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Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse Hardcover – February 7, 2011

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 78 ratings

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Thought the last financial crisis was scary? Just wait…it’s going to get worse

America is on the brink of financial collapse. Decades of political overpromising and underfunding have created a wave of debt that could swamp our already feeble economy. And the politicians’ favorite tricks—raising taxes, borrowing from foreign governments, and printing more money—will only make it worse. Only one thing might save us: Roll back the government.

In
Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse, Thomas E. Woods, Jr. explains that we may still have a chance to avert total economic disaster—but only by completely changing our understanding of government. With bracing candor, he dissects just how the political class has nearly destroyed America’s economy. In Rollback, you’ll learn:

Why practically everything you’ve been taught about government and the economy is wrong—the product of liberal pro–government propaganda
How the Federal Reserve helps create crises and slows recovery
Why big business is no ally in rolling back government and actually wants and needs big government intervention in the marketplace
How current policies, if unchecked, will lead to the collapse of the dollar
How government policies have driven the skyrocketing costs of health care
Why retirement will be a pipe dream for the next generation
How the coming collapse can be turned to your advantage—and the advantage of all who believe in liberty and limited government

Thanks to decades of politicians playing kick the can down the road, we and our children are facing economic Armageddon. But this crisis could help us see government for what it really is—an institution that has seized our wealth and taught our children to honor it as the source of all progress. The good news is it’s not too late to roll back government—and the opportunity to do so is now.
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Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap


“If Congress and the Administration really wanted to learn how to eliminate the deficit, limit government, and protect liberty they would stop wasting taxpayers’ money on ‘debt commissions’ and instead read
Rollback.”
—The Honorable Ron Paul, Member of Congress

“In
Rollback,, Tom Woods provides a provocative assessment of President Obama’s first two years of economic policy–making, challenging virtually every aspect of the administration’s narrative. While some readers may not be persuaded, all will find Woods’ analysis both interesting and worthy of serious debate.”
—Dr. Jeffrey Miron, Economist, Harvard University, and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute

“Tom Woods takes an honest (and methodically cited) look at the record of big government: skyrocketing health–care costs, an out-of-control military, moral hazard in the markets, and a collapsing dollar. Even better, he offers clever, turn–key solutions that could restore the United States to being the breeding ground of wealth and ingenuity that our immigrant ancestors sought and cherished.
Rollback debunks the popular rhetoric of politicians, the media, and academia. Without a hint of partisanship—taking on Republicans and Democrats alike—Woods has shown how misguided policies have set us up to be the first generation in memory to pass along lower standards of health, wealth, and opportunity to our children. If you are confused about how our once-mighty country has fallen so far, so fast, then Rollback is a good place to find your answer.”
—Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital and host of The Peter Schiff Show

“In
Rollback, economic historian Tom Woods proves that the true culprit for our financial woes is a government that thinks it can right any wrong, regulate any activity, and tax any event; and a public that continues to accept the assault on its natural liberties in the name of safety. Woods demonstrates with brutal clarity the critical and immediate need to reject the myth that the government can protect us and to repeal the institutions it has created to do so.”
—Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Senior Judicial Analyst, FOX News

From the Back Cover


?If Congress and the Administration really wanted to learn how to eliminate the deficit, limit government, and protect liberty they would stop wasting taxpayers money on ?debt commissions and instead read
Rollback.
?The Honorable Ron Paul, Member of Congress

?In
Rollback,, Tom Woods provides a provocative assessment of President Obama s first two years of economic policy?making, challenging virtually every aspect of the administration s narrative. While some readers may not be persuaded, all will find Woods analysis both interesting and worthy of serious debate.
?Dr. Jeffrey Miron, Economist, Harvard University, and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute

?Tom Woods takes an honest (and methodically cited) look at the record of big government: skyrocketing health?care costs, an out-of-control military, moral hazard in the markets, and a collapsing dollar. Even better, he offers clever, turn?key solutions that could restore the United States to being the breeding ground of wealth and ingenuity that our immigrant ancestors sought and cherished.
Rollback debunks the popular rhetoric of politicians, the media, and academia. Without a hint of partisanship?taking on Republicans and Democrats alike?Woods has shown how misguided policies have set us up to be the first generation in memory to pass along lower standards of health, wealth, and opportunity to our children. If you are confused about how our once-mighty country has fallen so far, so fast, then Rollback is a good place to find your answer.
?Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital and host of The Peter Schiff Show

?In
Rollback, economic historian Tom Woods proves that the true culprit for our financial woes is a government that thinks it can right any wrong, regulate any activity, and tax any event; and a public that continues to accept the assault on its natural liberties in the name of safety. Woods demonstrates with brutal clarity the critical and immediate need to reject the myth that the government can protect us and to repeal the institutions it has created to do so.
?Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Senior Judicial Analyst, FOX News

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Regnery Publishing; First Edition (February 7, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1596981415
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1596981416
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 78 ratings

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Thomas E. Woods
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Thomas E. Woods, Jr., was educated at Harvard and Columbia University (where he received his PhD), and was honored with the Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award in Vienna in 2019. Woods is the New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, which in turn have been translated into over a dozen languages, and his book The Church and the Market won the first prize in the Templeton Enterprise Awards.

Woods has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, FOX News, FOX Business, C-SPAN, and other outlets, produced his own program for EWTN, and he is the host of The Tom Woods Show. He was a creator of the self-taught, K-12 Ron Paul homeschool curriculum. He lives in central Florida with his wife and five daughters.

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Customers find the book's content scholarly and well-researched. They describe it as an excellent, important read for our generation. The writing style is concise and easy to understand, with a summary of the Libertarian argument that is concise and easy to follow.

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14 customers mention "Scholarly content"14 positive0 negative

Customers find the book's content scholarly, well-researched, and interesting. They appreciate the factual information and figures presented in the chapters. The arguments are well-cited, making the book a must-have for armchair pundits and educators.

"...This book is packed with information, and I would highly recommend it." Read more

"...Firstly, he is critical of defense expenditures. Admittedly, these are substantial, but the US must be in a position to take actions such as to..." Read more

"...This book is well-written, concise and well researched. Tom Woods (a Catholic, "ex"-conservative) has done a fine job...." Read more

"...Definitely a downer to read. Overall a decent collection of data and opinions that comes to the conclusion that we all know the problem..." Read more

12 customers mention "Readability"12 positive0 negative

Customers find the book easy to read and consider it an important work of our generation. They say it's a must-read for saving the next generation.

"This is a must read for anyone concerned about the current political and economic climate...." Read more

"Loved this book. Found it hard to put down...." Read more

"A must read, especially for anyone who thinks we need more government to solve our problems, and for those who don't realize hat most of our..." Read more

"I got this book some time ago. This is a book that everyone should read...." Read more

7 customers mention "Writing style"7 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's writing style. They find it concise, well-written, and easy to read. The chapter provides a succinct summary of the Libertarian argument. It is under 200 pages in an easy-to-digest format that any layman can digest. Readers are given proactive steps they can take now to prepare for the inevitable.

"Tom Woods' "Rollback" is an excellent summary of the Libertarian argument for cutting the size and scope of the federal government...." Read more

"...Chapter 1 is 16 pages discussing "Is it already too late?" This chapter is succinct and full of facts and figures that show the magnitude of our..." Read more

"Tom woods is a brilliant writer, historian, and teacher. I read this and my common sense sensors were reading a strong signal...." Read more

"...It gives the reader some proactive steps he or she may take now to prepare for the inevitable coming of financial collapse in America...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2011
    Tom Woods did an excellent job of pinpointing and explaining how we got into the financial mess we are in today. He talks about a government that takes credit for the good times, when in fact, they never should, because it's the private sector that causes the growth in an economy. And, in the bad times, they shuffle the blame which is really on their own backs with the programs & social ills that they themselves brought on. The massive amount of money printing and conterfeiting by the Federal Reserve (which never was a government entity, just a private group of independent bankers) has created a steady monetary devaluation of our dollar throughout the decades. The Federal Reserve created the bubbles. However, as a nation we improved and grew economically in spite of what they were doing. I daresay America would be much, much more wealthy (perhaps like Switzerland) if our dollar was worth 100%, instead of 5% of what it's worth. Unfortunately, when NAFTA & GATT treaties were signed, most of our manufacturing jobs left the country, and along with that, a massive decline in our economy, exacerbated by the false housing bubble created by the Federal Reserve with low interest rates, in combination with a complicit government that passsed regulations on banks to make them loan, and in combination with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, State Street, and other big banks that packaged the derivative scams and were deemed "too big to fail". It was a fraud perpetrated on our country, and to date, noone has gone to jail. In addition to all the shenanigans that have been pulled, we have clear and real deficits which have to include the future funding of Social Security and Medicare programs. If you add those into our current trillions of debt, you get $111 trillion in total debt. This is clearly unsustainable. But, Tom Woods tackles all facets of government spending and what we can do to rollback the various programs to get out of this mess. There are answers he says, but we are fastw running out of time. This book is packed with information, and I would highly recommend it.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2011
    Dr. Thomas Woods has reason to be concerned. Like any honest person, he is perfectly capable of looking at the financial future of the US government and can see that it will default. This is actually not a debatable point. The total present and future obligations of the government exceed the size of the US economy so no fix is possible. No amount of "taxing the rich" or "100 million dollar budget cuts" or "freezing of the budget" will have any effect. The simple fact is that the US government will default, and the only question remaining is, how will it do so? Woods urges us in his latest book to consider a radical possibility: we allow the government to default on its obligations now to limit the pain that will come later. There will be pain, no question about it. But if we allowed ourselves to repeal big government now, we would be much better off compared to delaying the inevitable with a policy of inflation, tax increases, and gradual benefit cuts. Unfortunately, as Wood acknowledges, the latter path is far more likely, but in the words of Rohm Emmanuel, we should not let a good crisis go to waste. So let's follow Woods and see where his thinking leads.

    Woods is not proposing a "program" in this book to "fix" government. It is broken, and the sooner we recognize that fact the better. The first portion of the book is spent dismissing the fairy tales we have all been taught in school: government ended poverty, deregulation "caused" the S&L crisis, and our current "Great Recession," regulation creates a safer and stronger economy. None of these points is even remotely close to true and the cognitive dissonance expressed by people who believe such nonsense is difficult to grasp. The fact is that government interventions in the economy everywhere and always misdirect resources. They promote waste and, when it comes to managing the money supply, create depressions, which is what we used to call the type of economic crisis we are currently experiencing. Regulators have been woefully ineffective in preventing fraud (Bernie Madoff, for example, was first exposed not by the SEC, but by a competitor!) and giving them more power is unlikely to produce different results. Woods is particularly critical of the policies of the Obama regime. He rightly notes that the "stimulus" package prolonged our recession and made unemployment worse, and the health care bill will increase costs without fixing most of the problems with our medical system. (In the process of detailing the problems with the bill, Woods incidentally does readers the good service of critically analyzing the claims that often circulate among the delusional left that socialized care does a better job of preventing "infant mortality" and a host of other such nonsensical claims. It turns out the claim that some countries, like Switzerland, France, and Belgium, have lower mortality rates is due to the fact that they classify all significantly premature infants as dead, whereas in the US any sign of life leads to the classification of living. When you correct for the differences in reporting, it turns out that these, and other indicators of greater health in socialized countries, collapses.) Finally, Woods notes that much of the rest of the Obama policies (cap and trade for example) while not yet implemented, will have similar dilatory effects on citizens of this country, most especially the poor and middle class.

    So what is to be done? Despite the fact that surveys show Americans distrust government, Woods notes that most Americans put far too much trust in government. They honestly believe regulation "works" and that government can truly legislate the creation of wealth. And poll after poll shows they do not want to face the hard choices of where to cut. Indeed, the only area of the budget citizens want to cut is foreign aid. But that makes up less than 1% of the budget. What we need, Woods argues, is to put everything on the table. And for so called conservative readers, that means starting with the military, the very example of big government that few people want to address. But military spending is incredibly wasteful. Because of the way government pays for new developments, companies have an incentive to understate both what is possible and costs. And once a project is underway, companies spread work around to several states and locations so congress will not have an incentive to kill significantly over budget projects that give the military no net benefit. The so called stealth F-22 is a prime example. Over 356 million dollars, per plane, was spent. And the result? The US military got several F-22s that have no real strategic benefit. But the costs of military spending go deeper than just the face costs of waste. This is because military appropriations cut into the supply of research and development resources that could have been more effectively used in the private economy. Even the cost of basic tools is increased by military appropriations. And by some estimates, these hidden costs actually exceed the already enormous military expenses.

    But it hardly stops with the military. Government needs to end its silly drug war, which Woods rightly characterizes as the biggest promoter of police corruption in the modern world. We need to end our redistribution programs, most of which cost over $5 for every $1 that goes to the "poor." (And it needs hardly be added that in many cases the "poor" are the last ones to receive such funding anyway.) We need to end programs like Medicare and Social Security which are on autopilot with their spending. Woods proposes a couple of ways to do this, but make no mistake, there will be severe consequences for many people when this happens. The problem is, it will happen regardless, and as this book points out, putting off the default till the future will not help.

    In the final analysis, we will see the end of big government in our lifetime. The only question is, will we see it as a result of rollback now, or will we see it as part of a general collapse sometime in the next 20 years. To ask the question, of course, is to answer it. Americans are not well educated enough, and politicians are not honest enough, to face the problem squarely in the face now. So people in Wood's generation, myself among them, will live through a collapse the likes of which have not been seen since Germany in the 1920s. Let us hope we can escape the consequences that followed, but anyone familiar with modern politics in the US should not hold on to a lot of hope. In the meantime, read the latest book by Thomas Woods for a look at a better alternative.
    12 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2011
    No matter your political persuasion, you won't agree with everything in this book. But it has a point of view which must be understood. Particularly important is the question of what, ultimately, should be the powers of the Federal government? The Supreme Court, in the partial-birth abortion decision, essentially gave the government a blank check to legislate on anything and everything, under the theory that ANYTHING affects interstate commerce, which Art. I, section 8, gives Congress the power to regulate. And, regulate it does -- mostly to ill effect, as Woods makes abundantly clear.

    There are two topics on which I think Woods is in error. Firstly, he is critical of defense expenditures. Admittedly, these are substantial, but the US must be in a position to take actions such as to deny bomb-throwers such as al Qaeda safe havens in places like Afghanistan. And much of the money spent is in efforts to reduce the risks to military personnel -- which is a high tech effort where the costs of bleeding edge technology and the risks of developing it are substantial and more than a typical defense contractor can take. I will not take issue with the idea of spending American dollars to save American lives.

    Secondly, he proposes "nullification" -- a procedure to evade Federal law where it appears that such law is oppressive or otherwise silly. Mostly, this can go nowhere: the Constitution specifically states that it, and laws promulgated pursuant to it, are the supreme law of the land. But there is one significant loophole, which as Woods notes is unpluggable: the right to trial by jury. If a jury thinks that a law is wrong, it has an absolute right to render it unenforceable.

    Bottom line: read this book, think about it and discuss it, and then read it again. You will profit by doing so.
    2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Uffe
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, well written, plenty of references and facts to back up his claims.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 21, 2015
    Thomas Woods writes in his usual style - easy to comprehend and joyful reading with the occasional hint of the use of humor in an otherwise very serious book. The book presents the reader with massive amounts of data on the American Government expenditure, and gives a plethora of examples of excesses and fraudulent uses of taxpayer money.

    Rollback is a must read for anyone interested in the american government expenditure on various programmes which are dissected piece by piece in a way only an Austrian could do it.
  • Edouard
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
    Reviewed in France on May 27, 2012
    Si vous parlez un minimum d'anglais (le niveau n'est pas très élevé, ça reste assez accessible) vous DEVEZ acheter ce livre. Tom Woods y explique en détail, avec des arguments à la fois moraux utilitaristes, en quoi à peu près tout ce que fait l'Etat est nuisible. Il décrit notamment au début du livre la situation fiscale des Etats Unis qui est juste catastrophique... Il explique les raisons de la crise de 2008 (les réelles, pas celles anticapitalistes habituelles). Il donne dans le dernier chapitre des solutions. Bref, un livre complet que je recommande chaudement !
  • Daniel Hayes
    4.0 out of 5 stars both otherwise very good.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2015
    Could have wiped off the coffee stain, both otherwise very good.