What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation - Rilegato

Murray, Charles

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0553069284 ISBN 13: 9780553069280

Casa editrice: Broadway Books, 1996

Riassunto

Recommends a return to the drastically limited federal government of America's beginnings as the key to creating more individual freedom and fulfillment

Su questo libro

L'autore

Charles Murray is the author of two of the most widely debated and influential social policy books in recent decades, Losing Ground: American Society Policy 1950-1980 and, with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Murray lives with his family near Washington, D.C.

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In the last quarter of the eighteenth century the American Founders created a society based on the belief that human happiness is intimately connected with personal freedom and responsibility. The twin pillars of the system they created were limits on the power of the central government and protection of individual rights.

A few people, of whom I am one, think that the Founders' insights are as true today as they were two centuries ago. We believe that human happiness requires freedom and that freedom requires limited government. Limited government means a very small one, shorn of almost all the apparatus we have come to take for granted during the last sixty years.

Most people are baffled by such a view. Don't we realize that this is postindustrial America, not Jefferson's agrarian society? Don't we realize that without big government millions of the elderly would be destitute, corporations would destroy the environment, and employers would be free once more to exploit their workers? Where do we suppose blacks would be if it weren't for the government? Women? Haven't we noticed that America has huge social problems that aren't going to be dealt with unless the government does something about them?

This book tries to explain how we can believe that the less government, the better. Why a society run on the principles of limited government would advance human happiness. How such a society would lead to greater individual fulfillment, more vital communities, a richer culture. Why such a society would contain fewer poor people, fewer neglected children, fewer criminals. How such a society would not abandon the less fortunate but would care for them better than does the society we have now.

Many books address the historical, economic, sociological, philosophical, and constitutional issues raised is pages. A bibliographic essay at the end of the book points you to some of the basic sources, but the book you are about to read contains no footnotes. It has no tables and but a single graph. My purpose is not to provide proofs but to explain a way of looking at the world.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Broadway Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0553069284
• ISBN 13: 9780553069280
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 178