The Big Ripoff

Praise for THE BIG RIPOFF "Politicians like to say that government is on the side of the little guy. But with impressive documentation and persuasive examples, Tim Carney shows how government power and regulation are typically used to assist the powerful." -Paul A. Gigot Editorial Page Editor, the Wall Street Journal "Exposes the dirty little secret of American politics: how big businesses work with statist politicians to diminish the prosperity and freedom of consumers, taxpayers, and entrepreneurs. Carney employs top-notch writing ability, passion for liberty, and understanding of economics to demolish the myth that big business is a foe of big government. Everyone who seeks to understand who really benefits from big government should read this book, as should anyone who still believes that the interventionist state benefits the average person." -Congressman Ron Paul U.S. House of Representatives, 14th District of Texas "Small entrepreneurial businesses are the backbone success of our great economy. They are the biggest job and wealth creators. Is that why big corpocratic behemoth firms collude with big government for a liberal agenda of higher taxes and overregulation that will punish the small risk-takers? Tim Carney's new book describes how anti-business big business can be." -Lawrence Kudlow Host of CNBC's Kudlow & Company "Tim Carney explodes the myth that big business and big government are natural opponents. All too often, as he points out, they're both engaged in a common enterprise: picking your pocket." -Ramesh Ponnuru Senior Editor, National Review "A romping tour de force of the love affair between big business and big government from Teddy Roosevelt and the Robber Barons to Enron and the Kyoto Treaty. Indispensable for understanding how government regulation really works." -Donald Devine Grewcock Professor of Political Science, Bellevue University "Every CEO in America should read this book today, issue new directives to their bureaucrat-appeasing Washington lobbyist tomorrow, and join in the fight for economic liberalization." -Fred L. Smith, Jr. Founder and President, Competitive Enterprise Institute

The Big Rip Off is a tale of an arrogant, slightly retarded man of extreme wealth who is the embodiment of self-inflicted blindness run amuck. This is the man of our times.

This book gives the reader a look at the complicated U.S. health care system through the eyes of a consumer. It explores two key questions: Why, with all of the resources that have been devoted to solving the health care crisis, does the situation continue to deteriorate? And, what, exactly, could be done differently this time to turn the situation around? The author examines obstacles that have stood in the way of health care reform in the past - including politics, government red tape, profit-driven providers, moneyed lobbyists and special interest groups and even, our own consumer "entitlement mentality" - and challenges the reader to envision a scenario in which innovation in health care might be possible. The author argues that consumers are the key to forward progress on health care: we'll only see consumer-driven solutions when enough people demand them. This book is a challenge to consumers to speak up and hold our leaders in the medical community, the government and corporate America accountable for developing solutions that work for us. Susan M. Finley is a small business owner and marketing strategist. She began her career as a bank product manager, and in 1994 co-founded Michaelson Kelbick Partners Inc. (MKP), a firm specializing in marketing and communications for the financial services industry. Over the course of a decade, the agency managed marketing communications for some of the largest bank mergers in recent history. In 2003, she left MKP (now renamed mkp communications, inc.). Her knowledge and understanding of the complicated U.S. health care financing system comes from a three-year research and consulting project, started in the hopes of serving as a catalyst for consumer-driven changes in health care. She lives in North Carolina, where she and her husband have recently founded Finley and Finley, LLC, to continue their research on potential avenues for innovation in the health care and financial services industries.

Cronyism is a serious problem in the United States, but unfortunately it is still not very well understood. In this new essay, Jay Cost explains what it is, and why we should be so worried about it. By mingling private and public interests, cronyism costs us hundreds of billions of dollars per year and threatens to transform our republic into an oligarchy, where the rich dominate the middle class. Worse, modern cronyism has become embedded into the laws themselves, so politicians in Washington assume that such corruption is just the way things should be. To confront the dangers of cronyism, reformers need to think outside the box, paying special attention to how the political process functions.

Spaghetti Westerns--mostly produced in Italy or by Italians but made throughout Europe--were bleaker, rougher, grittier imitations of Hollywood Westerns, focusing on heroes only slightly less evil than the villains. After a main filmography covering 558 Spaghetti Westerns, another section provides filmographies of personnel--actors and actresses, directors, musical composers, scriptwriters, cinematographers. Appendices provide lists of the popular Django films and the Sartana films, a listing of U.S.-made Spaghetti Western lookalikes, top ten and twenty lists and a list of the genre's worst.

Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, discusses the state of government and the depths of its political corruption.