Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book's ideas are really no different from commercials put on TV by corporations trying to convince you that everyone who is in the corporation is part of a happy family, filled with love, and not a conniving outfit which the government needs to regulate. Let's stipulate that loving your neighbor in general is a great idea. But Arthur Brooks' whole long-standing approach, now on display for years, is all about telling people that somehow we shouldn't look all that carefully into the actual operations of business in the country, and instead concentrate on problems that are harder to pin down in society. Keep busy with that folks, while the business goes on and on unimpeded, no matter what they want to do. His writing shows a deadly shrewd sense of how to appear just-so in terms just enough sops to notions like welfare and human rights, yet all along basically creating a false sense of current society by averting eyes from the essentially coercive takeover of an authentic culture by big business. Asserting religious notions has long been a way keep people away from what one really wants to do, by people who really want to do it, and make money. Love it ain't. Further, the notions of toleration in this country never were based on vaunted religious notions, even when the country was more religious overall that it was today. It was, since the start of the Republic, based on Enlightenment notions that made more clear that civility was a better course than enmity. In fact, an argument can well be made that it is precisely because religious notions have been substituted in current society, that the actual civility of the Founders' vision has been jettisoned. Arthur Brooks' approach is thus part of what is leading people away from that Founding vision.