Book Reviews

Just how much of a stronghold these nuggets of misinformation have attained was evident in President Clinton's 1995 State of the Union Address, which included either explicitly or implicitly no fewer than six of the cliches debunked in these pages. Had the President read, understood, and taken to heart Tibor Machan's expose of national service as, "a ploy, once again, to extract unpaid work from unsuspecting and gullible folks, another type of involuntary servitude," which is at best, "a wasteful way to give direction to human works" (p. 289), he would not continue to regard it as the accomplishment of which he is most proud. Had he not swallowed hook, line, and sinker the cliche that, "the government must set standards for living and working conditions," he would not have proposed a boost in the employment-killing minimum wage. Only someone enamored of the shop worn assertion that, "government should guarantee freedom from want," could con tend that ceasing to subsidize out-of-wed lock births is somehow punishing people, "just because they happen to be poor. " Paul Poirot's critique of that cliche in these pages is shaped by the insight that subsidizing failure breeds even more failure.

Characteristic of the FEE approach to economic issues is its willingness to go beyond mere cost-benefit considerations to focus as well on the morality of the actions imposed. Entry after entry in this book serves as evidence of this. Thus, Cecil Bohannon's refutation of the cliche that "food is a right" rests not only on the recognition that government attempts to guarantee a right to food invariably destroy the incentives to produce food, but that they do so at the expense of the rights of food producers. Similarly, Robert Higgs counters the claim that, "in a national emer gency, government must control the econ omy, " by alluding to the inevitable distor tions created by such control, but he clinches his argument by declaring that, "even if the government were more capa ble, it would not be justified in using its coercive powers for any and all purposes. " This volume leaves no doubt, as if there ever were any, which side FEE is on in what Murray Rothbard calls "the eternal struggle between morality and immorality, between liberty and coercion."

Cliches of Politics challenges the statist conventional wisdom on every front. Whether the false notion under consider ation involves the nature of rights or foreign trade, regulatory policy or income inequal ity, health care or political philosophy, it is handled with dispatch. For the uniniti ated, this book is a virtual crash course in FEE's freedom philosophy. For those al ready well acquainted with these ideas, it provides clear, concise, and quotable artic ulations of them. Anyone who learns the lessons put forth in this book need never fear entering the battle of ideas unarmed. Not only was Spangler judicious in his selection of the most harmful and well entrenched bromides to attack, but he has assembled a veritable "all star team" of free-market thinkers past and present to assist him in that effort. Among the most prominent are FEE founder Leonard Read, current FEE president Hans Sennholz, Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, John Hospers, Llewellyn Rockwell, Robert Higgs, and Tibor Machan. I'll take them on my side any day. D In addition to editing the book review section of The Freeman, Dr. Batemarco is a senior project manager for a marketing research firm in New York City and teaches economics at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York.

Death By Government by R.J. Rummel Transaction. 1994 • 496 pages. $49.95 Reviewed by Doug Bandow T he line, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you," takes on new meaning after reading R.J. Rummel's dev astating Death By Government. This cen tury, estimates the University of Hawaii policial scientist, the State has killed almost 170 million people. The numbers are so horrifying, so unfath omable, so unbelievable-it is tempting to dismiss them as meaningless statistics. But consider: this century, politicians have killed, for matters of ideology and policy, the equivalent of the entire population of Russia. With the slaughter averaging roughly 1.8 million people a year, in effect every resident of Houston or Philadelphia has been buried year in and year out. Rummel calls these murders" democide" rather than "genocide," because the latter focuses on the elimination of specific ethnic groups, while the former includes mass killingsfor any number of other reasons. He readily acknowledges the difficultyin devel oping an accurate death toll, but no one has done better: Rummel offers 72 pages of references. The basic problem, he explains, is power. Writes Rummel: "Power kills; 477 absolute Power kills absolutely. " Of course, this problem is not new. Rummel estimates that some 133 millionpeople were murdered over the first several thousand years of human life. China's emperors were partic ularly brutal, killing 33.5 million; the Mon gols ran a close second at 30 million.

While the State long ago demonstrated its democidal nature, the political experiment has, unfortunately, taken a much deadlier turn this century. Indeed, the twentieth century demonstrates the utterly disastrous results of what historian Paul Johnson calls the Age of Politics. Unique to this century has been the marriage of sinful men, all powerful governments, and technological progress. As a result, 20 death states have killed 170 million human beings. The greatest system of mass murder be longs to the Soviet Union-the "Soviet Gulag State," as Rummel refers to it. Some 62 million, "Old and young, healthy and sick, men and women, even infants and the infirm, were killed in cold blood." What makes this slaughter particularly mystifying is the fact that most of these victims were, as Rummel puts it, "guilty of ... nothing." Anyone who has read Robert Conquest knows the details of Joseph Stalin's perse cutions, but even Rummel's much shorter account provides more than enough infor mation to turn anyone's stomach. There was genocide, such as the slaughter of the Don Cossacks, Ukrainian peasants, and Esto nians. There were the mass purges of the Communist Party. And there were killings to fulfill quotas. At least the other murders fulfilleda horrific, perverse logic. But these?

Explains Rummel: [M]urder and arrest quotas did not work well. Where to find the "enemies of the people" they were to shoot was a particularly acute problem for the local NKVD, which had been diligent in uncovering "plots." They had to resortto shootingthose arrestedfor the most minor civil crimes, those previously arrested and released, and even mothers and wives who appeared at NKVD headquarters for informa tion about their arrested loved ones. Who can doubt that this was, as Ronald Reagan opined, an evil empire?

478 THE FREEMAN • JULY 1995 Then there are the Communist rulers of China, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and company, who were long feted in the West. Their victims roll was modest only when compared to that of the Soviet Union: 35 million. Given such a record, Rummel asks, why was anyone surprised at the murder of students and workers in Tiananmen square? China's history is, in many ways, more tragic than that of Russia. Rummel figures that various emperors killed 33.5 million people. Nearly a milliondied at the hands of warlords early this century. Chiang Kai shek's nationalists, backed so enthusiasti cally by many Westerners, slaughtered ten million, putting Chiang in fourth place be hind Adolf Hitler in the pantheon of mega murderers. And then came the Communists. As revolutionaries, Mao Zedong's forces killed millions under their control. Once in power throughout China, the new regime liquidated millions more opponents. The "Great Leap Forward" resulted in a famine that left as many as 27 million dead from starvation. Millions more were murdered during the Cultural Revolution. Almost as inconceivable as this endless slaughter was the fact that so many Western leftists could have promoted so vile a system for so long.

Mass murderer number three was Hitler, along with his criminal gangof anti-Semites, misfits, misanthropes, and racists. Rummel numbers the Third Reich's victims at 21 million. Germany's killings were heavily weighted toward genocide-of Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies, for instance, though few peo ple escaped the Nazi jackboot. Hitler also deserves blame for igniting the worst war in history, with generous help from Stalin and others. Rummel goes on to chronicle more mod est killers, like Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Vietnam, Poland, Yugoslavia, North Ko rea, and Mexico. What makes his analysis particularly useful is its impartiality. His book forces us to remember mass killingby the supposed good guys in World War II. Even Great Britain and the U.S. come under criticism for their terror bombings of civilian populations during the same con flict. Rummel goes so far as to list Britain as a "Centi-Kilomurderer," responsible for an estimated 816,000 deaths, primarily from its World War II aerial campaign, which exceeded anything attempted by Nazi Ger many.

Death By Government is a depressing, unnerving book. For this very reason, it should be read in history classes not just across America, but around the world. The problem of power, as Rummel terms it, remains with us today-just ask residents of Angola, Bosnia, Chechnya, Georgia, and Rwanda, among many, many other lands. Only if we learn from the past can we ever hope to end state-sanctioned murder. The case for human liberty and limited govern ment has never been made more effectively than by this fearsome book. D Mr. Bandow, a Freeman columnist, is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of The Politics of Envy: Statism as Theology. Beyond Politics by William C. Mitchell and Randy T. Simmons The Independent Institute/Westview Press • 1994. 234 pages. $17.95 paperback, $49.50 cloth Reviewed by Gregory P. Pavlik W ithin the last 30 or so years some advocates of limited government have begun promoting public choice eco nomics. This small but increasingly influen tial school of thought applies assumptions of neoclassical economics about human be havior to public employees, elected or not.

Public choice economists insist that politi cians and bureaucrats are motivated by rational self-interest, and the manifestations of that self-interest result in perverse and disastrous consequences for the public. Many of their insights buttress earlier so ciological and political analyses of both the State and the political class, echoing the work of such theorists as Franz Oppenhei mer, VilfredoPareto, and Ludwigvon Mises. William Mitchell and Randy Simmons have written an interesting and informative work on political interventionism in the economy from a public choice perspective. The book, Beyond Politics, begins with a discussion of welfare economics, that branch of the dismal science that deals with, among other things, issues of market failure. Market failure refers to the divergence of real markets from the assumptions of per fect competition. One of the most troubling of market failures in the eyes of the general public is monopoly. On this issue and others, the authors approach the" market failure" from a public choice point of view, showing that the incentives of government officials are structured in such a way as to exacerbate the very problems, real or imagined, that the State is being used to solve.

For example, politicians in a democracy must seek popular re-election. The easiest and most effective means of staying in office is often the use of public power to benefit an electorally powerful interest or constitu ency. Why then the absurd belief that pol iticians can be relied upon to eliminate monopolies? For one thing, a genuine mo nopoly is impossible to maintain against the forces of a competition in a free market economic system. Politics is the only means of creating a sustainable monopoly through artificial barriers to competition. More im portantly, it is in the interest of politicians to structure regulatory mechanisms that in hibit competition and lead to consolidation, since this creates a wealthy and grateful backer for the politician. In a similar fashion, Mitchell and Sim mons argue convincingly that market fail ures are often ill-defined and almost never warrant the degree of criticism they invoke.

To drive the point home, the authors show that private solutions are invariably superior to public solutions. In fact, most of the book deals with what the authors call "public failure," the inability of the public sector to live up to the vision of an efficient and benevolent government handling the flaws of the marketplace. The book ends with a call for a return to a free and unfettered economy, something which the authors have succeeded in demBOOKS 479 onstrating as superior to the various schemes involving the State. Occasionally lost in the long discussions of the personal interests of politicians and bureaucrats and the economic consequences of intervention ism is the fact that the most precious cost of growth of the State can be measured in terms of human liberty. The loss of freedom may be one of the unseen costs for econo mists, but it is the heaviest of burdens fpr civilization.

Beyond Politics is flawed by an over reliance on equilibrium models to illustrate points in the text. A free economy is dy namic and constantly changing. Many of the authors' points could be made using eco nomic laws based on apodictic principles that do not presuppose static conditions in the economy. But this caveat should not preclude an appreciation of the devastating critique of statism, government interven tion, and the pretensions of the political classes found in this book's pages. Beyond Politics is a cogent defense of the economic system of a free society and a firm rebuttal to some of its most vociferous critics among the economics profession. It deserves the attention of anyone interested in the great economic controversies of our day. D Mr. Pavlik is director of The Freeman Op-Ed program at The Foundation for Economic Edu cation. Investment Biker by Jim Rogers Random House. 1994 • 402 pages. $25.00 Reviewed by Richard A. Cooper J im Rogers autographed my copy of In vestment Biker with the words, "Life is short; Ride hard and far." Rogers closes his highly readable account of the round-the world motorcycle trip he and girlfriend Tabitha Estabrook accomplished with more words of wisdom: "More important, I've also learned that if you've got a dream, you have to try it; you must get it out of your system. You will never get another chance.

480 THE FREEMAN • JULY 1995 If you want to change your life, do it." Motorcycles, markets, and musings make this book both provocative and entertaining. Viewers of the CNBC show Mutual Fund Investor will recognize his blend of down home Alabama folksiness, savvy invest ment insights, and shrewdly biting public policy comments. Those viewers and other readers will marvel at the observations of Jim riding about China, Russia, Africa, South America and elsewhere, as he records his impressions and predictions about eco nomic policies and investment prospects. Often he saw how bad economic policies and wars had squandered great natural en dowments and the labor of the inhabitants. Why does Jim Rogers want to see and know the world? He hails from the small town of Demopolis, Alabama. His family's phone number was 5. Just 5. As he says, if you are from somewhere that small you either stay there your whole life or you want to get out and make your mark in the wider world. Despite the folksiness, Rogers is a well-educated and sophisticated man. From Yale he went to graduate school at Oxford with a summer stop on Wall Street along the way. He was a partner in a hedge fund after going to Wall Street full time. Jim left Wall Street in 1980 with millions of dollars.

Jim and Tabitha's trip-intellectually and geographically-began in Ireland. Let Jim tell this part: "Riding through this part of Ireland was wonderful, great for motorcy cles, the roads curvy and small and convo luted, green and beautiful. All my life, from my history courses at Yale to my work at Oxford and later on WallStreet, I've studied geography, politics, economics, and history intensely, believing they are interrelated, and I've used what I've learned to invest in world markets. I was on the lookout for investment opportunities, for some coun try-and its investment market-about to take off, where I could jump in and make five, ten, fifteen times what I put in." Unfortunately, Ireland could not meet Jim's tests. He worried over its instability but was most concerned about statist policies. The conflict between statism and en trepreneurial capitalism is one of Jim's key themes. Where statism reigns, decay in creases and opportunity decreases. Tied to that conflict is the burden of war frustrating the achievements of peace.

Jim observes that "Ireland is a victim of statism, which my dictionary defines as the concentration of economic controls and· planning in the hands of a highly centralized government, and which I further define as the belief that the state is the mechanism best suited for solving most if not all of society's ills, be they health related, natural disasters, poverty, job training, or injured feelings. Statism is the great political disease of the twentieth century, with Communist, socialist, and many democratic nations in fected to a greater or lesser degree. When the political history of our century is written its greatest story will be how a hundred variants of statism failed." I would say this is the story that should be written, but I expect that the story told will be how the historians' preferred brand of statism was not tried with enough rigor or was mishan dled. Unlike economists, Rogers is not merely interested in economic policy or analysis but in scouting out investment prospects. He is none too optimistic about the United States.

Bright spots include Botswana. Botswana? Yes, and he tells a great story about why he is optimistic about this small African country. Investment Biker shows you a world through a unique pair of eyes-badly main tained roads and sweeping natural vistas, economies wrecked by statist mismanage ment, and countries torn by renewed trib alism. All this with a country boy's way with words and a Wall Streeter's eye for invest ment opportunities. You can enjoy the ride with Jim Rogers, and think of your gasoline savings. D Mr. Cooper is an export/import manager and freelance writer.