The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome is a radical re-visioning of what government is, a powerful analysis of why it doesn't work, and an exploration of the innovative solutions spontaneously emerging thanks to the fortunate failure of politics.

Every year, consumer goods and services get better, cheaper, and more widely available while critical necessities delivered by government grow more expensive, even as their quality declines. The reason for this paradox is simple: politics. Not bad politics, not liberal politics, not conservative politics, not politics corrupted by big money or distorted by special-interest groups, but the simple practice of delivering goods and services through federal, state, and local governments and their obsolete decision-making practices.

National Review columnist Kevin Williamson describes the crisis of the modern welfare state in the era of globalization and argues that the crucial political failures of our time—education, health care, social security, and monetary policy—are due not to ideology but the nature of politics itself. Meanwhile, those who can't or won't turn to the state for goods and services—from homeschoolers to Wall Street to organized crime—are experimenting with replacing the outmoded social software of the state with market-derived alternatives.

Williamson compellingly analyzes the government's numerous failures and reports on the solutions that people all over the country are discovering. You will meet homeschoolers who have abandoned public schools; see inside private courtrooms that administer the law beyond government; encounter entrepreneurs developing everything from private currencies to shadow intelligence agencies rivaling the CIA; and learn about the remarkably peaceable enforcement of justice in the allegedly lawless Wild West.

As our outmoded twentieth-century government collapses under the weight of its own incompetence and inefficiency, Williamson points to the green shoots of the brave new world that is already being born.

Kevin D. Williamson covers the intersection of economics, politics, and culture for National Review and National Review Online. His highly regarded Exchequer column relies on his trademark "English-major math" to chronicle the daily growth of the national debt and the ugly symbiotic relationship between Washington and Wall Street. He is a regular on Kudlow & Company, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and National Public Radio, and has appeared on dozens of other television news and talk-radio shows. He has served as a professor at The King's College and as director of the journalism program at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. He lives in New York City.