THE WAY BACK TO AMERICA

A call for restraining U.S. government and restoring it to its original, constitutional principles.
Woltz’s (Justice Denied, 2010) second turn at political analysis repeatedly invokes the concept of returning to the nation’s founding ideas. His assessment of what ails the country is familiar territory: the aggrandizement of the federal government at the expense of individual liberty; the rise of an entrenched political class fueled by special-interest money; and the abrogation of the “strict limits” that once defined the Constitution. The book covers what the author sees as a broad swath of governmental dysfunctions ripe for reform, such as the expansion of judicial and executive power, the federal government’s power to collect income taxes, campaign finance, and the ever-swelling power of the Federal Reserve. The argument’s basic connective tissue is that all these problems could be solved by rolling the government back to its “original” form: “Our design of government was basically perfect. We don’t have to reinvent it, we just have to go back to it. All that is required to bring us back from the brink of disaster is to return to that design, get back on the path, and force the federal government to live by our contract.” Not content to merely diagnose the nation’s troubles, Woltz offers 10 specific, multistep action plans to revive its health. Sometimes those prescriptions are too well-trodden and politically implausible to stir readers’ attention; for example, it’s unlikely that the direct election of senators will be repealed anytime soon, or that the gold standard will be reinstated. Also, in place of a concrete plan to achieve legislative reforms, he offers overly general calls to organize grass-roots campaigns. However, Woltz manages to combine his concept of constitutional fidelity with a powerful critique of corporate interests—a brand of libertarianism that’s not often represented in public discourse today.
An ambitious book that valorizes small government principles without kowtowing to big business, but sometimes lacks political practicability.