This is the fifth handbook for new Congress which raises issues likely to be major agenda items for decades; form tax cuts and public health program reforms to creating policies for returning the federal government to a healthier size and scope. Included is an update on terrorism initiatives and their threats to civil liberties. The Cato Handbook For Congress is an essential political survey of issues which are certain not to become quickly dated.

A logical, concise, and thorough analysis of issues no body wants to discuss. The topics are well presented one by one within the context of the threats to the American way of life as prescribed by the US Constitution. It seems that we have lost our way and this book is a road map to set us back on course. Major topics include: Terrorism, Government Reform, Civil Liberties, Money and Banking, Domestic Policy, Regulation, Energy & Environment, Foreign & Domestic Policy, International Economic Policy. The Cato Institute is addressing the issues here that every congressional representative, senator, and the president are afraid to address because US politics is not about doing what is right, but who can steal the most.

As a libertarian I am sickened by the current state of the state. Federalism is dead, boondoggle's are a dime a dozen, the government rapes me every paycheck, social security is a pyramid scam that allows only a select few early participates tremendous return, the world cop (US) is hated by all nations and yet it costs us billions to protect these whiney countries, government jobs are just an extended welfare program, corporate welfare is offensive, environmental laws favor deep pockets, etc. This excellent book does more then just identify the problems. It suggests logical remedies to the many problems the government has created. The writers not only balance the budget, but they cut $309 Billion in chapter 23 --every I agree with every cut. I have sent a copy of this book to both my congressional and senatorial representative with a note that this is my desired action plan. I challenge every American that loves this country and wants the insanity to stop to do the same.

The Cato Institute consistently generates truly outstanding scholarship -- scholarship that to any unbiased reader is first-rate, well-researched, and logical. These traits are found throughout The Cato Handbook for the 106th Congress. Each essay is relevant and substantive; no essay taxes the reader with excess verbiage or illogical or unsubstantiate claims. This is a gem of a collection.

In my own special field of expertise, antitrust, I can vouch that the essay on that topic (by Robert Levy and William Shughart) is especially good. There's more sound and creative thinking in this Levy-Shughart contribution than in any 100 antitrust articles randomly selected from law reviews and economics journals.

Libertarians talk a lot about limited government and scaling back the welfare/warfare/regulatory state and there is finally a book that lays out a detailed plan to show you how to get there.

The message in virtually every chapter of this book is "repeal!" From terminating the bloated and wasteful Department of Energy to zeroing out the budget of tiny agencies like the Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, few agencies escape the Cato Institute's budget scissors. Likewise, regulations that don't meet strict tests of economic efficiency and federalism are quickly given the heave-ho.

This isn't limited to just domestic regulations and budgets. A large portion of the book is dedicated to foreign policy. Everything from immigration to declaring war is covered. Cato's fundamental principle here is "peaceful relations with all, entangling alliances with none." This means a drastic scale back, of course, with the end result being recommendations for unilateral free trade, fairly open borders, major defense budget cuts and troop and defense treaty withdrawals.

This is a terrific book, drawing on over twenty years of policy analysis from a classic liberal viewpoint. Too bad there is less than a snowball's chance in heck of getting any of these policy recommendations implemented.

So far as it goes, this book offers a decent selection of writings, but I am dumbfounded that Boaz considers the deprivations of liberty in the name of psychiatry and medicine so trivial as to not warrant the inclusion of an essay by Thomas Szasz. Or perhaps Boaz does not consider psychiatric imprisonment to even qualify as anti-libertarian.

This is a good intellectual book that covers writings from past and present thinkers like John Locke, Thomas Paine, and Milton Friedman. This is not a fast read -- but the good thing is that you can pick and choose what chapters to read. This is the ideal plane book for someone that wants to expand the mind.

This book inspires us to think about how collectivist ideas can damage our civil society. With its writings, this book also gives us a historical perspective of libertarianism since we keep in touch with all kind of authors: ancient (e.g. Bible, Lao-Tzu,), classical (e.g. John Locke, Adam Smith) and contemporary (e.g. Ayn Rand, Mario Vargas Llosa).

Boaz has assembled a very fine collection of essays regarding liberty and the failings of modern societies to create a world in which we can live as free men. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in libertarian (or for that matter free market or conservative) political thought.

Just to tone down my entheusiasm a bit, though, I would add that many of the essays may seem a little elementary to someone who has been reading libertarian publications for a long time. But on the whole, this is a solid, highly readable work full of ammunition for your libertarian debating arsenal.

This book is a collection of some of the best speeches, public policy reports, and articles published by The Cato Institute in its twenty five years of existence. It has been edited by David Boaz, executive vp of Cato and author and editor of several other books regarding libertarianism. Cato is a public policy institute headquartered in DC that promotes limited government, free markets, peaceful coexistence and a return to the rule of law as envisioned by our founders, especially Madison and Jefferson. While this political philsophy is generally known as libertarianism, it is more correctly labeled the dominance of civil rather than political society. As a disclaimer, this reviewer has been a member of the Board of Directors of Cato for fifteen years and regards David Boaz as a friend; however, those who know me will vouch that I have been an vocal critic of Cato on those occasions where I have disagreed with its policy positions. Therefore, despite my position, I believe that my review provides a useful summary of this book.

The editor provides an introduction which attempts to summarize the changes in the political landscape over the past quarter century and concludes that classical liberalism is on the ascendancy after a century of many failed experiments in statism.The book is then divided into nine topics with several selections for each topic - these are Ideas and Consequences (3 articles), Economic Growth (3 articles), The Welfare State (5), The Regulatory State (4), A World In Transition (11), Foreign Affairs (4), Trade And international Finance (4), Law And Liberty (8), and Democracy And Culture (8). Read in order, which few readers will probably do due to both time constaints and lack of interest in some of the topics, the book provides both a wonderful retrospective on the changes in the political debate over the past twenty five years and also serves as a comprehensive overview of the relevance of these ideas today. The authors include such well known figures as Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, an interview with F.A. Hayek, Dick Armey, Lord Peter Bauer, Jose Pinera and Antonin Scalia, but regardless of the fame of the author all pieces are both enlightening and intellectually stimulating. P.J O'Rourke's brief comments at the dedication of Cato's current headquarters, titled "THe Right To Do As You Please And Take The Consequences" even adds some trenchant and well directed wit to the collection. The longest piece is only fourteen pages and several are only three pages in lenghth, so while some of the topics are difficult if the ideas are new to the reader any can be digested in a single session.

It is impossible to chose a few favorites, although I thought the strongest topic was the collection regarding law and liberty; perhaps that is only due to my intense interest in the area and my belief that a return to the Constitutional protections of life, liberty and property are essential to our continued freedom. And I do strongly recommend that everyone read the article by Scalia (as a judge on the Court of Appeals) and the brilliant critique and reply by Ricahard Epstein. For some added flavor, some of the other articles include "The Case For US Stategic Independence" (Ted Carpenter), "Myths Of Individualism" (Tom Palmer), "Are Libertarians Anti-Government" (David Boaz), and "Enviro-Capitalism Vs. Enviro-Statism" (Terry Anderson and Donald Leal).

In conclusion, this book is for anyone who cares about the advancement of liberty and wants to sharpen their understanding of the topics which it covers. If you want to understand these ideas, whether to argue for or against them, there is no comparable collection that covers them so succinctly and states them so well by their most ardent proponents. N.B., the book is 460 pages long, not the 250 indicated in the description, and all the material is worthwhile but it is a long read that has to be accomplished gradually.

Growing up, I never questioned whether the government should provide education or old age pensions. When America rebelled against Hillary Clinton's health care initiative, I slowly realized that other government services that I took for granted also began as a political proposal. I asked myself why it may be good for government to control education, but not health care. It was that kind of question that led me to read a whole host of books that ask the same question. The latest being, Libertarianism: A Primer.

In this book, author David Boaz tackles many modern day issues from a Libertarian viewpoint. The main theme of the book is the importance of property rights. Boaz explains that the first property right is the ownership of self. Without ownership of self, the ownership of anything else is meaningless. If you are willing to accept his thesis and read further, you will find that private property is the basis of the free market, and the free market is what makes human freedom possible.

Markets just naturally churn out what we want, because they are rewarded for doing so. An entrepreneur that provides a needed good or service can then provide his family a better life. Whereas the bureaucrat's motivation is to make his position and staff more powerful. His salary won't be tied into the success or failure of any given project. But the entrepreneur must live and die according to our fancy. The entrepreneur may be inept and fail to achieve what we want, but other venture capitalists will take his place until the thing is done right. When the government fouls up some needed service or good, they scream for a budget increase, as if our stinginess is the real culprit for their ineptitude.

Some have argued that Libertarianism is inevitable, because the Internet and technology will render government powerless to control the mechanizations of society. I am not so optimistic. Most people think that the money coming from government is free. They tell me that they couldn't afford education if the government didn't step in and provide it. These are people who live in $100,000 houses, drive $20,000 cars and pay a mountain of taxes. Someday, maybe people will realize that they are paying for these things anyway, until then, the rest of us can enjoy reading books like Libertarianism: A Primer, by David Boaz.

The Libertarian Party has piqued my interest for quite some time. While I read a number of issues of Liberty magazine, I had never read a systematic introduction to the topic. This book provided precisely that. I was pleased with the clear and organized way that Boaz presented the topic to the lay reader. This book gives plenty of food for thought, and provides a springboard for future study of Libertarianism.

Although not a hard-hitting manifesto like Charles Murray's What It Means To Be A Libertarian (one of my favorite books), Libertarianism: A Primer provides an excellent overview of the intellectual development of libertarianism. It's a much more historically oriented book than Murray's, a study of people as much as a study of ideas, from Adam Smith to Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand.

But the ideas are still here, and they are well presented with strong arguments for all of the typical libertarian core issues- downsizing of government, privitization of services, legalization of drugs, open borders, free-market protection of the environment, etc, etc.

I consider myself a libertarian, although I'm still not sure whether I agree with all the mainstays of hardcore libertarianism. This book provides a balanced, moderate approach without coming across as either too conservative or too wild-eyed-and-fringe. Charles Murray's book has more intellectual weight, but I also recommend this book for a deeper understanding of the historical background of truly freedom-oriented politics. 

Left, Right, & Babyboom is a short collections of essays written by people in politics from all sides of the Nolan Chart. This book was composed and edited in 1986, by David Boaz, one of the leaders of the Cato Institute, a Libertarian Think- Tank in Washington, D.C. There are a total of 15 different essays in this 122 page paperback book, and each one is written by a different author.

The basic premise of this book is that the American Political landscape is going to change in the coming years, as the baby boom generation matures. Baby boomers are known for their tendency to be economically conservative (more Republican) and socially liberal (more Democratic). This combination of traits will move politics in a Libertarian direction, in the coming years. Today, the nations politics are more conservative overall. That's mainly due to the fact that there are so many older voters (pre- baby boom generation)who tend to be conservative on most all issues, economic and social.

Some of the ideas presented here are interesting. The writers point out that, prior to the 1970's, political analysts tried to peg everyone as being either liberal, moderate, or conservative. Someone who was conservative on economic issues (against government control of the economy) and liberal on social issues (against government control on personal decisions) was considered to be "inconsistent" in his/her thinking. Likewise, someone who was liberal on economic issues and conservative on social issues was also viewed as inconsistent. If anything, what's really inconsistent is to be conservative on ALL issues, or liberal on ALL issues. In other words, in the past, if you were 100% pro- liberty, or 100% pro- government, you were labeled as unusual in your thinking. Times have changed!

The various contributors of this book agree that politicians has better pay attention to the coming changes in the political landscape. If they ignore these changes, they will likely be replaced by more Libertarian- thinking leaders.