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Book Review: What Are These Tea Parties About, Anyway?

January 13, 2010 by 2 Comments

-By Warner Todd Huston

A new book about the Tea Party movement — and a movement it really is — will soon be hitting the shelves. “A New American Tea Party” penned by John M. O’Hara, one of the many folks that helped bring us some of those protests in early 2009, is a book that hopes that the reader will come away understanding and appreciating the Tea Party movement as a truly grassroots happening, a spontaneous outpouring of interest backed by true red, white and blue American ideals.

Author O’Hara, himself an early Tea Party organizer in Washington D.C. and the Chicago area, answers several questions with the book: what sparked the Tea Parties; is the name “Tea Party” itself a proper sobriquet; what do they mean; what does the future hold; and how do you make more?

The first thing one might notice is that O’Hara writes in a crisp, conversational style with short subchapters. This makes it ideal for reading bits at a time. This is not a dense treatment and I think his style makes the book very accessible to people of all ages — without talking down to the young or dumbing it down for the more advanced reader.
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Book Review: What Are These Tea Parties About, Anyway?”

Book Reviews - Economy/Finances - Media Bias - Society/Culture - Taxes - Warner Todd Huston

Your Next Book: Slaying the Leviathan, by Leslie Carbone

August 27, 2009 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

My friend, Leslie Carbone has published her book at last. It is titled “Slaying the Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform.”

It has just come out this week so I have not had a chance to look it over yet, of course. But here is the advance announcement and the book can be purchased from Amazon.com right now.

Description:

In the natural order, virtue and vice each carries its own consequences. On the one hand, virtue yields largely positive results. Hard work, patience, and carefulness, for example, tend to generate prosperity. Vice, on the other hand, brings negative consequences. Sloth, impatience, and recklessness, for example, tend toward suffering.

In Slaying Leviathan, Leslie Carbone argues that since the early twentieth century, U.S. tax policy has been designed to mitigate the natural economic results of both virtue and vice. When the government disrupts the natural order through taxation by creating incentives and disincentives that overturn these natural consequences, the government perverts its own function and becomes part of the problem—a contributor to social breakdown—rather than part of the solution or an instrument of justice.

Slaying Leviathan envisions an approach to tax policy rooted in natural justice. To achieve this goal, Carbone first traces the historical evolution of U.S. tax policy, from the 1765 Stamp Act to the 1997 tax cut. She then assesses the current American tax burden and George W. Bush’s tax cuts and explores the fundamental problems with U.S. tax policy. After providing a historical analysis of federal spending and of expanding governmental expectations, she offers a set of over-arching principles and instructions on how to apply them to tax policy proposals.

About the Author

Leslie Carbone served as the director of Family Tax Policy at the Family Research Council, chief of staff to the late assemblyman Gil Ferguson of California, and a speechwriter for U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. Her writing has been published in the Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other magazines and journals. She has lectured on more than 100 college campuses and has been interviewed on more than 250 radio shows. She lives in Fairfax, Virginia.

Book Reviews - Budget - Business - Conservatives - Democrats/Leftists - Economy/Finances - Patriotism - Society/Culture - Taxes - Warner Todd Huston

Taking the Mystery From Investing

August 5, 2009 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

I just got finished with a book about investing that I highly recommend. It’s called “The Investing Revolutionaries” by James N. Whiddon with Nikki Knotts. The subtitle is “how the world’s greatest investors take on Wall Street and win in any market” and short interviews with all sorts of high end investors that are making money even in this economic downturn are sprinkled throughout the book.

Now, I am not a money guy so when this book showed up on my table I cringed at the prospect of reading it. But I have to say that this book is no mere dry, archaic tome on investing. Instead, it is part lesson on human nature, part an American apologia, along with a guide to investing principles that everyone should know. This book has some timely advice and is written in a straight forward, understandable way and goes some way toward taking out the alchemic mysteries from the world of investing.

Each interview is uplifting and makes one optimistic about America and our economic system. For instance, author Whiddon spoke with Dinesh D’Souza whose enthusiasm for America is almost infectious.
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Taking the Mystery From Investing”