Insatiable Government (Paperback)

Toward what sort of social system is America moving? If you say it is toward socialism, Garet Garrett wrote in 1950, you leave out the possibility that it may turn into something else. Also, he wrote, You . . . may fail to see clearly what it already has in common with every other kind of totalitarian government we know anything about, namely insatiability. Insatiable government. Thomas Jefferson had famously said government's appetites were unlimited, and tended always to devour the people's freedom. The other founders thought so, and had attempted to put government in a cage. With the Constitution they did, and as long as people agreed on that cage, it held, most of the time. But in the 20th century the thinking of the people changed. Crises happened, government demanded to be let out, and the people let it out. Garrett was a journalist of what is now called the Old Right, the precursors of today's Libertarians, a defender of what he called limited, constitutional government in the republican form. He had been born under a government like that, in 1878. He died in 1954, in the age of the managed economy and the welfare state. In his lifetime had come the progressives, the New Deal and two world wars. Government had expanded insatiably. Insatiable Government is a collection of Garrett's writing over a 28-year period focused on his bedrock idea of the self-reliant individual, and government's penchant for unrestrained growth. Insatiable Government, edited by Bruce Ramsey, joins several other Garet Garrett books published by Caxton Press, including Ex America, Salvos Against the New Deal and Defend America First.