Rating: 
Summary: A Very Interesting History
Review: What I have never understood is how small the "government is bad" group thinks the federal government should be. To take it to the extreme there would be no federal or state governments and it would be the wild west, every man for himself. I have always taken the view that the American government is an extension of each citizen and can be a force for positive change. Even when I try to look at it from the point of view of many that think there should be no or almost no government, I do not see the massive damage that government is supposed to do. With all this said I was very interested in this authors book and was predisposed to follow his arguments. What I found was a nice argument against the current group of anti government "the true meaning of the founding fathers" non-stop bashing of what the federal government does. Lets face it, there has always been and there probably always will be dislike and distrust of the government, after all the faceless government imposes rules on the average citizen and takes tax money to do so. What this book tries to do is look at the anti government argument and really see if that is what the founding fathers were thinking. I thought it was a very interesting and insightful look at the American history as it relates to the creation of the federal system that we have today. To be fair I was ready to believe the arguments in the book before I read them and I have not done much reading on the founding fathers so my comments here may be skewed. Read the book and make up your own mind.
Rating:
Summary: A Very Interesting History
Review: What I have never understood is how small the "government is bad" group thinks the federal government should be. To take it to the extreme there would be no federal or state governments and it would be the wild west, every man for himself. I have always taken the view that the American government is an extension of each citizen and can be a force for positive change. Even when I try to look at it from the point of view of many that think there should be no or almost no government, I do not see the massive damage that government is supposed to do. With all this said I was very interested in this authors book and was predisposed to follow his arguments. What I found was a nice argument against the current group of anti government "the true meaning of the founding fathers" non-stop bashing of what the federal government does. Lets face it, there has always been and there probably always will be dislike and distrust of the government, after all the faceless government imposes rules on the average citizen and takes tax money to do so. What this book tries to do is look at the anti government argument and really see if that is what the founding fathers were thinking. I thought it was a very interesting and insightful look at the American history as it relates to the creation of the federal system that we have today. To be fair I was ready to believe the arguments in the book before I read them and I have not done much reading on the founding fathers so my comments here may be skewed. Read the book and make up your own mind.
Rating: 
Summary: A thoroughly engaging book that seems to have been mis-read
Review: When Garry Wills closes his book with the idea that government is a necessary good, some reviewers seem to have made the assumption that he is claiming then, that bigger goverment necessarily yields greater good. Nowhere does he make such a claim. In fact, his focus is not the scope of government or, for the most part, specifics of government. His main focus is two-fold: both the fact that anti-government sentiment has long been present in our nation, and the way in which its proponents have tried to see that sentiment written into our founding documents. His harsh words are not for those who are skeptical of the government but for those intellectualls who he feels have been sloppy in their attempts to establish a constitutional basis for such skepticism. If we were to assume that Wills's reading of the Second Amendment is the correct one, does that mean that it is the wise thing to ban citizens from owning fire-arms? Not necessarily. Is the belief that skepticism was not written into the Constitution a condemnation of skepticism? Certainly not. Though I may disagree with some of Mr. Wills ideas (though not generally with those found in this book,) he is certainly not a state-ist, a Hitler apologist, or a knee-jerk Liberal. The reviews that his book has received certainly show, though, that he has found a political nerve and that we often do look to the founding documents as justification for strongly held beliefs.
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