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Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society

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A very readable collection of essays and assorted writings that are an excellent companion to any of James Bovards works especially "Lost Rights".

He explodes myths in a way that exposes the corrupt foundation of big government. Nothing from the Wefare state to the FDA, the Drug War and overall regulation escapes Higgs' scrutiny.

There is something here for everyon and I plan to pass my copy to as many people as possible including my daughters college friends as an antidote to their years of being brainwashed.
If you've veer wondered whether all these big expensive and liberty-destroying federal programs are worth it or can ever work, Higgs will certainly cure you of any doubts.

The chapter of the FDA is alone worth the price of the book as many of my friends all use the FDA as the one thing that the federal government does right and we cannot live without. Higgs exposes that for the sad joke that it is. In reality the FDA had killed many more people than they've ever saved. Despite years of testing and hundreds of millions od dollars prescription drugs still kill thousands ( Voixx was approved by the FDA then recently pulled ) at the same time tens of thousands are dying while potential life saving drugs are denied patients by the FDA rules - all in the name of safety!

The best thing about this book is that Higgs exposes the underlying issues without his own poitical axe to grind, and he is willing to give credit where credit is due. Overall his attack is relentless and his arguments very convincing. Even the most rabid Demo-publican will not be able to factually dispute anything presented here. Like Bovards works, this book is meticulously researched.

Read this and it will become intuitively obvious to the most casual observer the futility of government action. Think of this book as a bull$h** vaccine. After digesting this work any reader will be more likely to pick out and filter the BS coming from DC and their media lapdogs.

"I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant."

~ H. L. Mencken (Living Philosophies, 1931)

H. L. Mencken would have delighted in Robert Higgs's crisp and razor-sharp assessment of America's political evolution, Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society. The American body politic in the early 21st century seems somewhat inexplicable to many classical liberals, traditional conservatives, libertarians and others who appreciate the famous Marxist inquiry (Groucho, not Karl) of "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" Higgs, in forty concise chapters focusing on what has really happened in our historical, political and economic evolution as a Republic, ensures not only that we "know" and are no longer ignorant, but hints that Americans may also someday recognize that it is better to be free than to be a slave to the idea of the necessity of a centralized nation-state.

How did America migrate so far from the ideas of the founders, who believed government was a necessary evil to be constantly watched for signs of insincerity and encroachment? How did we change from a people who saw American presidents as presentable representatives abroad and models of moderation in all things governmental, into a people who worship activists from Wilson to Roosevelt to Nixon to Clinton and George W. Bush - each in their own way a national embarrassment abroad and utterly Bacchanalian in all things related to the state?

Higgs explains why this is so, by showing us the historical facts, the rich and widely available evidence of a growing and ravenous state, addicted to an all-it-can-eat diet of American national wealth, productivity and citizens, and the actions of the three prolific cooks in the kitchen - the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive. Whether the cooks are just doing their jobs, or are actually co-dependent with the chief customer and its insatiability, will be a question answered in one way by modern Republicans and Democrats, and another by the rest of the country. That the state has eaten extremely well in the last century will be denied by neither group.

In a particularly helpful way, Higgs explains how our Constitution exists in three realities - the literal paper document, the body of judicial evaluation and rulings accumulated over decades about what it meant to say, and the most important reality - Charles Beard's idea of a living Constitution, "...what living men and women think it is, recognize as such, carry into action, and obey." In this last incarnation we find hope that it really can be the citizens in a republic who govern. Sadly, the hope Higgs offers in Against Leviathan must be gleaned along the model of the Straussians through the esoteric approach, using a kind of anarcho-libertarian inspired gnosis.

For those of us who have apprehended American history from television and public school texts, Against Leviathan explains political actions beginning the early 20th century in a way that makes real sense and is historically accurate. Specifically, Higgs analyzes various mythologies against econometric data not available or ignored when these story-lines were initially put forth. In particular the idea that World War II got us out of the depression, something I grew up believing without question, is firmly debunked on the basis of hard cold fact. As the irreverent Mencken and Jesus of Nazareth both understood, knowing the truth is remarkably liberating.

The past prepares the way for the future, and it cannot be otherwise. Woodrow Wilson, with a friendly legislature and judiciary, transformed his own electoral pledge to "keep us out of the war" into the classic tease practiced by all centralized states, where "no means yes." The federal government did not go from outlays of less than 2% of the gross national product in 1914 to the modern level of well over 20% without creative approaches towards confiscation and the elimination of citizen resistance, without a "crisis constitution" taking precedence over a "normal constitution." The massive conscription called by Wilson worked hand in hand with the Espionage Act of 1917, and its notorious Sedition Act amendment, to deliver bodies to the state while silencing complaints. Wilson's dedicated work paved the way legally and intellectually for the New Deal, in both spirit and detail of the governmental excesses, and further paved the way for an American command economy between 1941 and the end of World War II. This militarized society and emerging centralized state led, in turn, predictably and irreversibly into the quasi-corporatist government we both fostered and endured as Americans throughout the Cold War. Today we witness an even more perfect progeny, the never-ending War on Terror.

After their passage and implementation, the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act were challenged in the courts as violating the first amendment, among other things. Both were subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court, although they were repealed in 1921, several years after WWI ended. Higgs points out that the Supreme Court has upheld most of emergency powers assumed by the state in post-hoc reviews, and he explains why in a way that is both disturbing and depressing. In part, reversing things like Roosevelt's confiscation of privately held gold stock and invalidation of all public and private contractual language mentioning gold as a form of payment would have not only embarrassed the federal government, but completely shattered its finances, its authority and its credibility. In other words, had the Supreme Court acted to preserve the amendments to the Constitution that once protected life, liberty, and property, it would have brought down the government completely and chaotically. That several principled and stubborn justices at times came close to doing just that is heartwarming.

Robert Higgs covers a lot of ground in this comprehensive book. A relaxed reading is warranted by all Americans, whether they come to the book embracing the idea an activist state and feeling it is worth the cost, or loathing it as a moral and financial abomination. My favorite sections are those that address the political economy of the Leviathan; Higgs educates, entertains and enrages all at once. But there are at least three topics that are blazingly important to all of us as we consider present day-to-day challenges in our lives and for our families. In this election year, Americans are concerned about health care, crime and national security, and Against Leviathan enlightens on the state's interest in and influence on all three issues.

The Food and Drug Administration seems a benign example of the Leviathan holding our individual interests foremost. Yet Higgs clearly shows how the FDA not only inhibits and warps scientific research and consumer choice, but is killing people daily with crimes of both commission and omission. Higgs carefully analyzes, with the help of FDA scientists and administrators themselves, the risk analysis conducted prior to every decision of the FDA, decisions that seem to place the needs of politicians and lobbyists as well as scientists and pharmaceutical CEOs over those of actual people who need to purchase drugs and get complete information about their health and their choices. This chapter is entitled in part "A Billy Club Is Not a Substitute for Eyeglasses" indicating that the FDA's law enforcement agenda has superceded its better health agenda. Frankly, after reading this chapter it is not clear to me that the FDA would understand the metaphor, after decades of steeping in its own brand of moral superiority and bureaucratic infallibility.

In terms of crime and keeping Americans safe, Higgs relates the rise in public security spending with a threefold rise in private security employment and an astronomical rise in the incarceration rate of Americans and prison construction. Clearly, spending more for public safety from crime isn't working out as planned, although the prison industry emerges as one of the new micro-corporatist entities that provide depth and character to American-style corporatism. Higgs points out that while the private sector has rushed to fill the public safety void left by government policing, government spending in this area grows, unabated by a lack of effectiveness. In a discussion of the military industrial congressional complex elsewhere, Higgs points out how "no failure goes unrewarded" and discusses how industries affixed to various federal teats actually define government requirements instead of responding to them. It appears this condition extends beyond the MICC and into domestic law enforcement and public safety.

In terms of national security, the Leviathan on steroids we have witnessed in our crisis constitution's one thousand days since 9-11 tells its own story. Higgs, in defining the nature of government growth and the state's natural-born tendency to infringe upon individual rights of speech, action and property, takes a bit of the mystery out of the Patriot Acts, the Department of Homeland Security, and a bloated federal budget that unguently merges the military state with the police state to make everyone feel better. It was all so predictable, and a unique value of Against Leviathan is its clarification and analysis of how and why government grows, not just that it does.

A weakness in the book may be that while its title suggests we could have a foothold against our Leviathan government, the contents are not as optimistic. Is the black market and a growth in contempt for law a means of rebellion against state controls and restrictions? Sort of, Higgs says, but not really, as these two are mutually dependent. The super-productive peasant gardens in vast barren state collectives in the old Soviet Union worked well in part because the state run collectives were owned by everyone, meaning owned by no one. Thus collective resources of time, effort and supplies were free to be used on individual plots. The mystery was symbiosis. Once the artificial resource flow made possible by collectives was eliminated, the super-productive peasant gardens were likewise changed irrevocably, and we no longer hear of them. What about incremental change? Higgs points out that the Third Way is more of the same, succumbing to the false god of central planning even while lamenting it. Perhaps a major crisis so massive the state would be unable to surmount it could crash the system and relieve us from the Leviathan. Even this is viewed as unlikely, because of the remarkable stability of state interests netted with other interests, whether business or values based. America quasi-corporatism is not fascism, because each industry is not a single actor able to negotiate wholly with the state, or to completely act with the state to pursue this aim or that. Our corporatism is far more fluid and multifaceted, but the Leviathan's very widespread usefulness to all important political actors and factions makes it remarkably difficult to unseat it or even put it in a lurch. Only the individual is left out of the Leviathan equation, and most of us don't recognize that crucial reality.

We have been acculturated and miseducated to accept patronizing massive central power and call it a Republic. The benevolence, magnificence and necessity of the nation-state has been preached every day from Washington for the past one hundred years. Robert Higgs aims to correct this dangerous circumstance, and baptize us all with truth. He has succeeded in Against Leviathan. One only wishes that Higgs' next book will be entitled "Leaving Leviathan: The End of the Affair."

October 20, 2004

I highly recommend this book to veterans and newcomers to Liberty. I myself will definitely pass this book around to my friends and relatives.

The author has a very unique and humorous voice, and the writing overall is very clear and concise. It's an odd thing to say, but this book has the most entertaining and informative introduction I've ever read in a book--and I read many!

Buy it, read it, and spank it.

When Robert Higgs is attacking big government of the Hobbesian kind - i.e. "Leviathan", he is brilliant while also promoting the blessings of a free economy. "Against Leviathan" is a collection of 40 essays and reviews save one that were previously published in various journals, especially the Independent Institute's "Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy" that is edited by Robert Higgs. The 40 pieces are grouped under seven topics: Welfare Statism, Our Glorious Leaders, Despotism, Soft and Hard, Economic Disgraces, The Political Economy of Crisis, Retreat of the State?, and Review of the Troops. The gist is that "few people in the United States today really give a damn about living as free men and women".

Despite Junior Bush being selected as President by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 and Junior Bush next stealing votes in Ohio through corruption and cheating in 2004 to win that state's electoral votes and subsequently the national election, Higgs believes that Americans have free and honest elections: "Citizens in a democracy can always `throw the rascals out' at the next election". Ask a Libertarian or a Green about ballot access laws.

Higgs blames the American voter for the Demo-publican monopoly in party politics: "Here in the United States we have been flinging rascals hither and yon for more than two centuries". Yet during the last election in 2004, this reviewer asked all of his sociology of law students at a very expensive private college in Ohio to name the 4 candidates for President to appear on the Ohio ballot - they could name only 2! That's a score of 50% - not a passing score. They only knew Bush and Kerry, they could not name Badnarik or Peroutka. Higgs does not see the covert struggles by Demopublican statists and their corporatist friends to maintain control of their monopoly, so he blames the U.S. voter! Having said that, however, Higgs does see the end result: "two revolving factions of a one-party state".

Higgs does a good job of lambasting government and presidents, but pauses when he mentions Grover Cleveland who Higgs says "may have been the best of them all". Cleveland, former mayor of Buffalo and later governor of New York, built his anti-big government reputation by battling corruption and graft. Yet after Cleveland was elected President, his hostility towards the spoils system never translated into reforms. In fact, he nearly doubled the number of civil servants during his term of office and a majority of them represented his party of Democrats. Cleveland did veto a precedent-setting number of bills because they sought to enrich an elitist few at the expense of the general population. But then his increasing appetite for bigger government led him to create the Interstate Commerce Commission. Near the end of his term as President, Cleveland began to be viewed as a mercantilist, or British free trader, which was different from an American free enterpriser. And although the voters reelected Cleveland by a vote of 5,538,000 to 5,447,000, the Electoral College chose Harrison 233 to 168. But as we have already seen, Higgs blames the U.S. voter.

After four years of Harrison, the voters managed to outmuscle the Electoral College and reelect Cleveland to an ill-fated second term beginning with the Depression of 1893. He let the British drain American gold reserves, thereby establishing the Gold versus Silver controversy. Cleveland showed his statist heavy hand when he terminated the Pullman Strike. And as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. militaries, he failed to control his marines who deposed the Queen of Hawaii and took liberties with her daughters. In short, Cleveland was good at talking the talk but less able to walk the walk. Calvin Coolidge would have been a better choice because he slept more than the others and was awake less time to do statist damage, although his handling of the Boston Police Strike was abominable.

In short, Higgs does a thorough job of railing against Big Government, collectivism, and welfarism. But by ignoring the creation of the corporation by the State and its resulting status as offspring of the state - thereby just as inefficient and bureaucratic as its parent, Higgs is telling only half the story. Leviathan is government AND its corporations. In a free market, there are no corporations; corporations are creations of the state - they are "artificial persons" that are granted Constitutional rights by its parent. This is a problem I hope Higgs will address one day soon.

Not sure I can improve upon the thorough reviews already given, but I think this is an excellent and sober analysis of the relationship between the US government and the concepts/realities of freedom. His analysis inlcudes discussions about the costs and benefits of various government programs which helps to keep things in perspective; refraining from theoretical speculation and simplistic harping. Mr. Higgs work is timely and needed for the current and past crops of statists churned out of the government school systems. I am anxious to read more of his work and recommend this book to others whenever I have the opportunity.

Robert Higgs' Against Leviathan is a must read for anyone wanting to think - really think - about government involvement in a free society. Well... what is said to be a free society. The book is really a series of articles written over the years by the author, but each article is a self-contained tour de force of analysis on the chosen issue. Mr. Higgs shows, in detail, that we are not living in a free society, at least not the kind of free society we once lived in. Against Leviathan details, in an elegant intellectual fashion, how Western Society fell from grace as a set of governments holding individual rights in esteem to a group of near tyrants stomping on the individual and individual rights at every turn. Against Leviathan levels its intellectual firepower at government regulation, taxation, conscription, welfare, Marxism, collectivism, anti-individual ideology and a host of other ills that plague modern society.

What I like most about the book is it shakes up ones' worldview. It attacks commonly held assumptions with fervor, and causes the reader to re-evaluation his intellectual roots. For example, the book discusses the "Normal" Constitution and the "Crisis" Constitution. On the one hand, the normal Constitution functions as one might expect, as it is written (for the most part), but the crisis Constitution functions in an entirely different fashion. When a crisis arrives, the crisis constitution allows the government to expand its power exponentially. After the crisis is resolved, the government tends to return to its former more limited role - but not entirely. Government power does not deflate as much as it inflates, thus, the government manages to expand at least a little after each crisis. This is just one of many thought provoking articles in Mr. Higgs' book.

Of course, I do not agree with everything the author says, but that does not matter. In the main, the book is intended, I think, to cause the reader to examine his worldview and re-think the basis for his ideology. What more can a person ask than to be stimulated to ponder fundamental issues?

A wonderful book. Highly recommended.
AD2

Mr. Higgs work Against Leviathan is a collection of essays that cover the ways that the federal government has expanded to monstrous proportions. I believe that the chapter that impacted me the most was the one that contained the theory of a "crisis constitution" whereby the US Constitution was set aside in cases of "emergency." Both world wars, the Great Depression and, if the book were written today, the current mess, were cases where contracts, freedoms and other things precious to our liberty were thrown aside to "clean up the mess" of the problems then existing. Liberal and conservatives will not like what is found in this book. Five stars for this book.

Robert Higgs is one among a treasure trove of liberty's greatest assets at the Ludwig von Mises Institute at mises.org. Where a collection of America's greatest classical liberal free market mavens, and advocates of the minimalist government conceived by the Founders, have put together one of the WWW's most heavily trafficked site for freedom and truth in the entire world - bar none.

Mr. Higgs, and his ultra-commendable associates at Mises; Raico, Rothbard, Hoppe, Thornton, Denson, Hulsman, DiLorenzo, Stromberg, to name a very few, have put this prior dupe of the government, media & academe, on the right track after nearly a half century of being totally misled and lied to. Almost all I knew was wrong; a lifetime of disinformation literally meant to deceive me into believing our Government's massive existense is justified.

It is not, nor never was, justified to serve any more than it's intended role as the benign night watchman of our shores and our natural rights while otherwise keeping it's freaking nose out of our personal business and finances. A purpose Govt itself has spent this past century, and vast billions of our own money in it's compulsory education, to convince the people otherwise for the sole purpose of enriching an elite few on the backs and lives of the many they feed off like the unproductive parasites indeed they mostly all are.

The plethora of downloadable mp3 and video lectures at mises.org by Mr Higgs and others has given me the education I now must believe was purposely denied me by an evil establishment who's ONLY concern is it's own self preservation and expansion to our grave detriment and to our ever dwindling freedoms that each new "emergency" enables the chipping away of.

One of my favorites at mises.org is Mr. Higg's lecture that he begins w/the Margaret Attwoods poem "Siren Song" and well worth anyone's time in the listening.

If truth and freedom are your primary concerns, as they have luckily become mine, this Higgs book, like all his others, is highly recommended.

He really covers every base and sticks it to the man right between his little beady lying pea-brain eyes.