally accused of having killed 6,000,000 Jews during the Holocaust in World War II. Assuming that figure to be accurate, we Americans, the free and the brave, have killed about 9 1/2 times as many babies as Hitler killed Jews. He gets called nasty names, while we think of ourselves as the center of the universe and the “indispensable nation” required by history to take our “democratic values” to every other nation in the world, at the point of a gun. Go figure. Hitler may be feeling a bit envious of us by now, and wishing he could have hired our publicity agent.

Can anything be done to stop the abortions? Should anything be done?

We have several options. We can continue as we are, killing babies till we’re blue in the face. This is the favored option of the left. Of course they would like to see taxpayers fund as many abortions as possible, as well. Continuing as we are seems to be the path we are most likely to follow for the immediate future.

Another option would be to return abortion to something which is determined by each individual state, rather than the U.S. as a whole telling the states what to do. Thus one state might outlaw abortion. Another state might welcome abortion. Such a solution might encourage both the fervently pro-abortion, and the fervently anti-abortion. This might permit the empire (the republic died long ago) to continue a bit longer with less discussion on the topic of abortion. The empire has plenty of things to worry about, such as our pending bankruptcy, or how we can continue to build the welfare/warfare state with Other People’s Money, or how we can have transgender bathrooms, so no more arguing about abortion would free us up to devote our time to issues such as the ones I have just named and many others.

A third option would be peacefully to split up the country right now. The split-up is going to happen sooner or later. Why not do it sooner, and avoid quarreling? East Coast and Left Coast, kill babies all you want to. Leave us hicks in Flyover Country with our benighted, anti-modern ideas and ideals. If we refuse to permit the murder of unborn children, isn’t that just proof of what idiots we are? Why do you want to have anything to do with such Neanderthals? Some of us are even Christians. Yuck! Leave us alone to follow our principles into the dust bin of history. The hip people will leave us and go to you. How can you lose?

Another option, a very good and practical option, would be for Christian churches which take their Christianity seriously, to warn those in their congregations who are pro-abortion, that barring repentance, they will be excommunicated. Then if they refuse to repent, excommunicate them. If we think of all the big-name politicians who claim to be Christians, and actually belong to some version of the Christian church, yet go on year after year supporting abortion, we begin to understand how underutilized is such an option. But what is true of big-name politicians is true of no-name ordinary people. A church unwilling to excommunicate those who advocate the murder of children, is not a church acting within the will of God. True Christians in such churches should look for true churches, if their own church cannot be reformed. The excommunication option would strengthen the American church greatly, as unbelievers would be removed one by one, and fairly quickly. Unfortunately, American Christianity has been twiddling its thumbs on the abortion issue for 44 years. But repentance can always happen! A church, no matter how disobedient to God that it has been, can always repent, gird up its loins, and decide to honor God by its behavior.

One fact we have to face squarely: the left will NEVER accept a national reality in which no abortions are permitted. That train left the station a long time ago. The left has felt increasingly entitled in the last 44 years. They will NEVER give up baby murder, now that they have “enjoyed” it for so long. The best we can hope for is to make abortion an issue for each state. The left might accept such a reality, since they would have plenty of pro-abortion states in which to kill babies. But they will never become people who accept that the law says that you are not permitted to kill babies so you don’t kill babies. Only the Holy Spirit can help them change their minds about whether it is good and wise to kill unborn children. Until that happens, the best we can hope for is 1/abortion becoming a states rights issue, 2/the nation splitting up into smaller fragments, 3/churches taking their responsibilities seriously.

As a church and as a nation, we risk the continuing covenantal chastisement of God. We have had some chastisement already, but more may be coming. God has been remarkably patient. But He has seen us murder 57,000,000 children He created. We should not be shocked if His patience runs out.