Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Page 91: "In 2006, I helped set up a hedge fund specifically designed to short subprime mortgages." ... "I sent notes to those in my database whom I thought might be interested in profiting from a collapse in the housing market." Page 298: "My investment strategy has been about how to profit from the crash of the U.S. economy." Those sentences basically describe everything Peter Schiff stands for. He wants to make millions of dollars off of people losing their homes, to pay almost no taxes on the loot, and then get fawning praise for doing so. If you want to read a book by someone with that mindset then this one is perfect for you. Page 63: "A private insurer would charge premiums based on risk---someone with a stable employment history would pay lower premiums than someone who keeps losing their job." That is Schiff's brilliant plan of "privatized unemployment insurance." Basically if you need unemployment insurance you cannot pay the premiums because the price will be too high and you need the money for required expenditures. That is especially true if Schiff gets his wish of abolishing the minimum wage. Most of the people who have stable employment will not see the need to pay premiums for something they think they won't need, so there will be little money to lower the premiums of those with low income who would need the service. This seems obvious, but since the author only believes in government failure and denies the existence of market failures, he simply cannot understand this, or the much more likely explanation is that he doesn't care. Page 68: "If I calculate an unskilled worker in a certain job would be worth six dollars an hour to me, but the minimum wage is $7.25, I just won't hire him." Only three pages later he says "So, you could easily be paying a few thousand dollars a year just in gas to get to work." Think about the meaning of those two sentences and the fact that they are so close together. Schiff wants you to work for him and basically declares that you are not worth the price of gas that you are required to pay to drive there. On page 132 he talks about privatizing the highway system. His plan is to have them funded entirely by tolls and says "if drivers aren't willing to pay the price for a road, that's a signal that the road is not worth the cost." I am convinced that if a "Libertarian" was president in the 1950s, then America's interstate highway system wouldn't exist, because that vital infrastructure was funded through taxation and that is intolerable to them. Luckily we didn't have a Libertarian in the White House during the 1960s either, because if we did then NASA would not have received the government funding needed to put the first man on the moon. If Wall Street could have been convinced that the moon had a core made out of solid gold or had oil reserves for the taking then maybe they could have funded such the project. Of course, that is not the case. Human progress and national pride are not considered a rate of return worth investing in. On page 201 he claims that "Government creates public schools because politicians don't trust parents to provide for ther own children's education." That is one of the silliest conspiracy theories I have ever heard. On pages 206 and 210 he actually claims that doctors would treat poor patients "as a matter of charity," but they don't because of Medicaid. Therefore, abolish Medicaid and problem solved. After reading that I started laughing even though there is nothing funny about it. Page 216: "ObamaCare imposes even more costly mandates on the insurance industry. Most important, the bill prohibits insurers from discriminating against customers due to age, health, or preexisting conditions." Outrageous!!! Page 206: "Inequality in health care is no more a crime than inequality in transportation, shelter, food, or clothing." Page 216: "So government is the main reason preexisting conditions are such a main problem." The message I have gotten is that if you (or your children) develop cancer and can't pay for treatment because your not a business owner or have not speculated on stocks or currency to make tons of money then you can basically go die in a ditch. If you want to read a book that will open your eyes to the health care industry then read Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans by Wendell Potter. The book is written by a person who worked at CIGNA while they refused to pay for treatment that would have saved the life of a young girl, while the CEO paid himself millions of dollars. The company only showed phoney remorse for this because the story made the newspapers after the girl's death. The only thing that scares a CEO is bad press resulting in lower sales. Common deceny has no place in such decisions. I commend Mr. Potter for leaving the company and then exposing how the industry works. Page 252: "The mind-set behind modern American environmentalism is often simply an antihuman mind-set." Page 250: "Ironically, had we had fewer regulations, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico likely would have never happened." That one sentence is definitive proof that trying to serve an ideology can make you lose all connection to reality. As far as I am concerned this guy has no credibility. The main lesson of this book is that free market ideologues are just as deluded as any zealous Marxist. Stay away from ideologues. Human society does not exactly fit any ideology or ideals. No person has all the answers but many claim that they do. America is becoming bankrupt, but the author of this book is morally bankrupt.