After slowly and agonizingly making my way through a Gestapo checkpoint — Oops! I mean, an airport, recently — I noticed a book with the Hoppe-like title of “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad” by Fareed Zakaria. The inside cover said the book is about how “too much” democracy can be dustructive of freedom (Duh). So far, so good. But then a red flag was raised (pun intended) when I read the blurbs on the back cover from Henry Kissinger, Peter Jennings, Richard Holbrooke, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
The book, the author of which is a Harvard/Yale educated editor of Newsweek International, does a fairly decent job of discussing a few of the tenets of classical liberalism as well as the freedom-destroying potential of democracy. But then the last chapter, modestly titled “The Way Out,” recommends that we keep all the government we’ve got, even though it’s the result of the kind of excessive domocracy that the rest of the book bemoans. The way out is to model more (if not all) government agencies after — are you ready for this? — The Fed and the SEC! Oh, those Harvard sharpies have got it all figured out!
6:30 pm on June 20, 2003
