Embrace Freedom: A Review of Goyette’s Red and Blue and Broke All Over by Tim Kelly
The United States of America in 2012 exhibits the characteristics of a nation in terminal decline. Her capital city is a den of iniquity and a seat of corruption. The economy continues to wilt under a barrage of bewildering regulations, corporatist manipulation, rent seeking, and reckless government spending. Washington‘s finances are in a shambles and the only way it can pay its bills is with money it conjures out of thin air. Comparisons to the last days of Rome are common.
Charles Goyette surveys this mess in his new book, Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America’s Free Economy. The book’s title pretty much sums up the author’s analysis of 21st century America. According to Goyette, the country’s bankruptcy has been a bipartisan effort.
“The inescapable conclusion is that both parties are to blame. Einstein‘s oft-cited observations that no problem can be fixed from the same consciousness that created it applies to the deflating promise of America. The restoration of the American dream will not occur as long as the political discussion remains constrained by the old voices of the Republicans and Democrats who marched us into our present economic morass.”
Goyette’s previous book, The Dollar Meltdown, a New York Times best seller, was primarily concerned with increasing government spending and how it is destroying the purchasing power of the dollar and thereby impoverishing the American people. In Red and Blue Goyette tackles the broader issue of long term economic decline, arguing the country’s financial problems are a symptom of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of its political establishment. Goyette avers, “Mesmerized by state authority, and blinded by their own partisanship, few authors, analysts, and commentators active in the public debate realize that both parties worship in the same statist church and share obedience to same economic priesthood.”
Red and Blue’s message is that freedom works and statism doesn’t. If left free and unmolested, people will establish spontaneous, self-organizing systems which create prosperity. This is the theory of human action which asserts people naturally seek to improve their circumstances and they don’t need to be regulated, monitored, or whipped into shape by bureaucratic overseers. Goyette writes, “Only by understanding the bankrupt philosophy of statism and replacing it with the philosophy of freedom will a return to prosperity be possible.”
Political partisans may be bothered by the author’s iconoclasm, for in making his case, Goyette smashes cherished idols of both the left and right. Hawkish conservatives will likely take exception to Goyette’s criticism of the warfare state and his description of the United States as a “military empire.” Bleeding heart liberals will take umbrage at his criticism of the domestic welfare state and his support for a genuine free market, which the author contends is the only true path to prosperity.
- Use Cash (lewrockwell.com)
- I Love Oil Speculators (lewrockwell.com)
- Something Wicked This Way Comes (lewrockwell.com)
- Where America Is Going, and What You Can Do About It (lewrockwell.com)
- This Crumbling, Bankrupt Empire (lewrockwell.com)
- I Was the Last Person To Talk With Jude Wanniski (lewrockwell.com)
- If You Meet the Buddha on the Road by Charles Goyette (pointsofhype.wordpress.com)
- So Much for the Revolution (lewrockwell.com)
- How Empires Die (economicnoise.com)
- Empire (theburningplatform.com)