Archive for John Chamberlain
The Case for the Free Market
Mr. Chamberlain (1903-1995) wrote the lead book review for The Freeman for more than thirty-five years.
Every fourth year we get involved in the frenzied madness of a presidential election. Watching the quadrennial show, Leonard E. Read correctly estimates that politicians are powerless of themselves to change things. The politico, when he is running for [...]
A Reviewers Notebook: Reclaiming the American Dream
Richard Cornuelle, author of Reclaiming The American Dream, subtitled, The Role of Private Individuals and Voluntary Associations (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, N.J., 1993, 258 pages, $19.95 paperback), is the man who restored Alexis de Tocqueville to his rightful place in American history.
Cornuelle had worked as a young man for Garet Garrett. A good observer, he [...]
A Reviewers Notebook: Two World Views
As Eugene Rostow, former dean of the Yale Law School, shows in his book, Toward Managed Peace (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, $35.00), we have definitely had a foreign policy: It was to fight the Cold War. Stalin, like the Romanov Czars, continued the immemorial policy of trying to bite off more territory. [...]
1Apr1994 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: The Politics Of Power
The Greeks had a word for it: “Nothing in excess.” Centuries later, Edmund Burke used the word prudence. He believed in a conciliatory approach to Britain’s relations with America on the one hand and Ireland on the other. Thus it could be seen that Russell Kirk has had good literary forebears for his book, The [...]
1Jan1994 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Refuting Oswald Spengler
Is there an excuse for a volume the length of The Rebirth of the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991, 736 pages, $69.95)? The answer, rather obviously, is that the book might have been published as six or seven volumes. Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann have each done many important studies for the Hoover Institution [...]
1Dec1993 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: The Freeman Classics Series
FEE, under the new dispensation of Hans Sennholz, has decided to refine the gold it has scattered about in its publications, particularly The Freeman magazine. By the beginning of 1993 it had published three collections: one, called The Morality of Capitalism; another, Private Property and Political Control; and the third, Prices and Price Controls. In [...]
1Oct1993 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Costly Returns
Despite the reassurances of James L. Payne in his Costly Returns: The Burden of the U.S. Tax System (265 pages, $14.95) that the IRS is not really out to get anybody, there is no way to dodge worry about the tax collector. The Institute for Contemporary Studies, Payne’s publisher, may say that the Constitution has [...]
1Aug1993 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Out of Work
After last fall’s election George Bush said he beat himself. But history asks of Bush no such abasement. History tells us that when unemployment is high, presidential incumbents always lose.
In a fantastically detailed book called Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Independent Institute, Holmes and Meier, Foreword by Martin [...]
A Reviewers Notebook: Government Racket
In the course of assembling material for his book, Government Racket: Washington Waste from A to Z (Bantam Books, 270 pp., $7.95 paperback), Martin Gross has had to have recourse to the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. It’s all a manner of speaking, of course. Gross needs a double and triple alphabet. He has had [...]
1Jan1993 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Forge of Union
With the publication by Jameson Books of Ottawa, Illinois, of the third volume of his “eyewitness” narrative history of the founding of the U.S. government, Jeffrey St. John, radio and television commentator, has completed the job he set out to do. His idea was to pretend that he was “there” when General Washington, James Madison, [...]
1Aug1992 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke is a name that was once well-known to Americans. He never visited America, but he could be counted on to oppose King George III and his ministers in their efforts to tax the colonies without a by-your- leave. He opposed the Stamp Act, and he would have taken part in the Boston Tea [...]
1Apr1992 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: The Case for Conservatism
In his introduction to Francis Graham Wilson’s little book on The Case for Conservatism (Transaction Publishers, 78 pages, $21.95 cloth) Russell Kirk notes that Lionel Trilling could write in 1949 that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” But no sooner had Trilling made his remark than “the literary and [...]
1Jan1992 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: China Misperceived
Steven W. Mosher begins his study of China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality (New York: A New Republic Book, 260 pages, $19.95 doth) by plunging us into Nixon’s dilemma of 1972. President Nixon, after dispatching Henry Kissinger to mainland China to get the feel of things, faced up to a geopolitical fact that if [...]
1Nov1991 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: The State of the Union
In the Thirties, reviewing a book by Albert Jay Nock for The New York Times, I twitted Nock for referring to Thomas Jefferson reverential-ly as “Mr. Jefferson” where, often in the same paragraph, it was plain “Mencken” or even plain “Lincoln.” A couple of days later I received a one-line letter from Nock. It read [...]
1Sep1991 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: A Child of Fortune
We almost lost our Constitution before we had one. Jeffrey St. John, a journalist of talents who decided to put himself into a reporter’s position at the secretive meetings of 38 delegates who framed the Constitution in the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787, opens the second book of a trilogy with the story of a [...]
1Aug1991 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Leftism Revisited
you want to know the worst about Karl Marx (and there is very little good to be said for him), it’s all here in Erik yon Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot (Regnery Gateway, 520 pages, $29.95 cloth).
The Communist Manifesto, written by Marx jointly with Engels, with [...]
A Reviewers Notebook: The Conservative Constitution
Russell Kirk calls his generally excellent new book The Conservative Constitution (Regnery Gateway, 241 pages, $22.95). The word “conservative” is correctly calculated. The famous 55 men, leaders in their own colonies, wanted to avoid a revolution. They were bent on retaining the historic rights of Englishmen. It was King George III who was the revolutionist, [...]
1May1991 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued-
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Book Reviews
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
