David Gordon has a well deserved repuation as a first-rate reviewer of books. Here he is on Charles Murray's sweeping plan to replace the U.S. welfare system, In Our Hands, just out from AEI.

An excerpt shows the unfavorable gist of Gordon's review.

Murray rejects the libertarian approach because it is unacceptable to the American public. Are we then to regard his guaranteed income plan as a compromise with political reality? Unfortunately for this suggestion, Murray also thinks that his own plan exceeds the bounds of political possibility: "The ladder I am describing to you would work if it existed, but today's American politicians will not build it. I must ask you to suspend belief and play along." (p.xv) He cannot then imagine himself a Milton Friedman and say, e.g., "Ideally government should play no role in education. But the public will not accept this. Instead, educational vouchers are the closest to the free market that we can in practice attain." Friedman thought that his proposals were realistic; and however much one may disagree with them — would not vouchers lead to more government control, rather than less? — one can grant that he had a case worth presenting. Not so Murray — what is the point of a detailed account of an inferior plan that cannot be realized?