Before you get bogged down with another year's worth of reading material, here's a quick look back at some of the best books of 1996.
In a book called Backfire, ABC News correspondent Bob Zelnick reported that Americans of all shades and stripes "disapprove of any sort of officially sanctioned race discrimination." In spite of this overwhelming opposition, however, affirmative action remains "one of the most pervasive and powerful of government social policies, denying Americans jobs, career and educational opportunities, even handicapping their ability to bid on government contracts unless they fit into one of the preferred racial or ethic categories." Zelnick warned that affirmative action "is likely to become an even more searing and divisive issue in the decades ahead."
In The End of Welfare, Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute argued that "traditional liberal welfare reform will not work. Yet another job-training program will be no more successful than the 163 we already have. More child care will not address the underlying problems of the welfare system." Conservative welfare reform will not work either, he insisted. "The ability to fine-tune moral and spiritual values is well beyond the capability of government," Tanner concluded. "It is better simply to get government out of the way."
Frightening America's Elderly, by Thomas DiLorenzo of the Capital Research Center, showed how the seniors lobby promotes "costly and inefficient government programs, mandates, and regulations" and blocks reform efforts. "Reform-minded policy-makers in the U.S. face powerful political opposition from the seniors lobby," DiLorenzo reported. "These special interests have found it advantageous to organize themselves as tax-exempt, tax-deductible -- and, increasingly, taxpayer-funded -- nonprofit organizations," he observed. "They devote enormous resources to fending off any efforts to fundamentally reform Social Security, Medicare, and other government programs. Ignoring the consequences to future retirees, they seek to convince seniors and the public that these programs are financially sound and that any problems can be fixed by minor adjustments and tax increases."
A Few Reasonable Words, a posthumously published collection of the writings of Henry Regnery, featured the acclaimed conservative publisher's explanation of the liberal's fascination with government power: "With public power, the liberal believes, anything is possible: the age-old problem of race relations can be solved by forcibly integrating schools and neighborhoods, the problem of poverty by a government program, of ignorance by requiring everyone to go to school, of health by socialized medicine. Even the secondary differences between the sexes can seemingly be abolished by government action." Regnery reminded us that such false premises lead predictably to false conclusions: "The liberal begins with the premise of the innate goodness of man and his ultimate perfectibility, all human experience notwithstanding, and finds himself, unwittingly, defending a system of government which engages in mass terror and slave labor camps, and depends for its very existence on a vast system of secret police."
