A sometimes-intriguing but often familiar treatise against the oppressive forces of democracy and religion.
In this debut work of political philosophy, Wallace argues that American society is hindered by the twin restraints of democracy and religion.
There are certain elements holding back our economy, the author asserts, though economists rarely make mention of them, due to their status as societal sacred cows. They’re institutions that many consider core principles of the American experiment: majority rule, democracy, and faith in a higher power. Wallace argues that all these institutions are highly anachronistic in the 21st century and that we, as a society, would be freer and more prosperous without them. Democracy, he says, is simply the dictatorship of the majority over the minority, legitimizing such acts as theft and violence because they’re committed in the name of the so-called common good. Representative democracy is even worse, he asserts, resulting in a tiny minority ruling on behalf of a largely powerless majority; on the other hand, he says, majority rule “is simply mob rule. Sometimes a mob is right, sometimes, the mob is wrong.” Religion, of course, is depicted as irrational, predatory, and used as a justification for all manner of violence, theft, and persecution. The author’s solution is the “Voluntary State,” essentially a constitutional republic concerned primarily with individual liberty: “A Voluntary State is an individualistic state. An individualistic state is a non-aggression state. A non-aggressive state does not use aggression to the individual.” Arguments against religion are hardly new or uncommon when discussing political life in the United States, and the author refers to a number of thinkers and talking points from the New Atheism movement. His arguments against democracy are the most engaging sections of the book, in part because such cases are so infrequently made. Even so, he’s essentially espousing a libertarian philosophy (although he does dedicate a section to highlighting the hypocrisy of the Libertarian Party itself), and several chapters, such as a 16-page list of government agencies, will give readers the sense that they’ve encountered these arguments before. Although the book offers an interesting thought experiment, it is, in the end, a bit of utopianism with little practical application.
A sometimes-intriguing but often familiar treatise against the oppressive forces of democracy and religion.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4808-2821-6
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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