The book summaries are a mix of interpretations, paraphrases of the author’s language, and direct quotes from the book (without quotation marks). One purpose of the summaries is to summarize the author’s main ideas so that if interested you can order the book. Another purpose is to survey some of the most important and soundest ideas in government structure, political philosophy, history, and economics to give a rough idea of how they all fit together. A few of the best, and best known, books on many of these subjects are listed in a separate section.
By Jonah Goldberg - ...Humans have an innate moral sense. How we use it depends on the environment we grow up in and how we define morality. The desire for unity and distrust of strangers are universal human tendencies. Of all systems ever created that actually increases trust and cooperation among strangers none has been…
By Daron Acemoglu and James Ronbinson - “The authors convincingly show that countries escape poverty only when they have appropriate economic institutions, especially private property and competition….countries are more likely to develop the right institutions when they have an open pluralistic political system with competition for political office, a widespread electorate, and openness to new…
Notes on BALANCE by Glenn Hubbard & Tim Kane – The book is a review of the experience of great powers in world history and the political and economic lessons to be learned from studying them. Two thousand years ago, Rome was a stable and prosperous civilization. After 3 centuries of decline from the relentless...…
By John M. Ellis - The preface cites Bloom’s, The Closing Of The American Mind, Kimball’s, Tenured Radicals, D’Souza’s, Illiberal Education, and Ellis’s, Against Deconstruction, all warning about the dangers of a radicalized campus being created by increasingly radical professors. “This book is of a different kind, since now the campus is already radicalized. …its purpose…
By Mike Gonzalez – Introduction – The political purpose of identity politics is to divide the country into groups as a strategy to change America completely. Identity politics sees people’s beliefs and interests as determined by their membership in specific groups, particularly sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. It is an enemy of reason...…
By Mark Levin - American Marxists call themselves progressives, democratic socialists, social activists, community activists, etc....They claim to promote economic justice, environmental justice, racial equity, gender equity...They claim the dominant culture and capitalist system are unjust, inequitable, racist and sexist...The aim is to undermine the citizenry’s confidence in the nation’s institutions and traditions, weakening the nation…
By Edward Conard - The world of economics is deeply divided and inherently political. Advocates for stronger incentives for risk taking and those for income redistribution each work backward from their conclusions to find a set of indisputable beliefs on which to build their arguments. The economy is so complex that it is impossible to definitively…
By Peter Salins - America’s success is heavily dependent on its bedrock of political, social, and economic institutions – a free market democracy with secure personal freedoms and property rights. The real secret to its extraordinary success is human capital. …Given the indispensable role of government in generating human capital it matters a great deal how,…
By Peter H. Schuck - Among liberal democracies, Americans are by far the most patriotic people and America has the most robust and creative civil society. …A majority now believes that big government is the biggest future threat to the country. In the 1950’s, the vast majority of Americans trusted the federal government to do the…