Politics is a lagging indicator of social-cultural trends. Politics doesn’t lead change; it chases it, incompetently and long after the underlying reality is impossible to deny. This is why it makes no sense to put faith in politics. By the time politics catches up, the rest of the world has moved on.
That said, I’ve just finished what might be the finest book ever written by a sitting member of the US Senate. It is daring. It is intellectually serious. It displays mastery of the subject matter. It makes courageous and counterintuitive claims, such as the need for across-the-board cuts in all spending, including military spending and middle-class welfare, by raising the retirement age. It takes on taboo subjects like the war on terror to call for normalcy and peace.
It is not a perfect book, and all political books have to be graded on a curve. But in all, it represents a fundamental and thoroughly coherent alternative to politics as we know it and have known it for half a century. Despite my best effort to view this as another political tract, I found the book invigorating and even thrilling in ways I had not expected.
The book is The Tea Party Goes to Washington by Sen. Rand Paul. It is his first book since he won the Kentucky race for US Senate, running as a Republican and delivering a crushing blow to his opponent despite amazing smears by the media and very little in the way of support from the GOP itself.
Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/dailyreckoning/~3/gbV_FKqC02k/#ixzz23q1tbnFd
