TAMPA, April 20, 2012 — Best-selling author and former talk radio host Charles Goyette follows up on his New York Times bestseller, The Dollar Meltdown, with a more comprehensive look at all that ails America. In Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America’s Free Economy, Goyette makes a compelling case that America’s many problems are not due to a dizzying array of complex moral and socio-political dilemmas. Instead, they are all the result of one simple problem: diminishing freedom.
This book is not a partisan attack on the Obama administration by a conservative talk radio host. Goyette is more accurately described as libertarian and he has plenty of criticism for both political parties. However, what makes this book so valuable is Goyette’s ability to express timeless philosophical ideas in simple, everyday terms and then demonstrate how those ideas apply to today’s problems here in the real world.
The book is divided into three sections: “Liberty,” “The State” and “Dead Ahead,” respectively. Goyette lays the philosophical foundation by explaining the inextricable link between liberty and non-aggression, recognized by modern libertarians and the founding fathers. He quotes Murray Rothbard, who said that liberty is “the absence of molestation by other people,” and Friedrich Hayek, who maintained that it is “the condition in which man is not subject to coercion by another or others.”
Goyette moves on to apply this principle to property rights and what he calls “the free economy.” He refuses to use the word “capitalism” because it has come to mean the opposite of what he advocates. For most people, there is no difference between capitalism and “crony capitalism.” Goyette explains how the free market is constantly blamed for problems caused by the government.
“Like the man who gets into a fight with his wife and then takes it out on the dog, the free economy keeps getting kicked, blamed over and over for our depressed fortune. It is blamed for the ills that come our way from influence peddling and government favoritism. It is faulted when economic policies, tax laws, and even subsidies and bailouts are handed to well-positioned corporations.”
From this philosophical launching pad, Goyette leads the reader on a fascinating journey through one government intervention after another. In each case, he demonstrates the simple cause and effect relationships between government violations of liberty and diminishing American prosperity. Again and again, Goyette demonstrates how government coercion makes us poorer and less able to pursue our happiness.
While economic freedom is the focus of the book, Goyette makes an insightful link between economic dependency and the emerging police state. By yielding power over their economic liberty, Americans make themselves more susceptible to lose the rest.
“In moments of crisis, especially in the case of economic disruption such as we face – high inflation, the collapse of the monetary system, the destruction of the capital markets – we are most susceptible to the command of authoritarians.”
However, Goyette doesn’t lay all of the blame at the government’s feet.
“Despite the evidence that freedom works, it must be acknowledged that a great number of our fellow citizens have rejected freedom, and therefore prosperity, either consciously or unconsciously and that they are enough in number and influence to have the body politic accelerating on its statist course.”
This is really what the book is about. Goyette doesn’t conclude with a list of government policy recommendations or even exhortations to “vote the bums out.” Instead, he seeks to change the minds of his readers, challenging the next generation to reclaim the liberty that previous generations have lost.
“A change in the way people think about the state is inevitable, just as it was inevitable that tribal chieftains, the divine right of kings, the mandate of heaven, and the rule of churches should yield to the spread of freedom.”
Drawing on philosophy, history, literature, and current events, Charles Goyette’s Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America’s Free Economy makes the case for freedom like no other book in years. Goyette masterfully explains the connection between freedom and prosperity and provides convincing proof that government violations of liberty cause economic malaise. Regardless of your political affiliation, this book will make you think about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in a whole new way. If you’re looking for different answers than you are getting from Republicans, Democrats or the media, this book is a must read.
Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.
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