Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this book because of the favorable reviews - all five-star ratings. What I found, however, was that the truth regarding the evils of discount banking was being mixed with the polemics of the LaRouche camp. Let me be clear, the LaRouche group does some of the best research in the world as has been conceded by the CIA, but their socialist views and conspiratorial rants are not always supportable. The author does include some competing political and economic views, but ends up discarding these views with anecdotes that fall short of sound analysis. I would be persuaded to have assigned two stars were it not for the sloppy editing. Thomas Jefferson was not the second President of the United States. Cromwell's battle against Charles I was not the "Glorious Revolution," and Lincoln did not free any slaves. Perhaps I am making too much of a trivial thing, but when I see a pattern of errors that I can easily identify, I start to question how many errors are buried in the material that is new to me. To add insult to injury, there are spelling errors in some of the web links that make it difficult to audit some the author's references. As mentioned above, the core theme - that discount banking is an evil of great magnitude - is spot on and there is a lot of information regarding the extent of that evil that is worthwhile. However, it is untenable to portray free trade as merely a tool of British Imperialism the fact that free trade, like banking, can be abused notwithstanding. Likewise, the advantages of commodity money are too readily discarded in order to support fiat money and crank Keynesian theories. How we can trust politicians with our money system any more than we can the bankers is not clear to me; it seems that we would be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. The author reaches out to former Presidents and Founding Fathers to support this concept but fails to present the whole truth. There is not room in this review to enumerate these defects, but I would caution any reader to proceed with caution, many a conclusion is based on half-truths and shallow analysis culminating in a call for bigger government with fewer controls.