A call for restraining U.S. government and restoring it to its original, constitutional principles.
Woltz’s (Justice Denied, 2010) second turn at political analysis repeatedly invokes the concept of returning to the nation’s founding ideas. His assessment of what ails the country is familiar territory: the aggrandizement of the federal government at the expense of individual liberty; the rise of an entrenched political class fueled by special-interest money; and the abrogation of the “strict limits” that once defined the Constitution. The book covers what the author sees as a broad swath of governmental dysfunctions ripe for reform, such as the expansion of judicial and executive power, the federal government’s power to collect income taxes, campaign finance, and the ever-swelling power of the Federal Reserve. The argument’s basic connective tissue is that all these problems could be solved by rolling the government back to its “original” form: “Our design of government was basically perfect. We don’t have to reinvent it, we just have to go back to it. All that is required to bring us back from the brink of disaster is to return to that design, get back on the path, and force the federal government to live by our contract.” Not content to merely diagnose the nation’s troubles, Woltz offers 10 specific, multistep action plans to revive its health. Sometimes those prescriptions are too well-trodden and politically implausible to stir readers’ attention; for example, it’s unlikely that the direct election of senators will be repealed anytime soon, or that the gold standard will be reinstated. Also, in place of a concrete plan to achieve legislative reforms, he offers overly general calls to organize grass-roots campaigns. However, Woltz manages to combine his concept of constitutional fidelity with a powerful critique of corporate interests—a brand of libertarianism that’s not often represented in public discourse today.
An ambitious book that valorizes small government principles without kowtowing to big business, but sometimes lacks political practicability.

The harrowing account of one man’s persecution by a justice system indifferent to law and morality.

Debut author Woltz begins this memoir of judicial tyranny somewhat benignly: His financial firm, fulfilling a legal obligation, filed a suspicious activity report with the Central Bank of the Bahamas regarding a trust account an American attorney had opened there. He all but forgot the incident until, two years later, he was contacted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI looking to discuss the matter. He quickly obliged but was taken into custody on his way to the scheduled meeting in Charlotte; his terrified wife was taken into custody, too. What ensued was a long train of prosecutorial misconduct that will rattle readers’ complacent confidence in the U.S. judicial system. Woltz describes a “bizarre Kafkaesque world” in which both he and his wife were systematically stripped of their legal rights. They were denied the power to choose their own attorney, and the one they were saddled with worked in collusion with the prosecutors. In violation of their Sixth Amendment rights, they were arraigned in one judicial district and sentenced in another. They were charged with a litany of trumped-up accusations so absurd that the Middle District Office of the U.S. attorney called it a “sham prosecution.” Woltz and his wife were also subject to degrading treatment, intimidation and outright physical abuse, all in order to compel them to provide false testimony against the federal government’s real quarry. Woltz deftly catalogs his disillusionment: “More or less everything I believed about our judicial system was being challenged through personal experience. I was locked in a filthy mad house, though innocent, un-convicted, and pleading not guilty to the charges.” Woltz served 87 months in federal prison; when released, he saw both his financial assets and marriage disappear. A foreword written by a former magistrate judge provides legal context helpful to understanding the full extent of Woltz’s travails.

A stirring legal drama made more thrilling by sharp, journalistic prose.