James Bovard
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James Bovard (born 1956) is a bestselling libertarian author and lecturer, whose political commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, and eight other books. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, The American Conservative, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.
Critical Acclaim
The Wall Street Journal called Bovard "the roving inspector general of the modern state." Washington Post columnist George Will called him a "one-man truth squad." His 1994 book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty received the Free Press Association's Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism and Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner Award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association.
Criticism
Bovard's writings have been publicly denounced by the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, multiple Commissioners of the Internal Revenue Service, and the chair of Congressional Black Caucus.[1][2]
Bibliography
- Fair Trade Fraud: How Congress Pillages the Consumer and Decimates American Competitiveness. Palgrave Macmillan. 1992. ISBN 0312083440.
- Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. Palgrave Macmillan. 1995. ISBN 0-312-12333-7.
- (1996) Shakedown
- Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen. Palgrave Macmillan. 2000. ISBN 0-312-22967-4.
- Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years. Palgrave Macmillan. 2001. ISBN 0-312-24052-X.
- Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil. Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. ISBN 1-4039-6682-6.
- The Bush Betrayal. Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. ISBN 1-4039-6851-9.
- Attention Deficit Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan. 2006. ISBN 1-4039-7108-0.
Quotations
- "Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." ~ Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994)
- "A democratic government that respects no limits on its power is a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy the rights it was created to protect."[3]