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A Review: Charles Goyette's "Red and Blue and Broke All Over" (2012)

Written by Subject: Books
Charles Goyette, a radio talk show host who gained international fame when the owner of his station, Clear Channel, overtly tried their best to destroy his career for articulately opposing entry into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  He wrote a New York Times best selling economics book, The Dollar Meltdown, (2009) in which he used his amazingly detailed memory to reference and outline the United States' desperate economic debt, how we got there, who was responsible and most importantly how to save yourself from the coming collapse.  It is still, in my opinion, the BEST book there is on explaining our predicament, where our economy is headed and who the winners and losers will be.

In his new book released today, Red and Blue and Broke All Over: Restoring America's Free Economy by Charles Goyette, (2012, Sentinel, hardback, $25.95) [Kindle ed. available, ePub ed. available, PDF version available] the author does it again.  Instead of focusing exclusively on the economy he outlines what is necessary for Americans and indeed the failing world economies to recover their prosperity.  His first book was officially translated into Chinese and Korean and pirated into others.  I am not sure if any government will want to allow this new book to be translated into that nation's native language.  No government will want its citizens to read this book.  Because in a nutshell, Goyette's thesis for how individuals are to once again become prosperous: "The government must stop." 

His book is a devastating critique of the modern fascist nation state that our democracies have become of planned and controlled and colluded economies.  Devastating in that he lays it all out Goyette style, one documented example after another in his attack on the planning state until there is nothing more to defend.   The government must stop.

He points to the United States near term third world nation status future and the "One Percent" getting significantly richer through political patronage and crony capitalism rather than inspirational labor and investment.  He outlines the myriad of ways in which government ("the state") steals individual freedom, individual labor and compels obedience resulting in our dramatically declining fortunes and freedoms.  In the end the only road to recovery is that individuals must recognize the failure of the nation state, its controlling economy and demand that the government must stop.  Only then can our decline be reversed. 

This does work.  While mentioned in The Dollar Meltdown (but not in the latest book), Canada was in an economic collapse in the eighties due to endemic socialist policies.  A desperate government did the unthinkable---they eliminated a lot of their bureaucracy, taxes, rules and spending and restored prosperity and restored a surplus in a few years time.  Examples in the new book of a peaceful and rapid recovery after a great deal of pain include the 'great depression of 1920' and post-WWII Germany.  In both cases government stopped, and recovery was painful but quick.

While the United States' situation is far, far more desperate the alternative is to stay the course and watch a complete collapse of our debtor nation into an inflation spiraling abyss of controlled and command economy of slave laborers.  Here is perhaps the biggest weakness of the book; a failure to provide a course, a plan to recover our economy beyond restoring freedom from government.  The case is subtly made that the debt is so huge, the politicians and the 1% behind them so mercurial and corrupt that there is no collective solution except two.  An individual can either go down with the ship or get off of the ship. 

The government and its ruling class have been through this boom-bust cycle numerous times over millennium; either our situation ends in surrender (collapse) of the present rulers or it ends in bloody revolution.  Either way prosperity and freedom will return if but briefly.  Prolonged prosperity will only come about if those who produce understand they are the source of their own wealth and refuse the seductive promises of those who only consume.  And pass that on to the next generation.

Buy this book and read it.  Now!  The government must stop.

Disclosure: Charles Goyette is a friend of mine, and while I can assure you I would not write these things unless I believed them, you can weigh my words accordingly.
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