Product Review

Why capitalism is moral and practical . . . and why big government is neither

America has faced many fiscal and economic problems in the last decade: the housing bubble and the financial crisis, stagnant economic growth and high unemployment, record budget deficits and unsustainable debt. What do these problems have in common? They were all caused by statism.

Statism denotes any system of big government, a government that gains power at the expense of individual freedom, a government that uses its power to confiscate and redistribute wealth, to regulate and control the economy, and to micromanage citizens' behavior.

As Michael Dahlen shows in Ending Big Government: The Essential Case for Capitalism and Freedom, the only rational alternative to statism and the only antidote to the problems it has caused is free-market, laissez-faire capitalism. This is the system of limited government, the system of economic and political freedom. It is a system that has created more wealth, offered more opportunity, and lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.

Yet it is relentlessly demonized. We are told that businessmen pay "starvation wages," that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, and that the free market is impractical--prone to crises, depressions, mass unemployment, and coercive monopolies. Michael Dahlen dispels these and many other myths. He shows that a system of free markets and limited government is not only practical; he shows that it is moral, as it is the only system that recognizes each individual's inalienable right to his own life.

A provocative weave of history, philosophy, and political economy, Ending Big Government shows that laissez-faire capitalism is incontestably superior to statism.