Customer Reviews

Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen

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James Bovard explains, point blank, how the United States government has grown into an uncontrollable monster, negatively impacting each and every one of us, and taking away many basic rights that were once taken for granted.

There is no denying that power corrupts. Give a politician the authority to pass one oppressive law and, eventually, more and more oppressive laws will follow. Government has become increasingly intrusive, unethical, and dishonest over the years as more and more special interest legislation has made its way through congress.

This process did not take place overnight and it will not be eliminated overnight. Americans must work for change first on the local level, leading up to the state and national levels. We must act quickly before it is too late. I hope that many people will read this book and take action. A totalitarian United States government is closer than we think.

After reading Lost Rights, I couldn't wait to read this book. This book is an outstanding follow-up, with more insight into the evolution of government power. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in political science, philosophy, law, or really just interested on how the world works. If every American read this book, the Democrats and the Republicans would be relegated to third-party status practically overnight. The government is one thing if nothing else- coercive power over the individual. Upon that understanding we should make one thing clear: that the more power that is given back to the individual, the better we shall be able to live our own lives without a "nanny state" to watch behind our backs to make sure we don't do something "wrong", like ingest politically incorrect substances. It is in this spirit that I give this book my highest praise. It is worth every penny.

Once you read this book you'll have a tough decision to make: What will you do with the information? Will you muster the courage to start resisting tyranny while there's still some hope for a rebirth of liberty here in the U.S.?

If you're in America, you do not live in a free country. If you have any doubt about that, you must read this book, and with it, I would recommend "Why Government Doesn't Work," by Harry Browne and "Your Money or Your Life," a brand new book by Sheldon Richman.

While the Federal Government is distraction you with Kosovo and our new gauranteed-to-be-protracted war on terrorism, the IRS is tooling up do to more of what it's been doing for years, invading your privacy and controlling your life. The elephant/donkey boondoggle does not have your best interest in mind at all. You must put your best interest up front, especially when you vote. VOTE LIBERTARIAN!

Amen

According to perpetual social and political critic James Bovard, the power inherent in government is alive and well; unfortunately, as he reminds us, they are not always necessarily accomplishing the people's will. Thus we find ourselves in circumstances in which governments are both larger and more powerful than ever before, while the individual citizen's ability to control and influence the course of his or her own life and liberty is becoming more and more problematic. In this stirring expose, the author explores how the federal government increasingly poses a threat to destroy individual rights and liberties in an attempt to preserve the fiction of government as superceding the citizen. Bovard wonders along with us how this state of affairs has managed to occur, and takes a thoughtful and impressive tour of the history of government control over individual liberties in an attempt to better understand it, and the future it presents for our cogitation.

Long before it was either fashionable or popular, conservative author Bovard was railing against the accumulating power and privilege of the crony-based capitalists who now seem to control the country. Here he draws blood from a dissection of the notion of state sovereignty, which he contends amounts to nothing so much as a glossy justification for the power elite's lust for ever-increasing power and privilege. Especially egregious in the author's view is the way the doctrine is being used to justify the behavior of others, to limit their rights to protect themselves, or to keep the fruit of their own labor. Indeed, all of this is food for thought. Moreover, Bovard is an interesting and quite eclectic scholar, someone who accomplishes both meticulous research and establishes the substantiation for his claims as he proceeds, and does so quite convincingly. He also seems to be profoundly well read, based on his wide use of quotations from such luminaries as Marx, Hegel, Rousseau, and Thomas Hobbes.

Thus, he manages to raise some thought provoking issues regarding our seeming need to regulate many aspects of private behavior (such as the use of pot) that we can neither effective enforce nor usefully demonstrate to be evil for the individual. Bovard argues quite convincingly regarding the potential dangers of allowing others to regulate our Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties according to their own moral prerogatives. Bovard reserves special scorn for the so-called "Peter Pan" theory of government as the benevolent and paternalistic defender of the commonweal, and actively guides the reader through a critical review of the two hundred year history on the subject, a history he finds rife with examples through which government has repeatedly used its power to thwart rather than support the will and civil liberties of the majority. This is a splendidly researched book that reads well and which has some disturbing thoughts regarding the state of our polity. It is also one I highly recommend. Enjoy!

...Freedom In Chains is a hard hitting book that explains thedifference between democracy and liberty and how statist politiciansand intellectuals have perverted the definition on liberty. Instead of the right to be left alone and doing what one pleases so long as no one else's rights are interfered with, statists have twisted it into something else. Government declares that there is a crisis or unmet need that requires taxation or intrusive laws that decrease our freedom in the guise of taking care of us. If you are a libertarian, Bovard's Freedom In Chains will remind you why you are one, if you are not a libertarian, it will hard not to become one after reading this book. It will really make you think hard about the role of the state and its citizens.

I read a lot of political books and this book is one I recommend to everyone. James Bovard is a genius. His writing style is very good, his facts most interesting and his message is one that all Americans need to hear. This is not a book you read in one sitting. It is one you sip, savor and contemplate.

If you still labor under the delusion that the United States Government is here for your benefit, read this book. Mr. Bovard puts paid to that myth. Americans are now subject to such an unrealistic array of laws and statutes that every one of us is ripe for picking by some bureucrat looking to "get his numbers up". America has truly gone from a government "for the people" to one "against the people". Our constitutional protections are not worth the paper they are written on. If you manage to go through life without running afoul of some government functionary, you are indeed a luck individual. Read this book

Freedom in Chains documents the steady give-up of individual rights for the sake of "safety", for combatting drugs etc. Jefferson said the surrender of one liberty is the first step to slavery. If he is right, we are in big trouble. This book presents the case for preserving liberty,and is a must read!

This is by far Bovard's best work yet. Although his previous works such as "Lost Rights" and "Shakedown" primarily presented instance after instance of government oppression, in this work he manages to tackle political philosophy on top of it. The result is magnificent. He completely disects the philosophy of statism and shows why it is imcompatible with any semblance of individual liberty and self-government. Statism is revealed to be nothing than a form of slavery and bondage. But what is really chilling is that Bovard makes it known that America has long been under the statist spell and that liberty is being trampled upon everyday by government officials and bureaucrats nationwide. This is a very important work that should be read by anyone who cares about what is happening to America. The time is now to recognize how far we are along the road to serfdom before it is too late to turn back.

"BEHOLD, I SEND YOU OUT AS SHEEP AMIDST THE WOLVES"

This book and the reason YOU (Thinking Americans) should read it is best stated on the dust jacket.

"He (James Bovard) is one of Washington's most controversial journalists. Since 1993, his writings have been publicly denounced by FBI Director Louis Freeh,the Secretary of Commerce,the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Developement, the White House AIDS czar, as well as by the Chiefs of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the U.S. International Trade Commission."

With a cast like that, not wanting you to read his writings, you should be all the more determined to find out just what it is that THEY don't want YOU to know.