Customer Reviews

Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty (HOOVER INST PRESS PUBLICATION)

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I was extremely disappointed in the Kindle version of this book. The first few pages are riddled with typographical errors, apparently reflecting the lack of editing following whatever text recognition scanning method Amazon uses to convert books. The topic is interesting to me but reading this poorly edited version is a major distraction.

Always looking for the intelligent counterpoints in important matters I picked this up. Not worth the effort. Very disappointing and unbalanced viewpoint with plenty of footnotes but no intelligent connections... and with many Herculean leaps of logic. Reminds me of O'Reilly's diatribe about who is looking out for us. One thing for sure, this nonsense presumes that our nation and it's proud inhabitants need a cadre of radical myopic minions to guard the gate. I disagree.I give credit to the author for being provocative but then I am pretty easily provoked by narrow positions of certainty. Here on the 4th of July I affirm my love for this great nation and my distaste for radical undemocratic viewpoints like this that seek to diminish the foundation. I prefer to discuss "of the people, by the people, and for the people" as we collectively and with great affection shape our collective path to secure and protect "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Read the Federalist Papers, Toqueville's. Democarcy in America, and the recent book Adams for a healthy context. God bless America.

A lawyer takes local and state government to task. Kinda like a journalist taking the federal government to task (Bovard's books). Both these guys write adversarial briefs, selectively picking and chosing their material to paint a picture. Useful propaganda, since I support zero government (you can privitize everything, including the military, post office, justice, etc).

One example from page 8, which you can check out on-line: Federal expenditures are listed as less than $1 trillion, which is less than state and local expenditures, but in fact federal expenditures are greater than $2 trillion. So how did the author get away with this statistic? Easy. He stripped out "entitlements" like Social Security, Medicare, which account for roughly half of federal expenditures.

This is but one example.

In short: useful propaganda, but nothing more.