Leviathan (Hoover Institution Press, 2004), the latest book by Hoover fellow Clint Bolick, was awarded the Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing the Literature of Liberty.
For those who have declared the era of big government over, says Bolick, they are dead wrong. In Leviathan, Bolick shows that, although the national government has downsized somewhat since the Reagan era, local government has grown exponentially. This ever-expanding beast, he explains, saps our nation’s productive vitality and threatens us with "grassroots tyranny."
Drawing from his experience as an attorney with the Institute for Justice, Bolick uses illuminating cases from the litigation trenches to show how powerful local government has infringed on freedom of speech, freedom of commerce and enterprise, private property rights, and even the simple right to be left alone. He explains how locally controlled government school systems reflect the values of powerful interest groups and why—despite spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars—they are unable to provide the basics of education.
Bolick ultimately reveals that, although the rules are often rigged in favor of local governments and against ordinary citizens, we can take action to rein in these out-of-control bureaucracies.
Bolick, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is president of and general counsel for the Alliance for School Choice, the nation’s foremost organization advocating school choice programs for economically and otherwise disadvantaged children. He cofounded the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm based in Washington, D.C., that litigates in support of economic liberty, private property rights, school choice, and freedom of speech.
The Lysander Spooner Awards are presented by Laissez Faire Books to honor those who continue to advocate freedom. This honor is awarded monthly to the most important contributions to the literature of liberty, followed by an annual award to the author of the best book on liberty for the year.
Other Hoover fellows who have received a Lysander Spooner Award include Thomas Sowell for his books Applied Economics in January 2004 and Affirmative Action around the World in April 2004 and Tibor Machan for his book Putting Humans First in May 2004.
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, is a public policy research center devoted to advanced study of politics, economics, and political economy—both domestic and foreign—as well as international affairs. With its world-renowned group of scholars and ongoing programs of policy-oriented research, the Hoover Institution puts its accumulated knowledge to work as a prominent contributor to the world marketplace of ideas defining a free society.
