Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century

"We are slaves. All of us," writes Wyoming superlawyer Gerry Spence with his trademark exuberance. "The New Master is an entanglement of megacorporations on the one hand and an omnipresent national government on the other, each stuck to the other like a pair of copulating dogs, each unable to move without dragging the other behind it, each dependent upon the other, hating the other, but welded to the other in a dissolute enterprise."

This decidedly offbeat manifesto will make Spence--who comes across as a left-leaning Ross Perot on steroids--friends and enemies at every point along the political spectrum. Among his tamer suggestions are a call to criminalize campaign contributions, forced voting for all citizens, and the drafting of judges for temporary assignment from a pool of trial lawyers. In case these ideas don't go far enough, Spence also wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. Liberal populists will cheer Give Me Liberty! for its unremitting audacity; conservatives will chafe at Spence's fundamental radicalism. --John J. Miller