Governments are bigger and more powerful than ever, while a citizen's ability to control his or her own life has never been less effective. Bovard shows how the State threatens to destroy the individual in order to preserve the belief that any government is superior to the citizen. Bovard asks how we got to this point and answers with a thoughtful look at the history of governmental control from ancient times to the present, peppered throughout with observations on our present day, out of control governmental regulatory commissions and all-confiscating IRS.
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.
