What is fundamentally wrong with government today? In Against Leviathan, economist and historian, Robert Higgs, offers an unflinching critical analysis of government power in all its aspects: welfare, warfare, regulation, spying, and its imposition on personal liberties.
Against Leviathan combines an economist’s analytical scrutiny, an historian’s respect for the facts, and a refusal to accept the standard excuses and cruelties of government officialdom. Topics include Social Security, the paternalism of the FDA, the “War on Drugs”, the nature of political leadership, civil liberties, the conduct of the national surveillance state, and governmental responses to a continuing stream of “crises,” including domestic economic busts and foreign wars both hot and cold.
Against Leviathan is a thorough and penetrating critique, and a significant contribution in this current time of crisis and unchecked expansion of government power, and a worthy successor to the author’s seminal treatise Crisis and Leviathan.
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Dr. Robert Higgs is retired and lives in Mexico. He was a senior fellow in political economy for the Independent Institute and longtime editor of The Independent Review; he was also a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He is the 2007 recipient of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty, and the 2015 Murray N. Rothbard Medal of Freedom.
Today these reasons or very similar ones are used by opponents of a different form of abolitionism: the proposal that government as we know it — monopolistic, individually nonconsensual rule by an armed group that demands obedience and payment of taxes — be abolished.
With the affected business interests demanding regulatory harmonization and the world's legislators and regulators willing to supply it, who will oppose it? The answer, all too often, is no one.
It appears upon sober reflection that the whole idea is as fanciful as the unicorn. No one in his right mind, save perhaps an incurable masochist, would voluntarily consent to be treated as governments actually treat their subjects.
