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Все книги издательства IngramWho Needs the Fed?
The Federal Reserve is one of the most disliked entities in the United States at present, right alongside the IRS. Americans despise the Fed, but they’re also generally a bit confused as to why they distrust our central bank.Their animus is reasonable, though, because the Fed’s most famous function—targeting the Fed funds rate—is totally backwards. John Tamny explains this backwardness in terms of a Taylor Swift concert followed by a ride home with Uber.In modern times, he points out, the notion of credit has been perverted, so that most people believe it’s money and that the supply of it can therefore be increased. This false notion has aggrandized the Fed with power that it can’t possibly use wisely. The contrast between the grinding poverty of Baltimore and the abundance of Silicon Valley helps illustrate the problem, along with stories about Donald Trump, Robert Downey Jr., Jim Harbaugh (the Michigan football coach), and robots.Who Needs the Fed? makes a sober case against the Federal Reserve by explaining what credit really is, and why the Fed’s existence is inimical to its creation. Readers will come away entertained, much more knowledgeable, and prepared to argue that the Fed is merely superfluous on its best days but perilous on its worst.
The New Totalitarian Temptation
What caused the eurozone debacle and the chaos in Greece? Why has Europe’s migrant crisis spun out of control, over the heads of national governments? Why is Great Britain calling a vote on whether to leave the European Union? Why are established political parties declining across the continent while protest parties rise? All this is part of the whirlwind that EU elites are reaping from their efforts to create a unified Europe without meaningful accountability to average voters.The New Totalitarian Temptation: Global Governance and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe is a must-read if you want to understand how the European Union got to this point and what the European project fundamentally is. This is the first book to identify the essence of the EU in a utopian vision of a supranationally governed world, an aspiration to achieve universal peace through a global legal order.The ambitions of the global governancers are unlimited. They seek to transform not just the world’s political order, but the social order as well—discarding basic truths about human nature and the social importance of tradition in favor of a human rights policy defined by radical autonomy and unfettered individual choice. And the global governance ideology at the heart of the EU is inherently antidemocratic. EU true believers are not swayed by the common sense of voters, nor by reality itself.Because the global governancers aim to transfer core powers of all nations to supranational organizations, the EU is on a collision course with the United States. But the utopian ideas of global governance are taking root here too, even as the European project flames into rancor and turmoil. America and Europe are still cultural cousins; we stand or fall together. The EU can yet be reformed, and a commitment to democratic sovereignty can be renewed on both sides of the Atlantic.
Making David into Goliath
During the Six-Day War of 1967, polls showed that Americans favored the Israelis over the Arabs by overwhelming margins. In Europe, support for Israel ran even higher. In the United Nations Security Council, a British resolution essentially gave Israel the terms of peace it sought, and when the Arabs and their Soviet supporters tried to override the resolution in the General Assembly, they fell short of the necessary votes.Fast forward 40 years and Israel has become perhaps the most reviled country in the world. Although Americans have remained constant in their sympathy for the Jewish state, almost all of the rest of the world treats Israel as a pariah.What caused this remarkable turnabout? Making David into Goliath traces the process by which material pressures and intellectual fashions reshaped world opinion of Israel. Initially, terrorism, oil blackmail, and the sheer size of Arab and Muslim populations gave the world powerful inducements to back the Arab cause. Then, a prevalent new paradigm of “social justice,” in which class conflict was supplanted by the noble struggles of people of color, created a lexicon of rationales for taking sides against Israel. Thus, nations can behave cravenly while striking a high-minded pose in aligning themselves on the Middle East conflict.
The Heroic Heart
What does it mean to be a hero? In The Heroic Heart, Tod Lindberg traces the quality of heroic greatness from its most distant origin in human prehistory to the present day. The designation of “hero” once conjured mainly the prowess of conquerors and kings slaying their enemies on the battlefield. Heroes in the modern world come in many varieties, from teachers and mentors making a lasting impression on others by giving of themselves, to firefighters no less willing than their ancient counterparts to risk life and limb. They don’t do so to assert a claim of superiority over others, however. Rather, the modern heroic heart acts to serve others and save others. The spirit of modern heroism is generosity, what Lindberg calls “the caring will,” a primal human trait that has flourished alongside the spread of freedom and equality.Through its intimate portraits of historical and literary figures and its subtle depiction of the most difficult problems of politics, The Heroic Heart offers a startlingly original account of the passage from the ancient to the modern world and the part the heroic type has played in it. Lindberg deftly combines social criticism and moral philosophy in a work that ranks with such classics as Thomas Carlyle’s nineteenth-century On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History and Joseph Campbell’s twentieth-century The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The Nixon Effect
The Nixon Effect examines the 37th president’s political legacy in broad-ranging ways that make clear, for the first time, the breadth and duration of his influence on American political life. The book argues that Nixon is the key political figure in postwar American politics in multiple ways, some barely acknowledged until now. His legacy includes a generational shift in the ideological orientations of both the Republican and Democratic parties; the Nixon influence, both intentional and unintentional, was to push both parties further out to their ideological poles. So stark was Nixon’s influence on party identities that it shaped the hardened partisan polarization in Washington today and the evolution of what has come to be called Red and Blue America.Stemming in part from this, and also from Nixon’s scorched-earth political warfare and eventually his Watergate scandal, we have also seen the evolution of politics as war, where adversaries and ideological opponents are seen as evil or unpatriotic. Finally, Nixon’s pioneering tactics—from the identification of the Silent Majority to the Southern Strategy, from “triangulating” between both parties and claiming the political center to launching the culture war with attacks on “elites” in media, academia, and the courts—have shaped political communications and strategy ever since.Other books have argued for Nixon’s importance, but Douglas E. Schoen’s is the first to take into account the full range of this fascinating man’s influence. While not discounting Nixon’s many misdeeds, Schoen treats his presidency and its importance with the seriousness—and evenhandedness—that the subject deserves.
Islam and Free Speech
In January 2015, Muslim terrorists massacred cartoonists and writers at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, proclaiming to be avenging Islam’s prophet. The rampage, which included the murders of hostages at a kosher market, prompted global leaders and throngs of citizens to rally in support of free expression. But was the support genuine?In this Broadside, Andrew C. McCarthy explains how leading Islamists have sought to supplant free expression with the blasphemy standards of Islamic law, gaining the support of the U.S. and other Western governments. But free speech is the lifeblood of a functioning democratic society, essential to our capacity to understand, protect ourselves from, and ultimately defeat our enemies.
Admirable Evasions
In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures.Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind.Admirable Evasions also considers metaphysical objections to the assumptions of psychology, and suggests that literature is a far more illuminating window into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.
The Inequality Hoax
The controversy over inequality has gathered steam with the publication of Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a dense work of economic history that documents the rise of income inequality in recent decades and sets forth an agenda of taxation to deal with it. Piketty’s treatise has turned into a rallying point for those favoring income redistribution and higher taxes on the rich.In this Broadside, James Piereson explains how Piketty’s book is flawed and advances a narrow understanding of the market system. While misjudging the era in which we are living and misunderstanding the sources of inequality, Piketty’s book proposes solutions that will make matters worse for everyone – the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor alike.
David's Sling
Throughout Western history, the societies that have made the greatest contributions to the spread of freedom have created iconic works of art to celebrate their achievements. Yet despite the enduring appeal of these works—from the Parthenon to Michelangelo’s David to Picasso’s Guernica—histories of both art and democracy have ignored this phenomenon. Millions have admired the artworks covered in this book but relatively few know why they were commissioned, what was happening in the culture that produced them, or what they were meant to achieve. Even scholars who have studied them for decades often miss the big picture by viewing them in isolation from a larger story of human striving.David’s Sling places into context ten canonical works of art executed to commemorate the successes of free societies that exerted political and economic influence far beyond what might have been expected of them. Fusing political and art history with a judicious dose of creative reconstruction, Victoria Coates has crafted a lively narrative around each artistic object and the free system that inspired it.This book integrates the themes of creative excellence and political freedom to bring a fresh, new perspective to both. In telling the stories of ten masterpieces, David’s Sling invites reflection on the synergy between liberty and human achievement.
Blood of Tyrants
Blood of Tyrants reveals the surprising details of our Founding Fathers’ approach to government and this history’s impact on today. Delving into forgotten—and often lurid—facts of the Revolutionary War, Logan Beirne focuses on the nation’s first commander in chief, George Washington, as he shaped the very meaning of the United States Constitution in the heat of battle.Key episodes of the Revolution illustrate how the Founders dealt with thorny wartime issues: How do we protect citizens’ rights when the nation is struggling to defend itself? Who decides war strategy? When should we use military tribunals instead of civilian trials? Should we inflict harsh treatment on enemy captives if it means saving American lives? Beirne finds evidence in previously unexplored documents such as General Washington’s letters debating the use of torture, an eyewitness account of the military tribunal that executed a British prisoner, Founders’ letters warning against government debt, and communications pointing to a power struggle between Washington and the Continental Congress.Vivid stories from the Revolution set the stage for Washington’s pivotal role in the drafting of the Constitution. The Founders saw the first American commander in chief as the template for all future presidents: a leader who would fiercely defend Americans’ rights and liberties against all forms of aggression.Pulling the reader directly into dramatic scenes from history, Blood of Tyrants fills a void in our understanding of the presidency and our ingenious Founders’ pragmatic approach to issues we still face today.