A thorough and accessible consideration of government regulation.
A debut book advances an argument for limited government on economic, political, and—most important—moral grounds.
According to Lipse, the great promise of the 20th century was sadly unfulfilled despite great leaps forward technologically and a surfeit of enthusiasm. He blames the widely held belief in “economic interventionism,” or the view that government regulation and policymaking are the keys to growth. Most, though, attribute the failures of that approach to bureaucratic incompetence or the fiascos engendered by political partisanship. The author contrarily contends that the real issue is “predatory jurisdiction,” understood as a government’s unjust proscription of basic individual rights within the bounds of its lawful authority. Lipse anatomizes several problems from this perspective: the erosion of individual property rights, the unlimited accumulation of public debt, overregulation, and government-induced inflation. In one chapter, Lipse targets entry regulation, which not only creates a shadow economy or “informal sector” of business for those refused access to their chosen professions, but also denies citizens their basic rights to function as free economic actors. Repeatedly, the author prioritizes the moral argument that any iteration of predatory jurisdiction is a trampling of rights: “Ultimately, the essence of this book is to remind people of that great republican ideal: that the state is an entity instituted by the citizenry to serve the people.” Lipse also discusses the issue legally, contending that the Constitution does not provide a powerful enough catalog of basic economic rights, in the absence of which any reform will be limited. The author’s argument is both comprehensive and painstaking; he uncoils it carefully and lucidly. In addition, he avoids the trap of tendentious hyperbole so typical in reformist books—Lipse makes it clear he’s not against government regulation, just its unrestrained exercise. More could be said in these pages, in the spirit of the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, about the ways in which the people themselves are complicit in the failings of democracy and have acquiesced, if not contributed, to the technocratic oversight performed to their disadvantage. But this remains a thoughtful reminder of the moral stakes in government policy.
A thorough and accessible consideration of government regulation.Pub Date: June 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-7674-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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