Freedom at Risk

Book excerpt: James L. Buckley may be the only American alive who has held high office in each branch of the federal government as senator of New York, undersecretary of state under Ronald Reagan, and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. His unique understanding of how Washington works equips him to address the intrusive and exponential growth of the federal government in the past forty years. In Freedom at Risk, Buckley’s collected essays, musings, and speeches tell the real story of why government is incapable of managing an economy, and why the transformation of the federal government into a centrally administered welfare state is undermining the critical safeguards that the Founders wrote into the Constitution. Here, in a sober book of perceptive analysis spanning a lifetime in Washington, lies an outline of the steps that must be taken to save constitutional government, if that is still possible.