Governments and bureaucracies are bigger and more controlling than ever. Today's citizen has less ability to control his or her own life than ever before. How did we get to this point? James Bovard, bestselling author of Lost Rights, shows how the State has become a behemoth that threatens to destroy the individual. Public policy today is permeated by "Statism"--the belief that government is inherently superior to the citizenry, that progress consists of extending the realm of governmental compulsion, and the vesting more arbitrary power in government officials will eventually make citizens happy. Reading through the history of the State and its war on the citizen, Bovard looks at thinkers as diverse as John Locke, Etieene de la Boetie, James Madison, and G.W.F. Hegel. He explores the original idea of the State; the corruption of the concept of freedom; how the rising number of government dependents is subverting democracy; and the ultimate fraud that is perpetrated as the State's benevolence. In these times of the Leviathan State, Freedom in Chains is must reading for everyone who took James Bovard's Lost Rights to heart, as well as for anyone trying to understand how government power has transformed self-reliant Americans into wards of the State.
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (St. Martin's/Palgrave, 2006), and eight other books. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean. He is a contributing editor for the American Conservative and a frequent contributor to Freedom Daily.
The Wall Street Journal called Bovard 'the roving inspector general of the modern state,' and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a 'one-man truth squad.' His 1994 book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty received the Free Press Association's Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism and Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner Award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association.
His writings have been been publicly denounced by the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.
