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Store: An Independent Institute Book
4 Figures • 8 Tables
© 2004 |
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AGAINST LEVIATHAN
Government Power and a Free Society
By
Robert Higgs
What is fundamentally wrong with government today? In Against Leviathan, economist and historian Robert Higgs, offers an unflinching critical analysis of government power.
Against Leviathan combines an economist’s analytical scrutiny, an historian’s respect for the facts, and a refusal to accept the standard excuses and cruelties of government officialdom. Topics include Social Security, the paternalism of the FDA, the “War on Drugs,” the nature of political leadership, civil liberties, the conduct of the national surveillance state, and governmental responses to a continuing stream of “crises,” including domestic economic busts and foreign wars both hot and cold.
Against Leviathan is a thorough and penetrating critique, and a significant contribution in this current time of crisis and unchecked expansion of government power.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. Welfare Statism
- 1. Is More Economic Equality Better?
- 2. The Welfare State: Promising Protection in an Age of Anxiety
- 3. Nineteen Neglected Consequences of Income Redistribution
Part II. Our Glorious Leaders
- 4. The Mythology of Roosevelt and the New Deal
- 5. Public Choice and Political Leadership
- 6. Bolingbroke, Nixon, and the Rest of Them
- 7. What Professor Stiglitz Learned in Washington
- 8. Great Presidents?
Part III. Despotism, Soft and Hard
- 9. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration: A Billy Club Is Not a Substitute for Eyeglasses
- 10. Regulatory Harmonization: A Sweet-Sounding, Dangerous Development
- 11. Puritanism, Paternalism, and Power
- 12. We’re All Sick, and Government Must Heal Us
- 13. Lock ’Em Up!
- 14. Government Protects Us?
- 15. Coercion Is Not a Societal Constant
Part IV. Economic Disgraces
- 16. Official Economic Statistics: The Emperor’s Clothes Are Dirty
- 17. A Tale of Two Labor Markets
- 18. Death and Taxes
- 19. A Carnival of Taxation
- 20. Unmitigated Mercantilism
- 21. Results of a Fifty-Year Experiment in Political Economy
- 22. Results of Another Fifty-Year Experiment in Political Economy
- 23. Pity the Poor Japanese
Part V. The Political Economy of Crisis
- 24. War and Leviathan in Twentieth-Century America: Conscription as the Keystone
- 25. Crisis and Quasi-corporatist Policymaking: The U.S. Case in Historical Perspective
- 26. The Normal Constitution versus the Crisis Constitution
- 27. The Myth of War Prosperity
- 28. To Deal with a Crisis: Government Program or Free Market?
- 29. Beware the Pork Hawk: In Pursuit of Reelection, Congress Sells Out the Nation’s Defense
- 30. The Cold War Is Over, but U.S. Preparation for It Continues
Part VI. Retreat of the State?
- 31. Leviathan at Bay? (As Viewed in 1991)
- 32. Escaping Leviathan?
- 33. The Era of Big Government Is Not Over
Part VII. Review of the Troops
- 34. The Bloody Hinge of American History
- 35. The Rise of Big Business in America
- 36. Origins of the Corporate Liberal State
- 37. When Ideological Worlds Collide: Reflections on Kraditor’s Radical Persuasion
- 38. On Ackerman's Justification of Irregular Constitutional Change: Is Any Vice You Get Away With a Virtue?
- 39. The So-Called Third Way
- 40. Thank God for the Nation State?
Index
About the Author
Praise for Against Leviathan “In Against Leviathan, Higgs is an excellent writer and one finds pithy insights, numerous well turned phrases, and telling arguments against government . . . carefully argued . . . supported by numerous case studies.”
—JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
“Against Leviathan combines a public choice economist's approach to government activity with a historian's attention to institutional frameworks. A wide range of topics is covered, including the history of presidential leadership in building big government, problems with particular parts of the U.S. bureaucracy (the FDA, Social Security, Medicare, and regulatory bodies), defense spending, and responses to several recent critiques of the American state. Higgs's book is accessible to a wide readership. Recommended.”
—CHOICE
“Higgs is an economist of a different kind, as his new book, Against Leviathan, shows. . . If it isn't exactly the most essential reading next to the Constitution itself, Against Leviathan is nonetheless the best critique of the relentless expansion of state power -and the perils that growth entails.”
—AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
“Robert Higgs is an effective and persuasive writer, and his scholarship is thorough and rigorous. Against Leviathan collects Higgs's effort to communicate the truth to his readers about the shocking state of affairs with regard to the growth and acceptance of statism in the U.S. The book is a set of wonderful essays that all will benefit from. Higgs writes clearly, and his argument is grounded in logic and evidence discovered in deep scholarly investigation. Higgs' message is so clear and well-argued that I cannot believe if read widely wouldn't give pause to those championing the necessity of, and growth of, government.”
—ECONOMIC AFFAIRS
“The title [Against Leviathan] says it all. More than just being anti-government, however, economist Higgs is against all those who infringe on our personal liberties in the name of doing good, curing our afflictions, or otherwise helping us, whether it be twelve-step programs, the war on drugs, neoconservatives, official economic statistics or the military-industrial complex. His feisty tone challenges the reader.”
—ACROSS THE BOARD
“Defenders of liberty need look no further than to Robert Higgs’ Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society for intellectual ammunition. This hard-hitting book exposes the multitude of ways the growth of the welfare-warfare state threatens our freedom and prosperity. Higgs exposes the fallacies and lies used by politicians and statist intellectuals to justify big government. Higgs also details how government programs enacted in the name of ‘the people’ actually benefit powerful special interests. In perhaps the most valuable portions of Against Leviathan, Higgs explains how politicians and bureaucrats use wars and other ‘emergencies’ to expand their power and violate our rights.”
—RON PAUL, U.S. Congressman
“I wish liberals and even radicals felt and wrote as strongly about the Iron Heel of government power as does Robert Higgs.”
—ALEXANDER COCKBURN, columnist, The Nation; co-editor, CounterPunch
“Foremost among the countries that pride themselves on taking most collective decisions by vote-counting, America largely believes that it has a government that does what the citizenry wants or at least does not much mind. If you believe this—as Robert Higgs tells us in his sparkling book, Against Leviathan—you will believe anything. In fact every part of Leviathan’s vast and still expanding agenda has been wanted by somebody, but the sum of the parts oppresses, disgusts and alienates near enough everybody. In a tireless indictment that surveys in scholarly detail most aspects of recent and current government and finds saving grace in none, Higgs brands the whole as a vicious and destructive fraud. His intellectual equipment as an economic historian serves him well, as does his lively and easy prose. If books could ‘roll back the state’ (and who knows, perhaps they can?) Against Leviathan would do a fair bit of rolling.”
—ANTHONY DE JASAY, author of The State; Justice and Its Surroundings; Choice, Contract, Consent; Social Contract, Free Ride; and Against Politics
“In Against Leviathan, Robert Higgs documents the growth of government, showing how the freedom of Americans has been curtailed as a result. This is a book that should be read by anyone concerned with American freedoms in the 21st century.”
—THOMAS GALE MOORE, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
“A book by Robert Higgs on government and its growth is a sure thing. Against Leviathan is a superb treatment, and no one is better qualified to write on such a topic.”
—TYLER COWEN, Professor of Economics, George Mason University
“In Against Leviathan, Robert Higgs colorfully describes government’s many failures—and its one success: the manipulation of fear and patriotism on behalf of crises that increase government’s power.”
—PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy
“Against Leviathan provides a strong antidote for claims that the government is competent, protective and just. With forensic flair and lucidity, Higgs demonstrates why these received ideas are bunk and why he is a master of swimming against the tide.”
—STEVE H. HANKE, Professor of Applied Economics, Johns Hopkins University
“Against Leviathan is one of the best books on economic policy in the last few years. Higgs’s case against government oppression is tight and persuasive. Virtually every page of this easy-to-read book tells something important about the economy or government.”
—DAVID HENDERSON, Professor of Economics, Naval Postgraduate School; author, The Joy of Freedom
“In an age of cowards and trimmers, Robert Higgs is a gutsy, passionate, and learned defender of liberty. America—the real country, not the rotten empire—needs him.”
—BILL KAUFFMAN, Associate Editor, American Enterprise About the Author Robert Higgs is a Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute and Editor of the Institute’s quarterly journal, The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University and has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College and Seattle University. He is the author of The Transformation of the American Economy 1865-1914, Competition and Coercion, and Crisis and Leviathan, recognized as one of the classic works on the growth and abuse of government power.
His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and San Francisco Chronicle. He has been a guest on NPR, NBC, ABC, C-SPAN, CBN, CNBC, and Radio Free Europe. He lectures at universities and conferences around the world.
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