This book is very poor value so it gets one star. It's thin, it's full of assertions that are highly debatable, and it does not do anything to disclose and discuss the assumptions (other than splash a little data here and there) on which the claims are based. I should have known better than to pay out over $20 for a book that I suspected might be rather easily summarized by the publisher's blurb. Shame on me for blowing $20 on the kindle version.... I might have been able to give it up to 3 stars if it were priced about $2.99. That would be a roughly balanced value proposition.
Many of the points in the book, while not exactly new, do merit some consideration and were provocative, at least to me. Here are few comments, by section. I'll leave it to another reviewer to outline the book's arguments.
I hoped that the book would at least make the most obvious point on the main failing of Obamacare: that healthcare costs can only come down if a) demand decreases or b) supply (of healthcare) increases. Obamacare INCREASES demand and actually hurts supply (in a thousand ways, some of which are catalogued in this book. There are points made in the 1st section of Reviving America, but it's a dusty mess of details, all without a guiding principle (i.e. the law of supply and demand can't be repealed), hence it's a pretty bad job.
The Flat Tax section is better, but not enough to move me off of the single star. Taxes are an easy target though, the tax system is a great illustration that the great framers of the constitution weren't so great because they missed a critical section in the constitution regarding laws: The principle that any law should be readable by whoever is supposed to follow it and therefore no law or regulation covering a single matter (say, taxes) can exceed one million words. To be modern and ridiculous. But you get the point.
There is some groping around for principles, but this didn't seem to be central to the argument, which had a political vs. principled feel. There is a principle underlying progressive taxation, and it's something like 'tax where the collectable money is'. That has always been the main principle of taxation. I would go further and suggest a number of other principles, such as 'people own stuff, dead people don't', which would lead on to further clear thinking about what a good taxation system is and does, but it's not my book so I'm going to stop there.
The worst section of all was on gold and the Fed. Wow, what a wrong headed mess for the most part. It is totally backward looking and not even very strong in understanding economic history, as in where the source of depressions/recessions is. So, Steve & Elizabeth, let's test your gold bug model against the 'Abundance future scenario' or even 'Robo-paradise, where no one needs to (or 'has') work because AIs run the factories, robots maintain the factories & drive the trucks, and a few people are needed to help the AIs creatively think about the new generation of AIs and robots and factories. NO ONE will give one tiny care about gold. Gold won't motivate the robots, it won't recycle the piles of broken gadgets, it will only be an inert lump of shiny metal. This is because, if you remember your economics, most people only care much about things that have BOTH scarcity AND utility. Gold is a loser in the 2nd regard. A contract with the government for a slip of paper (or electron) that can pay taxes is a better idea (getting us about a third of what we want) as it can be used to pay taxes at least. See Chartalism, which is helpful but not the complete story. Money, whatever the theory, is worth zip if it does not succeed in being part of the human motivation system... that which is in place to get people off their duffs and doing what they need to do. If money = gold equals only so much human motivation available in the whole world, that's a losing approach.
This is not an easy problem. You can do better than hard currencies if you think about it (and fiat currencies ARE better, if they are managed to maximize total motivation), but please, this is 2015 already and we need to be thinking about next year and 5 years and 25 years from now, not repeating the approaches of the past which only worked because of the psychology of the people then.
I recommend skipping this one. Read Debt, the first 5000 years, to help you understand money, but also reading histories such as 'Lords of Finance', 'Freedom from Fear', and Niall Ferguson's books can help understand the actual experience of gold backed currency… which is not so very fine.
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