Former Acton research fellow Jay Richards has another bestseller, as of last night–Infiltrated: How to Stop the Insiders and Activists Who are Exploiting the Financial Crisis to Control Our Lives and Our Fortunes.
IF you follow free market writers closely, you known that government interventions in the financial markets, rather than too much economic freedom, fueled the housing bubble and paved the way to the subsequent housing collapse and financial crisis. Infiltrated deftly summarizes this, but it’s in two other areas where the author, former Acton research fellow Jay Richards, offers fresh insight.
The first is the way he explains how activists and politicians have used the financial crisis to double down on the same big-government hyper-regulatory strategies that got us into the financial crisis in the first place. As Jay explains, the misleadingly named “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act,” which neither reforms Wall Street nor protects consumers, is mostly just more of the misguided medicine that contributed to the crisis in the first place.
The second valuable feature of the book is its often novel-like descriptions of the characters and tactics that led from small beginnings to the Leviathan creature that is Dodd-Frank. Understanding the opposition–their strategies and appeal, their cynicisms and idealism–is crucial to mounting a successful counteroffensive.
The book explains all of this with the sort of accessible, engaging prose that characterized Richards’ previous bestseller, Indivisible, and lays out a practical blueprint for a counteroffensive.
“Richards brings a sharp analytical mind and a passion for justice to bear on the financial crisis and its aftermath.” –Arthur C. Brooks, President, American Enterprise Institute
“If you want to know why the popular wisdom about the causes and effects of the financial crisis is mosty wrong, and how such myths will help faciliatae similar crises in the future, Jay Richards’s Infiltrated is an eye=opener.” –Samuel Gregg, author of Becoming Europe and Tea Party Catholic.
