The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century

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The Great Unraveling is a chronicle of how "the heady optimism of the late 1990s gave way to renewed gloom as a result of "incredibly bad leadership, in the private sector and in the corridors of power." Offering his own take on the trickle-down theory, economist and columnist Paul Krugman lays much of the blame for a slew of problems on the Bush administration, which he views as a "revolutionary power...a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system." Declaring them radicals masquerading as moderates, he questions their motives on a range of issues, particularly their tax and Social Security plans, which he argues are "obviously, blatantly based on bogus arithmetic." Though a fine writer, Krugman relies more heavily on numbers than words to examine the current rash of corporate malfeasance, the rise and fall of the stock market bubble, the federal budget and the future of Social Security, and how a huge surplus quickly became a record deficit. He also rails against the news media for displaying a disturbing lack of skepticism and for failing to do even the most basic homework when reporting on business and economic issues. The book is mainly a collection of op-ed pieces Krugman wrote for The New York Times between 2000 and 2003. Overall, this format works well. Krugman writes clearly about complicated issues and offers plenty of evidence and hard facts to support his theories regarding the intersection of business, economics, and politics, making this a detailed, informative, and thought-provoking book. --Shawn Carkonen

Book Description

A galvanizing new work from America's leading economic critic—a book that will set the terms of the political debate for years to come.

No one has more authority to call the shots the way they really are than Paul Krugman, whose provocative New York Times columns are keenly followed by millions. One of the world's most respected economists, Krugman has been named America's most important columnist by the Washington Monthly and columnist of the year by Editor and Publisher magazine.

In this long-awaited work containing Krugman's most influential columns along with new commentary, he chronicles how the boom economy unraveled: how exuberance gave way to pessimism, how the age of corporate heroes gave way to corporate scandals, how fiscal responsibility collapsed. From his account of the secret history of the California energy crisis to his devastating dissections of dishonesty in the Bush administration, Krugman tells the uncomfortable truth about how the United States lost its way. And he gives us the road map we will need to follow if we are to get the country back on track.

Customer Reviews:

One long editorial.......2007-05-17

I am not a fan of George Bush, and was hoping this book would provide a comprehensive critique of his economic policies. What I got instead was a collection of editorials previously published in the print media. These editorials were published over a time span of 5 years, hence many of them were outdated by the time this book was published. The feel of the book is sarcasm, and it is one long polemic against George Bush and the neo-conservatives in his administration. Unfortunately, since it is comprised of editorials, there are no figures, no charts, no graphs and very few references. Instead, we get paragraph after paragraph that mention this number or that statistic, but without proper sourcing. Also, because it is comprised of a series of reprinted editorials, the flow is not good, and many of the points are not argued well.

I would not recommend this book.

More of us should've read this book sooner.......2006-12-09

Having just finished this book, I wish more of us had read it sooner and recommended it to others. Paul Krugman's observations from 1999 to 2002 on the economic side of American politics were right on the mark as far as warning what might happen under the Bush administration. On Nov. 19, 2000, when the Bush-Gore election was still in doubt, Krugman wrote: "Suppose that George W. Bush pulls it off -- that he gets to the White House on the strength of chads and butterflies. Will he make good on his boast of being a `uniter, not a divider'? His behavior since election night is a bad omen; it suggests that what Mr. Bush means is that everyone should unite to give him what he wants." How many examples of that have we seen in the past six years? I read Krugman's columns when my local paper chooses to run them, but that only happens three or four times a month. Even though it's now 2006, this three-year-old book makes up for that drought in economic ideas. Would that every member of the House and Senate could read it and follow Krugman's advice for steering this country in another economic direction!

Very intelligent economist could have done better.......2006-07-10

I thoroughly enjoy Krugman's academic work, and the man is a world-class expert on international macroeconomics.

For those of you who don't know, this book is basically a compilation of his NY Times Columns from 1998 to early 2000s. Sadly, many of his columns are hit or miss.

There are very real economic critiques that exist for the Bush administration, and the columns in the book that objectively discuss these are very well written. Krugman especially has a very solid understanding of academic economic applications to the business world, something that a lot of economists lack.

Unfortunately, the book also contains columns where Krugman tends to wander off on political tirades and rants. Some of the rants border on hypocrital; in particular - his Enron rants are quite appalling, being that Krugman served on an Enron advisory board in 1999 (at which the revenue inflation was occurring).

Taken as a whole, the book contains some gems that critique Bush's economic policy, but is also tarnished in some places with ranting partisan rhetoric.

Mark Twain revisited: starve the beast.......2006-05-31

In 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court', Mark Twain characterizes the relationship between the privileged class and the rest of the population in King Arthur's times as follows: 'sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, go naked that they might wear silk and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them.' In other words, starve the beast.

In his very revealing and clearcut comments, Paul Krugman exposes mightily the hidden agenda and the vast rightwing conspiracy of those actually at the helm in the US: cut taxes for the super-wealthy (even in the face of war), deprive the government of the revenue it needs, then use the deficits as an excuse to cut popular social programs. It is not less than a crusade against the Welfare State.
The results are that more than 40 million US citizens have no health insurance, that US life expectancy is lower and child mortality higher than in most of the advanced nations.
From his analyses, Paul Krugman draws the chilling conclusion that the actual US administration does hot accept the current political system. They want a one-party State, in which elections are only a formality. He poses rightly the ultimate question: 'What will happen to our democracy?'

He also exposes rawly the hypocrisy of the Bush administration with 'its pattern of neglect, of refusal to take crucial action to protect the US against terrorism', its deceptive accountancy, its military spending, its big budget deficits and its intolerance for dissent.

Internationally, he denounces the US foreign policy as 'conquest followed by malign neglect' (Afghanistan). The actual administration refused to provide the relatively modest funds needed for fighting infectious diseases. He scoffs at the pre-war supposition that the cost of the Iraqi war would be defrayed out of oil revenue!

This hard-hitting and provocative book presents a most welcome independent and modern Doremus Jessup amid the actually shamelessly partisan and gagged media herd, paralyzed by autocensure.
We need Paul Krugman's loud and clear voice.

A must read.

Keynesian Schmeysian.......2006-02-12

I hated most of Paul's economics, and, in fact, I hated his stated politics in this book even more, but the book is not about my personal opinions or judgements of Paul's political/economic opinions or his previous job.

The book is well written by a crystal clear mind with well motivated arguments and where his case is stated it is stated clearly and accurately. There is'nt too much dribble or drab.

Much of the content is probably already well known to his readers but a collective work of the thought process over the time span covered in the work was well worth the read.

Again, I disagree with Paul's politics and economics but for those wanting a good view of "the other side" and the mechanics of the minds on that side this is as good as work as any.

Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)

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Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
Paige West , and Paige West
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
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ASIN: 0822337495

Book Description

A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the programâmostly ngo workersâand the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The ngo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both.

West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Areaâincluding ideas of space, place, environment, and societyâwas socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)

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Success in Grassroots Politics
How does environmentalism happen?

Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
Arun Agrawal
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
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Reimagining Political Ecology (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)

ASIN: 0822334925

Book Description

In Kumaon in northern India, villagers set hundreds of forest fires in the early 1920s, protesting the colonial British state’s regulations to protect the environment. Yet by the 1990s, they had begun to conserve their forests carefully. In his innovative historical and political study, Arun Agrawal analyzes this striking transformation. He describes and explains the emergence of environmental identities and changes in state-locality relations and shows how the two are related. In so doing, he demonstrates that scholarship on common property, political ecology, and feminist environmentalism can be combinedâin an approach he calls environmentalityâto better understand changes in conservation efforts. Such an understanding is relevant far beyond Kumaon: local populations in more than fifty countries are engaged in similar efforts to protect their environmental resources.

Agrawal brings environment and development studies, new institutional economics, and Foucauldian theories of power and subjectivity to bear on his ethnographical and historical research. He visited nearly forty villages in Kumaon, where he assessed the state of village forests, interviewed hundreds of Kumaonis, and examined local records. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork and archival research, he shows how decentralization strategies change relations between states and localities, community decision makers and common residents, and individuals and the environment. In exploring these changes and their significance, Agrawal establishes that theories of environmental politics are enriched by attention to the interconnections between power, knowledge, institutions, and subjectivities.

Customer Reviews:

Success in Grassroots Politics.......2006-03-22

This book reports a rare success story in Third World conservation: the rise of grassroots-level forest management in Kumaon, India. In the colonial period, the British tried to stop deforestation by increasingly authoritarian methods. This failed; the local countryfolk, prevented from using their forests for subsistence needs, protested more and more seriously, ultimately resorting to arson. Eventually the British got the message and eased off. Fortunately, the Indian government later built on this perception, and gave more and more management rights to the Kumaonese. They rose to the occasion, and now manage the forests reasonably well. Arun Agrawal uses a Foucauldian approach to analyze the development of local management in an extremely fine-grained, detailed, careful way. The benefit of this approach is that it has stimulated a uniquely thorough and fair ethnography. The cost of this approach is its narrow focus on government and "subjects"--there is no independent assessment of how well the forests are actually doing. One wishes for a biologist's input. Still, any success story, even relative, is welcome these days, and this book will be very useful to anyone interested in comanagement of resources or resource conservation in general. We simply have to involve local people and respect their needs, in every conservation project, and this book is notably good at detailing one way a governmental system actually did that.

How does environmentalism happen?.......2005-11-16

Arun Agrawal's book offers a fresh approach to consider how subjectivities change, particularly in terms of how environmentalism happens at an individual and social level. Agrawal borrows from a number of different fields, including anthropology and history, to pursue these questions. His approach differs from several dominant schools that address these issues. One group of scholars, when talking about rural citizens in developing countries, assume that their needs are primarily material and antagonistic to any sense of long-term environmental care. "Environmentalist sensibilities don't make any sense unless their bellies are full" they say. Another group of scholars argues that rural women, because they rely on natural resources for their familiy's daily needs, are actually quite environmentally minded.

Agrawal does not follow either of these approaches, and questions a number of their premises. To carry out his inquiry, Agrawal examines a region in India that was famous for its resistance to British forest protection during the colonial era. This area resisted British authority by lighting hundreds of deliberately set fires. Surprisingly, Agrawal now finds that a number of villages are forming their own community-based groups for forest protection, and he seeks to discover what accounts for these changes.

In his explanation, Agrawal draws on Foucauldian and other post-structural thought, but does so in novel ways. He is trying to examine the process of how subjects change over time, and even over the course of one lifetime. His writing is lively and his analysis is sharp. I highly recommend this book for those interested in social change, social theory, environmentalism, and new interdisciplinary approaches.

Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971 (The New Cold War History)

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A Deeply Unstable and Politicized Monetary System

Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971 (The New Cold War History)
Francis J. Gavin
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
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The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy
The Reagan Diaries

ASIN: 0807828238
Release Date: 2006-09-26

Book Description

How are we to understand the politics of international monetary relations since the end of World War II? Exploiting recently declassified documents from both the United States and Europe and employing economic analysis and international relations theory, Francis Gavin offers a compelling reassessment of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and dollar-gold convertibility.

Gavin demonstrates that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, Bretton Woods was a highly politicized system that was prone to crisis and required constant intervention and controls to continue functioning. More important, postwar monetary relations were not a salve to political tensions, as is often contended. In fact, the politicization of the global payments system allowed nations to use monetary coercion to achieve political and security ends, causing deep conflicts within the Western Alliance. For the first time, Gavin reveals how these rifts dramatically affected U.S. political and military strategy during a dangerous period of the Cold War.

Customer Reviews:

A Deeply Unstable and Politicized Monetary System.......2005-12-11

Gavin's book departs in several ways from conventional wisdom. First, it has long been an article of faith that the Bretton Woods agreements were the cornerstone of an open, liberal international economic order that ensured financial stability, economic interdependence, and international cooperation. In fact, Gavin shows that Bretton Woods was an ineffective and crisis-prone monetary system. It began experiencing potentially fatal difficulties as early as the late 1950s, and was only kept alive by a series of political fixes that made little long-term, macroeconomic sense. It could never have survived the globalization of finance and the removal of capital controls that began to take place in the 1970s. Indeed, it can be argued that the system was doomed the moment that it came into existence, and that the Bretton Woods agreements contained fatal flaws that could only lead to the abandon of gold convertibility.

Second, there is a widely held view that the Bretton Woods system was designed to benefit the United States by allowing Americans to live beyond their means and by persuading central banks from Western Europe and from Japan to finance its external deficit through dollar holdings. The real story is that American policymakers had no great love for the Bretton Woods system. It was associated in their minds not with American hegemony, but with American vulnerability. The growing European balances, which, under the rules of the system, could be cashed in for gold at any time, were a kind of sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Indeed, successive administrations toyed with the idea of abandoning the gold convertibility altogether. What prevented them from doing so was the fear that floating exchange rates would generate financial chaos and the return to the 1930s' beggar-thy-neighbor policies.

The third piece of conventional wisdom casts France in the role of the villain, trying to sabotage the system by converting its dollar reserves into gold, while it credits West Germany and the United Kingdom of more cooperative behavior. There is some truth in this story. De Gaulle certainly tried to spoil the game after 1965, when he espoused the crusade of economist Jacques Rueff and denounced the "exorbitant privilege" of the dollar. But if France was willing to call the bluff and end the dollar-exchange system, it never had the means to do much harm and was certainly unable to deliver the final blow, especially after mounting deficits and attacks on the Franc depleted its currency reserves at the end of the decade. Besides, other central banks also joined the fray and stealthily tried to convert their dollar balances into gold, sometimes as early as 1957. The relationship with West Germany was also fraught with political tensions, particularly regarding the offset arrangement that allowed the United States to compensate some of the cost of American troops stationed in Europe. And France was not always uncooperative: Gavin unveils from the archives a surprising episode of Franco-American cooperation over monetary affairs, when young Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing convinced President Kennedy to create a task force aimed at reforming the international monetary system.

Gavin's central argument is that economic and monetary problems cannot be considered in isolation from the strategic and diplomatic policy issues in which they were often embedded. He sees the Bretton Woods system as central to the Cold War bargain in Europe which aimed at "keeping the Russians out, the Germans down, and the Americans in." He shows that strategy and finance were inextricably meshed and that U.S. officials often felt they had to sacrifice important domestic policy goals and strategic imperatives in order to maintain the dollar's value. Of particular concern were the mounting balance-of-payment deficits, which successive American presidents were willing to address by reducing America's overseas commitments and military obligations that they saw at the source of the country's economic profligacy. As incredible as it may seem, the policy alternatives were often cast as a choice between defending Europe or the dollar.

But it could be argued that it is precisely this lack of isolation of economics from the political which compounded the gold convertibility problem and prevented decision-makers to find a long-lasting solution to the conundrum of international monetary relations. One is struck by the abundance of political in-fighting, the frequency of inter-agency skirmishes and the high level of political attention that these seemingly technical, second-order issues generated. Kennedy was not the only president to be "obsessed with the balance of payments." The victim of these obsessions and confusion was, more often than not, sound economic reasoning. In fact, it took a Nixon to put monetary affairs squarely in the hands of the Treasury and to isolate them from the encroachments of other agencies and departments. Likewise, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing certainly remembered his conversation with President Kennedy when he proposed the idea of discussing economic and especially monetary problems in strictly limited meetings of heads of government, isolated from the diplomacy buffs and academic luminaries that had convinced de Gaulle to embark on his confrontational stance against the dollar's hegemony.

The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food And Agriculture Organization, And World Health Organization Have Changed the World 1945-1965 (New Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations)

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The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food And Agriculture Organization, And World Health Organization Have Changed the World 1945-1965 (New Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations)
Amy L. S. Staples
Manufacturer: Kent State University Press
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0873388496

The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report)

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Uneven but worth a look
Great Teacher

The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report)

Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0226065898

Book Description

In contemporary American political discourse, issues related to the scope, authority, and the cost of the federal government are perennially at the center of discussion. Any historical analysis of this topic points directly to the Great Depression, the "moment" to which most historians and economists connect the origins of the fiscal, monetary, and social policies that have characterized American government in the second half of the twentieth century. In the most comprehensive collection of essays available on these topics, The Defining Moment poses the question directly: to what extent, if any, was the Depression a watershed period in the history of the American economy? This volume organizes twelve scholars' responses into four categories: fiscal and monetary policies, the economic expansion of government, the innovation and extension of social programs, and the changing international economy. The central focus across the chapters is the well-known alternations to national government during the 1930s. The Defining Moment attempts to evaluate the significance of the past half-century to the American economy, while not omitting reference to the 1930s.

The essays consider whether New Deal-style legislation continues to operate today as originally envisioned, whether it altered government and the economy as substantially as did policies inaugurated during World War II, the 1950s, and the 1960s, and whether the legislation had important precedents before the Depression, specifically during World War I. Some chapters find that, surprisingly, in certain areas such as labor organization, the 1930s responses to the Depression contributed less to lasting change in the economy than a traditional view of the time would suggest. On the whole, however, these essays offer testimony to the Depression's legacy as a "defining moment." The large role of today's government and its methods of intervention—from the pursuit of a more active monetary policy to the maintenance and extension of a wide range of insurance for labor and business—derive from the crisis years of the 1930s.

Customer Reviews:

Uneven but worth a look.......2000-03-15

The editors of "The Defining Moment" pose an interesting set of questions: Did the Great Depression cause a quantum increase of the federal government's involvement in the U.S. economy? If so, how and why?

Given the multitude of federal interventions into various sectors of the economy, the editors sensibly subdivided the questions into twelve topic areas, so that each chapter pertains to a particular program or sector. They then assigned the topics to respected academic economic historians affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Most of the authors actually try to answer the editors' questions, which gives the collection unusual coherence for a conference volume. Still more remarkable, most of them write well. They offer arguments and evidence that are far more accessible than those a reader will typically find in academic economics journals. The authors do not examine the question of whether the new roles played by the federal government during the 1930s contributed to, rather than only resulted from, the length and severity of the depression.

In their introduction to the volume, the editors set forth the quantum-increase or "defining moment" hypothesis and summarize the authors' answers. They provide useful line charts plotting the growing size of total government spending during the twentieth century, as a share of GNP and as divided among federal, state, and local governments. To my eyes, the time series for total government purchases of goods and services as a share of GNP shows two distinct upward steps. It first rises from a plateau of around 8 percent in the 1920s to a higher plateau of 14 to 15 percent in 1932-40. It then (after the spike associated with World War II) rises to a still higher plateau of around 21 percent after 1952. As is consistent with the theme developed by Robert Higgs in "Crisis and Leviathan" (1987), the crisis of the Great Depression is associated with the first upward "ratchet effect." The second ratcheting upward is a puzzle not examined in the current volume, beyond a passing reference or two to "the cold war."

Like most conference volumes, "The Defining Moment" is a mixed bag; some chapters are stronger than others. Few readers will want to read it cover to cover, but anyone seriously interested in the economic history of the United States in the twentieth century particularly those called upon to teach that subject should give the volume a look.

Great Teacher.......1998-12-15

Prof. Bordo is my instructor for my Financial & Monetary History of the US class here at Rutgers University. He is a brilliant guy and I am sure this book is great. I have never read it but he is no slouch.

Global Finance in the New Century: Beyond Deregulation

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Global Finance in the New Century: Beyond Deregulation

Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

This edited volume deepens our understanding of the complex processes and mechanisms of financial expansion and elucidates the effects of this expansion in the global political economy. It brings together perspectives from political economy, finance, accountancy, law and sociology to develop an appreciation of financial deregulation and its consequences. And it looks at the central question of how financial power works.

Twenty-First Century Anarchism : Unorthodox Ideas for a New Millennium

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Twenty-First Century Anarchism : Unorthodox Ideas for a New Millennium

Manufacturer: Cassell
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New Rules for a New Economy: Employment and Opportunity in Postindustrial America (Twentieth Century Fund Book)

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essential reading for economic policy

New Rules for a New Economy: Employment and Opportunity in Postindustrial America (Twentieth Century Fund Book)
Stephen A. Herzenberg , John A. Alic , and Howard Wial
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0801435242

Book Description

Three quarters of the American workforce is now employed in services, a substantial portion in low-paying, dead-end jobs. Can the service economy do as well by the American worker as the old manufacturing economy? Can the widely shared prosperity that accompanied steady increases in productivity and performance in manufacturing be replicated in the services? They can and they will, the authors of this timely book contend, but only if outmoded policies and practices are brought into line with the new economy. New Rules for a New Economy explains why this must be accomplished and how we can start.

The authors call for new, decentralized institutions suited to a dynamic economy in which change is constant and rapid. In particular, they see a need for job ladders and worker associations that cut across firm boundaries. These institutions would foster individual and collective learning, mark out career paths, and facilitate coordination among both individuals and organizations in a networked economy. The authors propose new rules to reshape labor market institutions and policy, improving economic performance and opportunities for workers.

Unusual in providing a comprehensive theoretical perspective that is grounded in detailed case research, this book points the way to a better future, not just for elite knowledge workers but for everyone.

Customer Reviews:

essential reading for economic policy.......1999-01-23

Everybody knows that the US economy is generating a lot of low-wage, dead-end service jobs. Now there's a book that knows what to do about it. This book is chock full of cheap, practical, useful ways of turning dead-end jobs into careers, linking jobs to training, facilitating employee organization. Should be part of the platform for Republicans and Democrats.

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A Great Collection Of Essays Showing The Downside Of The New Deal
Assessing the Weaknesses of FDR
Heroic Writings During a Difficult Time
He who forgets the past . . . . .

Salvos Against the New Deal
Garet Garrett
Manufacturer: Caxton Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0870044257

Book Description

President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" plan to pull the nation out of the Great Depression has been hailed as a landmark in American history. Many people aren't aware that Roosevelt also had critics who believed there were better ways to turn the country around without making citizens more dependent on the federal government.

One of F.D.R.'s best known New Deal opponents was Garet Garrett, financial columnist for the Saturday Evening Post. For nearly a decade, Garrett was one of the few columnists of national stature willing to speak out against the expansion of the federal bureaucracy.

SALVOS AGAINST THE NEW DEAL is a collection of Saturday Evening Post columns written by Garrett attacking the trend toward big government. Garrett's analysis of Roosevelt's recovery plan has stood the test of time well when examined in the cold light of the events of the past sixty years. His writings also offer food for though relevant to the nation's present economic and political environment.

Customer Reviews:

A Great Collection Of Essays Showing The Downside Of The New Deal.......2005-08-24

This is a great collection of essays against the entire New Deal program and philosophy which lives on today. Ramsey includes very useful notes placing each article in context and background information. History is written by the winners, but many lessons can be learned from the losers. Garrett is a powerful dissident. He shows what lost when the New Deal won, and that explains much of our present economic and social predicament. Although there is discussion of economic issues, it should be easily comprehensible to a non-economist, since Garrett comes from a classical economics (no formulas) background.

Assessing the Weaknesses of FDR.......2004-03-02

Historically speaking, very few Presidents are as immune to criticism or question than FDR. Yet, that premise is unacceptable for American historians, generally, and inconsistent with American domestic and foreign policy with regard to nearly everyone. There is always dissenting opinion because there are always healthy views that comprise the possibility of different options. FDR is so popular a President that most consider him off limits when viewing his administrations. There do appear to be areas where his choices, or those of Eleanor's might have been different however, and whether they might have been better choices, who knows? The case is rarely made, however, just as it is rarely made in the case of Washington or Lincoln. Being American means to question the outcome of nearly everything in order to evaluate the best possible option to use in any given circumstance. This is learning that Americans prize, and need not be an affront to the person scrutinized. Intellectual analysis produces considerable beneficial opportunities for discussion, and surely, if FDR was the kind of person he is portrayed as being, he would be the last to suggest that his decisions could not bear up under a healthy, and respectful scrutiny. For a period so heavily rooted in foreign relations, and world strife, it would be more ignorant not to evaluate the period, the persons associated with decisions made at the time, and what assumptions went into making those decisions appropriate. This is good patriotic inquiry, not intentional discrediting of anyone. Witch hunts appear by using devisive information to harm, not by using legitimate facts to evaluate circumstances present when decisions are made, and then condoned and supported. Americans are the most self-scrutinizing government on the planet, and it is that patriotic spirit that justifies confidence in a free government, requiring criticism from both perspectives of for and against current issues. This is the approach that helps to "balance" democracy and help America stay free (or so we used to think) before the Patriot Act.

Heroic Writings During a Difficult Time.......2003-12-24

How wonderful it is to find this hefty volume of writings by the heroic Garet Garrett! For some 30 years, I've read about Garrett and his polemical battles against FDR and his statist New Deal, but all you could find by him was THE PEOPLE'S POTTAGE (an excellent book, but just a smidgen of Garrett's work). Now Bruce Ramsey has assembled this 300-page sampling of some of Garrett's best political writing from the Saturday Evening Post. Three cheers for Garet Garrett, and another three cheers for Ramsey! This lone, inexpensive volume will give you a very different view of just how "compassionate" a president Roosevelt was.

He who forgets the past . . . . ........2003-11-04

Bruce Ramsey does an excellent job of resurrecting writings that were quite well known at the time, but have become obscure by virtue of the New Deal's political conquest over the Constitution and all of America. What we now accept blindly from our "leaders" was once highly controversial and didn't need to happen. We ignore the writings of Garet Garrett at our own peril.

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