10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intellectually Accessible, Yet Compelling, June 12, 1998
This review is from: Government and Legal Plunder: Bastiat Brought Up to Date (Paperback)
In 1985, I registered for, and then attended, a seminar at the Foundation for Economic Education. I was sent this book to read before the conference, and found it a fascinating little book. I must confess that I often have a short attention span (if I were an elementary school student, I would be diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder--but as a real person, I realize that I just get bored easily), and don't always care for books that require me to read dozens of pages for an obscure point. Russell's book is a series of short chapters (8-12 pages), and each is broken down into 3 or 4 key ideas (2-3 pages each). Thus, a busy reader can read 3 pages, learn something worthwhile, and then put the book down. A person doing a little reading during a break at work can easily read a chapter, and understand it, without being docked for failure to be back on time. An aggressive reader can probably devour the entire book in a single reading.
Russell makes use of a lot of little stories, much like Aesop's fables. They are easy to read, the point is clear, and the lesson is learned painlessly.
The book is subtitled "Bastiat Brought Up To Date" because Russell closely follows the lead of Frederic Bastiat a member of the French Chamber of Deputies in 1840, who told little stories to his colleagues during debates, in his attempt to get them to vote his way. Interestingly, Bastiat, in his own classic book "The Law," wrote a book which is astonishingly descriptive in its modern-day accuracy. Consider this little quotation from Bastiat (and cited in Russell):
"The government has been perverted. And the police powers of the state have been perverted along with it. The law, I say, has been turned from its proper course and made to follow an entirely contrary purpose. The law has become the weapon of every kind of greed. Instead of checking crime, the government itself is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish."
One can only wonder whether Bastiat was foretelling the Cl! inton presidency, or if maybe, just maybe, politicians have always been the same, and Bastiat faced the mid-18th-century French equivalent of Bill and Hillary. Indeed, the timelessness of the ideas found in both Bastiat's work and in Russell's American updating is all the more reason to read these books.
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