Opting Out

Overview

At first glance, you may ask, Opting Out of what? Is this only another impractical ideological manifesto?

No.

But the late Gerrit Wormhoudt, a highly learned constitutional scholar and practitioner of the law, carefully studied the final victory during the twentieth century of the progressive national administrative state in America, its conquest of both the Constitution of our Founders as well as our inherited common law traditions going back many centuries. The result was not the progressive/socialist dream of a smoothly functioning scientific government run by experts for the benefit of all Americans.

Instead, as demonstrated by F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, what happened was what always happens to all-powerful, massive central governments: The worst people end up on top. Those who govern us are captured, with campaign donations or organized political support by power-hungry or favor-seeking special interests of every kind. Elections are turned into futures markets for government favors: both free stuff for voters and massive taxpayer dollars to thousands of large institutions corporations, big city political machines, government employee unions, educational institutions from elementary school through college … the list is virtually endless.

In this elegant collection of timeless essays on the law, political economy, and education, Wormhoudt makes a convincing, practical libertarian case that Americans must opt out of our current quasi-socialist national administrative state before free choice, personal liberty, and the rule of law disappear entirely. And then arrives the economic ruin which always in history has destroyed all national states grown big, fat, and corrupt.

There is great wisdom in this little book, especially for those in or planning the practice of law as well as for college students seeking alternatives to what their professors are preaching.