The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure

by Kevin D. Williamson

In The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome , Kevin Williamson, a National Review Online contributor, makes the bold argument that the United States government is disintegrating—and that it is a good thing!Williamson offers a radical re-envisioning of government, a powerful analysis of why it doesn’t work, and an exploration of the innovative solutions to various social problems that are spontaneously emerging as a result of the failure of politics and government.Critical and compelling, The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure lays out a thoughtful plan for a new system, one based on success stories from around the country, from those who home-school their children to others who have successfully created their own currency.

Genres: Politics, Economics, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Self Help, Political Science

240 pages, ebook

First published May 7, 2013

About the author

Kevin D. Williamson is National Review's roving correspondent. He is the author of The End Is Near and It's Going To Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure, The Dependency Agenda, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, and contributed chapters to The New Leviathan: The State Vs. the Individual in the 21st Century and Future Tense: Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval. When he is not sounding the alarm about fiscal armageddon, he co-hosts the Mad Dogs & Englishmen podcast with fellow National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke.

Williamson began his journalism career at the Bombay-based Indian Express Newspaper Group and spent 15 years in the newspaper business in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. He served as editor-in-chief of three newspapers and was the founding editor of Philadelphia's Bulletin. He is a regulator commentator on Fox News, CNBC, MSNBC, and NPR. His work has appeared in The New York Post, The New York Daily News, Commentary, Academic Questions, and The New Criterion, where he served as theater critic. He is a native of Lubbock, Texas.

Reviews

[Patrick Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nov. 2016 - Very interesting book, especially in light of the lightning fast attack on and firing of this author from his job at The Atlantic, shortly after he was hired there.

Williamson is a journalist and I bought the book after hearing him speak (a year or more before the Atlantic debacle). His talk was not the greatest - he did not seem to really enjoy being there and giving a lecture, at least in the beginning. Happily, he did warm up a bit later. But his approach to issues, his personal commitment to the value of freedom and demonstrating the negatives of bureaucracy and general government controls endeared me, if not the conservative crowd, to him in any case.

Also the title of this book, with it's frightening hyperbole and optimism combined had me very intrigued.

I don't want to spoil the book for those who might check it out, by giving away the "how he reconciles that amazing title" but I will say that he does a very good job of explaining the ideas and referring to so many good authors who have clues, minor and major, about the answer. That is a big benefit of the book. Enjoy his taking some of the greats (but too often little knowns) in economics, philosophy, history and other disciplines and condensing their ideas down to just the right level to explain some massive current problems.

What are the problems he deals with?

1. The growth and size of government and how that differs from and negatively affects personal lives and the reality and prospects of our livelihoods.

2. Just what government really is. Not the civics/government/political science class definition, which is pretty amorphous and clouds people's thinking, but what it REALLY is, and what that means.

3. Social Security, other "entitlements" and the inevitable failure of the Ponzi Scheme that they are.

4. The health care mess and understanding what the way out is.

5. The existing education cartel, how depressing it really is and it's alternative.

6. A glimpse at the beauty of and enduring benefits from voluntary exchanges and private property in contrast to how little time there is left till the whole government system of management collapses.

I really enjoyed most of the book.
Libertarians may feel a bit put-down or "why did he not see the connection and go a bit further" in some parts - I know I felt that way several times.

But conservatives will probably feel VERY stretched on quite a few issues, and I hope they respond accordingly. It would be very good for them and for our country if they did stretch to understand and to internalize the fairly radical libertarian insights which the author took great care in outlining.

Whether leftists pay any attention to this book is an open question. I doubt many will, but they should. There is much truth and good lessons in this book.

I did note that the author's acknowledgements section clued the reader in to the wonderful work and environment the author benefited from at the Institute for Humane Studies. That was very insightful as well as gratifying to me, a fan of the too little known TheIHS.org for many years.

10 Jan. 2019 - updated for clarity and grammar. And 25 July 2019 for some extra intro remarks and upgrading the rating from 3 to 4 stars. 2022-08-15 - a few more fairly minor modifications for clarity.

[David Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite a good book - and probably the closest thing to anarchist literature I will ever say that about. The book isn't subdivided this way, but I felt like it went through roughly three movements.

1. Why politics is bad.
2. How politics is failing.
3. What we can do about it.

The arguments made under heading #1 will seem quite familiar to many. First, much of the world around us is simply too complicated to be planned by a few people on high - the recently resurrected "I, Pencil" (http://youtu.be/IYO3tOqDISE) is invoked several times. If nobody even knows how to make a pencil, how in the world can you possibly expect them to write a working healthcare bill?

Another reason politics is bad is because politics is violence - disobey any government order for long enough, no matter how small, and eventually men with guns will show up at your house and make you comply. This isn't always a bad thing (Hitler was defeated by guns), but anyone asking the government to do anything should keep in mind that they are asking for coercion upon the unwilling. I was surprised by how strongly the analogy was made between "legitimate politics" as we normally understand it today and groups like the Mafia and Taliban who fulfill many of those same roles where they have been/are dominant, and are often accepted as more legitimate by the citizenry than the supposed "government".

So #2 - how is politics failing? We often talk about the financial angle - the welfare states of the West have promised people more money in payments (retirement, healthcare, etc.) than actually exists on the planet. Those payments are not going to be made at the amount promised, or if they are it'll be in inflated money that essentially means the payments are not being made at the amount promised. Second, the products produced by government are failing - Williamson makes frequent reference to cellular phones, which get better year after year, and compares them with a government produced product like education that seems to get worse year after year (even as we spend more and more money on it). And finally the government's ability to exert sufficient controls is being diminished by technology - just today I read about the government ordering some instructions for how to 3D print a gun to be removed from the internet, as if anything long posted can ever be removed from the internet!

So what do we do about all this? As Williamson says we opponents of central planning are often at a disadvantage in conversations for the simple reason that we don't have big elaborate plans to fix society - that's kind of the point, right? We're more concerned with setting up systems that make it possible for people to plan for themselves. But he does make several suggestions - in healthcare, education, and even law enforcement to an extent - to show how we could move to competitive, voluntary, improving and learning systems to the benefit of everyone. And I liked that his solutions, which I will not spoil for you, tended to be incremental, meaning it might be possible to actually implement them. Education is a great example - you could certainly see us moving from "you must attend the public school closest to your home!" to "you may pick a public school" to "here is a voucher for any school" to a totally free system of education. He also gives many examples of places where "traditional government functions" have already been taken over by voluntary institutions (like the Silicon Valley Arbitration Center "court"), which just goes to show that we probably need government less than we think.

A couple more thoughts - scattered throughout the book were many historical stories or facts I didn't know (for example, many towns had a lower homicide rate in their lawless "Wild West" days than they do today with their million dollar police departments). And there were many other fascinating suggestions made that are hard to categorize - for example, he pointed out that the excellent private schools in America are one reason it's so hard to reform the public schools since they provide a place for the wealthy and politically connected (aka - the people who could actually reform the public schools) to shield their own families from public school failures. And I also liked his emphasis that people act out of reasons other than economic self-interest - reputation, for example, is often quite important, and with modern technology we actually have ways to quantify reputation and make it available to interested parties (see the credit-reporting bureaus for one example).

I feel like that was a pretty weak summary of an excellent book - pick it up.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this one very much. As one economist put it, anything that can't go on indefinitely, won't.

[Todd N · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was visiting my parents and flipping channels in the guest room when I saw this author speak on CSPAN-2. I was intrigued by his talk, so I downloaded and read the book on the strength of that. I'm always up for some nutty libertarianism.

The gist of this book is that government will eventually collapse under the weight of its own obligations (social security, pensions, Medicare, Obamacare). But don't worry about this because government will be replaced with a much smaller government and America will become a libertarian paradise. Ni-ice.

The author comes out swinging by defining government on a monopoly on violence. To rile you up further, he lists some of the arms that the Department Of Education (!) has been amassing. Then he suggests that you withhold part of your taxes from the government -- maybe the part that is funding the way, maybe the part that provides subsidies for Monsanto or Archer Midland, or maybe just your property taxes -- and it will invariably end up with some representative of the government with a gun standing at your doorway. And probably really early in the morning.

Then he breaks down the budget as a rough analog of the government's concerns. About 30% goes to military defense and law enforcement (the aforementioned people with guns) and about 60% goes to forcibly redistributing wealth (i.e. Social Security, Medicare, etc.).

This leave about 10% left over for "public works," which is ostensibly the purpose of government.

Totaling up the total obligations of the federal government, the author estimates it as some huge number that I forgot and my Kindle is in the other room. It amounts to roughly all the wealth (cash, investments) held by all Americans right now, excluding property holdings. Then he throws in the total pension obligations for states, counties, and cities and comes up with an even more obscenely mind boggling number that I forgot. (Maybe I read this too quickly.)

To round out the government bad also fire bad vibe of the book, the author then compares government handling of Central Park (bad) with the private consortium that took it over in the 70s (good). Amusingly, he points out that Starbucks has managed to create a public bathroom system where government has failed. (I also noticed that the line for the bathroom is usually longer than the line to get coffee.

The main point he is trying to make is that something as lowly as the cell phone has made a series of amazing leaps from the giant bricky thing that Michael Douglas had in Wall Street to the ubiquitous iPhone. Services provided by the government have not. The reason? People have the ability to say "no" to cell phone companies but are bound by a lame-ass "social contract" to our government.

I'm not being 100% fair to the author because he repudiates some libertarian orthodoxy, like that the free market will fix anything if just allowed to run rampant. He also reminds us that prior to Obamacare (which he calls by it's real, boring name) about 50% of medical spending was done by the government. He wonders why Republicans were all of a sudden so concerned about "socialized medicine."

Oh, I almost forgot about public schools. He makes the hilarious point that private schools perform a vital function in abetting the public school system because it provides a way for the elite to opt out of having to send their kids there. Come to think of it the first story about Obama arriving in Washington was about how his kids will be attending Sidwell Friends. And the poor, who generally have property taxes baked into their rent with none of the tax benefits, tend to pay more for schools while getting the worst of schools.

So until the libertarian paradise comes (assuming that Kurzweil's singularity doesn't get here first) we'll just have to either cower in our gated communities or somehow muddle through while clinging to our gods and guns.

[Russ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kevin Williamson has written a political treatise for the 21st century. Teachers, politicians, law enforcement officers and other government employee should avoid this book. You are rightly portrayed as obstacles to a more inclusive and productive society. The first part of the book lays out a foundation for a better system of government. It is not political in the sense of Republicans, Democrats or even Libertarians. Instead, he recognizes the boundary between a less intrusive government and more involved citizenry. He then takes on government overreach in healthcare, education, law enforcement, etc. He dispels myths along the way like the "Wild Wild West" and the disinterested apolitical government employee. More importantly, he provides reasonable alternatives to our current state of affairs. Also avoid the book if you are looking for a declinist how to manual. I suggest "Enjoy the Decline" instead.

The author leans on community as markets to replace government overreach. While I appreciate his ideas on reforming education and healthcare, I am not convinced that societal pressure is the proper coercive tool.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kevin D. Williamson is, for a Gloomy Gus, rather unfashionably upbeat. I recently read Mark Steyn's "After America" which, while trenchant and darkly funny, was resolutely downbeat about the future of the USA. I liked that Williamson saw a light at the end of the tunnel, citing America's long tradition of mutual aid societies like the Elks and the Masons and help from extended families as a possible way forward when the federal government collapses under its own weight.

Local is always more efficient than federal. If the local council sees that poor unemployed Joe Schmoe is spending his community-provided stipend at the local bar or gambling parlor they can cut him off pronto. Ditto Grandpa Fred or rich Aunt Elva.

What I missed in this book was Williamson's cutting wit, which is always on display in his articles in The National Review. He was a bit too pedantic here for my taste.

Small beer. Give it a read!

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Even if you are not a political/economics geek you should read it for a fresh look at the intersection of politics and economics and what our "choices" will be when the country's overwhelming overspending comes crashing to a halt.

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

My 15 year old daughter said to me the other day that she had read an article online that stated if the minimum wage in the US was raised to $15/hr, there would be far less poverty and a more equal distribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Being cynical by nature, I explained to her that if the Fry Cooks at McDonald's were making $15/hr, a Big Mac would soon cost $9 and this would disproportionately affect the lower income families who might eat out at the chain; the bottom line is, the fat cats will still keep getting richer; not since Henry Ford has anyone seemed to care if employees were being paid enough to consume the goods they were making (just think of the people who actually make iPhones and Nikes).

Reading The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome, it's clear that Kevin D. Williamson shares my daughter's enthusiasm for easy answers: in every area of government that he examines (from Social Security to Education to Law Enforcement), Williamson details the awful state of affairs in each, offers up what these programs should look like, but doesn't explain how to transition from one way of doing things to the other; essentially, he fails to explain how to wrest control from the fat cats who have entrenched power.

I did enjoy quite a bit of the political philosophy in The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome, from the notion that "politics is violence" (just try not paying your taxes and see how long it takes before the men with guns show up at your door) to "the social contract is the only contract that somebody else can sign for you, without your consent, and still be held to be valid -- and a valid expression of your consent at that". And I also enjoyed the fact that Williamson remained bipartisan-- the problems in the US go beyond Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians; the problems are endemic to all of centrally planned politics.

Some bits that jibe with my own beliefs:

(On the impending bankruptcy of the entitlement/welfare state) The US government is, in an important sense, a promise -- a promise that is not going to be kept.

(On public education) With a market that is literally captive, ensured revenue with no meaningful accountability for performance, above-market compensation rates, heavy political protection from emergent competitors, and the biggest lobbying budget in Washington, the public schools have a setup that no robber baron or mafioso would have dared to dream of -- and summers off, to boot.

Some things that bothered me, leading me to wonder at the scholarly level of this book:

The English language has spread throughout the world (it is one of two official national languages of India) not because of unadulterated admiration for Anglo-American culture but because Chinese-speaking, German-speaking, and Hindi-speaking people wish to participate in the global economy, and speaking English makes that a great deal easier. Um, isn't English one of the official languages of India due to a hundred years of British rule in the subcontinent?

Also, Williamson name drops iPhones and Apple and Steve Jobs repeatedly-- was he getting paid for the product placements? He should be, for the amount of times it happens, and it seems out of place in a book that rails against vested interests.

And, several times, Williamson quotes long passages from his source material in which those books quote their source material. Isn't it Writing 101 to only quote primary sources?

I went into this book hoping to learn how the end of business as usual in American politics would be "awesome", but like my daughter's uncritical enthusiasm for a seemingly simple solution to poverty, I think that Williamson's optimism is premature: with no systems suggested to move from a centrally planned government to the series of community-based and grassroots organisations that he proposes to take their place, I fear the result would be chaos; Hobbes' anarchic alternative to the Leviathan that Williamson dismisses out of hand. Awesome.

[Taylodl · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a Libertarian I'm wary of those who play with data to make their point. Mr. Williamson's analysis are trite and quite flimsy. For example he claims the amount owed in entitlements is more than all the material wealth in the world. This is a true statement. He follows up that if a family were to invest 10% of their income at 5% rate of return then they will exceed the amount they would have received in entitlements and they could bequeath it to their heirs. Really? Somehow this investment in production as Mr. Williamson calls it is going to generate MORE wealth in the next forty years in the United States than exists in the entire world at the moment?

We agree on the problem of health care: the consumer never sees the price and is indirectly responsible for paying for it and therefore the market has no opportunity to work. But Mr. Williamson offers no solution: he blames the problems with health care on health insurance and then gets sidetracked on alternate means of providing health insurance to people. He never addresses the root problem of the lack of market dynamics in health care itself, he only engages in a diatribe against health insurance.

Education reform is similarly dealt with. Mr. Williamson never deals with the issue that Americans don't really value education and want to claim to be educated, through credentials, than actually be educated. It's not cool to be smart in America, and that's a cultural concern more so than a political concern. I don't have a solution for this problem either. But I do have anecdotal evidence against his main claim: having been involved in multiple private and public school systems I can without a doubt state the public school systems have been far superior - not without their well-known issues, but better nonetheless.

Finally, nothing is mentioned about the forces at work destroying jobs. Not just outsourcing, but automation too. We can't have a meaningful discussion about political reform without discussing the impacts of the unprecedented loss of jobs that will take place over the next two decades.

So where does that leave us? We have a book touting to be a solution to 21st century problems that's really more fitted to solving mid-twentieth century problems.

[Don Incognito · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting, but relatively disappointing. Kevin Williamson's thoughts on the state of America and the possible future are much more analytical than prescriptive or predictive; that is, his explanation of what politics really is about is much substantive and deep than the ideas he offers on what the future American society, economy and governmental structures will be like after--as he obviously accepts as a given--the American economy and government collapse after going broke.

Very quotable.

The book very obviously speaks from a naturalistic perspective throughout. That is, its analyses and prescriptions for the future operate from the implicit assumption that our world is all there is (or, perhaps, all that Williamson is interested in) and our world has as much of a future as we give it. Since I don't believe this at all, I found the book interesting but hardly inspiring or emotionally resonant (which was already hard enough considering that, as I said, Williamson actually spends relatively little time discussing what the title of the book suggests).

[Frank R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart, funny, and highly recommended reading for everyone.

This book was not what I expected. Williamson explains why politics is a poor provider of health insurance, education, and other public goods, and discusses alternative ways that people can freely associate together to provide those things, especially in light of new information technologies. Essentially, this book is a libertarian manifesto for America's future, after "the end." The only problem is that Williamson gives no suggestion how we get from here to there.

Nonetheless, this is a brilliant enjoyable and insightful book. Conservative in the sense that it recognizes the real limitations of human nature and of political institutions, but progressive in that it provides a vision of a better way to do things.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kevin Williamson's book establishes the failures of the welfare state as we know it, but fully underestimates the way the collapse of the welfare state will play out. His idea that a libertarian smaller state will emerge is totally flawed. Instead an authoritarian dystopia is what is likely to happen with falling standards of living, generations pitted against one another, and perhaps violence between rent-seeking groups fighting over a shrinking pie. There are some interesting policy prescriptions in the book, but they haven't a prayer of being enacted, because the political class will never allow it.

[Daniel Manske · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just reviewed a part of this book related to Medicare and our healthcare system in general. I've copied some pages worth reading, here as well as Facebook since Facebook will probably delete or edit my post:
“CHAPTER 5

Health Care Is a Pencil
The Buddha’s teachings were founded on the awareness of the three impediments of old age, sickness, and death. The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.
—MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ, THE ELEMENTARY PARTICLES

The price of health care is high because there is no price for health care.
Some years ago, I found myself needing a medical procedure at the same time I was considering changing jobs. It was a possibility that I might find myself without health insurance and paying for the procedure out of pocket. In order to calculate how I should modify my plans, I began calling around to various medical practices and inquiring as to the price of the procedure. It was nearly impossible to get an answer other than “Let’s see if your insurance covers it.” I was quite insistent that I needed a price that I could rely upon in the event that I needed to pay out of pocket, a proposition that seemed to universally mystify every medical professional with whom I came in contact. After dozens of phone calls to several medical practices—including some very prestigious ones—the answer was the same: “Talk to the lady in insurance.” When I finally succeeded in getting an estimate from one doctor, the possible price ranged from the low five figures to the low six figures, the higher end of the estimate being more than ten times the lower end. Strange that I can get an exact price on an iPhone, a Honda Civic, or a pizza, but not on something as essential to my well-being as health care.
There are almost no consumer prices in health care. Because there are no prices, there is no price discrimination by consumers, and therefore no pressure to keep prices down to where consumers can pay them. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: One of the reasons that we rely on insurance or government programs to pay medical bills is that the bills are too high for ordinary consumers to pay; one of the reasons that the bills are too high for ordinary consumers to pay is that we rely on insurance and government programs to pay for them.
Health care is a maddening and stupid business, and it is no wonder that Americans collectively hate insurance companies, HMOs, and hospital operators, if not physicians themselves. It is a truly goofy business—half politics (about 50 percent of all U.S. health-care spending was government, even before the PPACA) and half corporate Kafka. I am still shocked that every time I walk into a new doctor’s office, I am given a clipboard and a pencil and old-fashioned paper forms to fill out—cutting-edge, nineteenth-century technology. I can open my gun safe with a thumbprint, carry all of my travel information for the benefit of Homeland Security on my scannable passport, and make a thousand-dollar purchase at the Apple Store without touching a piece of paper (Apple emails receipts), but the guy poking around my insides and prescribing me drugs is using “the same technology as Charles Dickens. Very odd, that. Even more odd when you consider that every medical practice in the country has access to a very high-tech customer-tracking system—the credit-reporting network—but they use information technology to collect money, not to keep track of patients’ records: twenty-first-century technology when looking after their own interests, caveman stuff when looking after yours.
You could make a very long list of what is wrong with the American health-care system, pre- or post-PPACA: Doctors and other specialists are cartelized, there is no transparency in prices, your bills are paid by third parties with economic interests antithetical to your own, interstate barriers inhibit competition between insurance carriers, there is widespread governmental price-fixing, special-interest groups dominate the major government health-care programs, and the whole mess is driving the country toward national insolvency.
American health care is great. Health-care financing is a mess.”

Excerpt From: Kevin D. Williamson. “The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome.” HarperCollins, 2013-05-01. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/us/4Nw7H. Or the Amazon Kindle Version, typically almost 50% less.

A fascinating perspective quite different from our collective narrative.
It has profound implications for our future. We need to find new ways and bring back old ways of dealing with societal issues. Government is not the answer to our problems; it stands in the way of progress by usurping the imaginative, entrepreneurial solutions that blossom organically in the detritus of our past. Government is way too slow to respond, fortunately, to the fast pace of our evolving, accelerating information era. That's why we have relative freedom in the tech arena. Hopefully government will get out of way when better solutions emerge.

March 22, 2014: Update comment from 2013: Unfortunately, Mr. Obama continues to lead the crusade to regulate and has decreed that the Internet is now a utility to be regulated like your phone and electric service. Does anyone seriously think that this is going to improve the service we now get?

[Ari · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm fond of Williamson, but this book disappointed. It largely summarizes standard libertarian talking points., without any particularly deep analysis at any point. I would have hoped in a book-length work the author would engage more thoughtfully with all the obvious points against.

See my highlights for examples and details.

[Paul Bassett · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Review: The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure by Kevin D. Williamson

This book came to my attention when I heard the author being interviewed on the radio. The title intrigued me and he seemed an erudite enough fellow so I was persuaded to purchase his work. I am glad to have learned from the more interesting parts of this book but will have to give it an overall poor rating
.
Let’s begin with what I found to be positive in Mr. Williamson’s effort. His work contains some fascinating facts. For example, he notes that 40 percent of the teachers in the Chicago public schools send their children to private schools. The irony does not escape him as he further remarks that these teachers are “insulating their families from the effects of political policies for which the teachers themselves are in no small part responsible.…” (Kindle loc. 497-8)

Along the same vein Mr. Williamson documents the rapid growth of the Department of Education thusly: “Until 1980, there was no U.S. Department of Education at all, but by the turn of the century, there was a Department of Education with armed tactical squads and a paramilitary arsenal, busting down doors in predawn raids.” (Kindle loc. 607-9) And when Williamson asks himself why educators need to be armed like gangsters, his conclusion is pointed and obvious: because they are gangsters. And that is a frightful observation, to be sure.

And his observation that “the University of Texas could repeal tuition if only it would make more intelligent use of its labor resources”, is wonderful in its Wizard of Oz, don’t look at the man behind the screen manner.

I found Williamson’s definition of public goods – those things that properly exist in the purview of our Federal government – to be helpful. The two characteristics of a public good – that they are “nonexcludable” and “nonrivalrous” are important as guidelines to apply whenever your local politician wants to offer a service from the government.

Likewise, Williamson’s analysis of the development of the British monarchy from its origins was interesting. His introduction of the economic principle of the “tragedy of the commons” and its impact upon our system of government is trenchant. And his description of how mutual aid societies were so effective in taking care of the less fortunate without the need for help from outsiders is very good. Those ideas alone make the book a worthy read.

But not all of Mr. Williamson’s efforts seem as worthy. For example, it seems that he never answers the question posed by his title: why will the end be great? So we are just left to wonder when the end will come and to suppose that it will be great. That seemed a little unsatisfying to this reader.

The fundamental problem Williamson faces is his schizophrenic world view. For example, he spends pages chronicling the ills of the current Social Security system and then proposes a solution that looks remarkably to Social Security which he calls“the Mortgage”. I will leave the details to the discovery of the reader but suffice it to say that, just like Social Security today, it is a wealth transfer program based on Williamson’s idea of what people “ought” to do. But what he fails to address is how exactly the administrators of the trust set up by “the Mortgage” would be more beneificent or more ethical than the crop of current SS administrators. Apparently he hopes that politicians and beaucrats twenty or thirty years into the future will be morally superior to the current generation. But, as they say, hope is not a strategy.

Another shortcoming is Williamson’s neglect of the Judeo-Christian influences which, in the early days of the republic, served to alleviate many of the problems we now face. This is apparent in the author’s badly informed misuse of Paul’s letter to the Romans wherein he states this:
“St. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, wrote that “the law is written on our hearts”—but a lot of good it does us there! When it comes to organizing community life, relying upon that which exists only in our heads and our hearts is futile.” (Kindle loc. 962-4)

But the fact is that the “law written on our hearts” is what provides the consensus in our society which Williamson needs to make his point! When Williamson bemoans the fact that thievery exists in government he can only gain agreement if his readers believe “Thou shalt not steal” is a norm. The irony of his worldview then, is that he mocks the very thing that makes it possible for him to make his point. That seems to me to be very nearly a fatal flaw.

In sum, Kevin Williamson has done an admirable job of continuing the conversation about the calamaties that may well lie ahead. He does not, however, as his title promises, give the reader any indication why the aftermath of these calamities will be “awesome”.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, the good. Kevin D. Williamson has written an accessible, insightful book on politics and economics and how if we could free the latter from the former we would all be better off.

He starts by laying out the basic argument that government is a form of coercion hardly different from a mafia-style protection racket and that the so-called "social contract" is one of the only binding contracts for which consent is not required. He adeptly explains why this form of providing goods and services is inefficient, counter-productive, and often morally indefensible.

He convincingly shows that the entitlement structure of the United States is unsustainable and that we are heading for an inevitable default, and that this default will likely come at the expense of citizens who were promised government services and not our international creditors.

He then identifies several areas of government services that could be replaced by private, consensual transactions and argues that the transition to the free market will lead to higher quality and cheaper prices. He divides the later chapters between Social Security, health care, education, public safety, and the legal system. Each chapter highlights how the capture of these goods and services by government has prevented them from responding to the actual demands of the consumer.

The chapter on education was the most compelling. Why is our education system essentially unchanged from the 19th century Prussian modal on which it was based? Why does public education treat students like products to be assembled rather than customers with diverse needs? He argues that the reason nothing has changed is that the people against change have more to lose than those in a position to force political change who typically send their kids to private schools. He proposes choice and competition through something like vouchers, which is nothing new, but presents an inspiring picture of what education could look like if allowed to evolve to meet the real needs of a consumer base with diverse needs and aspirations.

My main criticism of the book has been stated by other reviewers and that is that he doesn't directly answer the question of "How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure." Most poor countries are pretty grim places where people have even less choice and less power and repressive governments and unfair economic privilege are even more common. One can certainly hope that as the country is unable to fulfill its obligations that the private sector will be allowed to step up and fill the vacuum, but Williamson does not give us any reasons to believe that the vacuum will not be filled by even more autocratic, coercive institutions. In short, the case for conservative pessimism was by no means refuted.

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kevin Williamson is one of my favorite bloggers on the National Review Online site. He focuses on one of my main worries--the horrible expanding deficit--and provides useful facts and analysis. So when he came out with a book (The End Is Near And It's Going To Be Awesome) I was immediately interested. I read the Kindle sample, liked it, and bought the whole thing.

Now I've finished it and I'm very disappointed. The book has three main points:
1. There's no way the US government can keep the promises it's made, even if taxes go up to 100%.
2. Political organizations screw up most of the tasks they try to perform.
3. Bottom-up groups can do almost all of what we've been depending on the central government to do.
Williamson does a great job of proving all three points. He did a good enough job to shock me on #2, not with the content but that this is being supported and promoted by National Review. Since when did WFBjr's heirs start putting out anarchist manifestos? I suppose Williamson might qualify it as minarchism, but I'm a minarchist and this was a big slug of 150-proof anarcho-capitalism. Not that polite Friedmanite stuff either. This was "politicians are crooks, taxation is theft, and the police are another gang." No ritual praise for "our heroes in uniform" in this book. In fact, the only allusion to uniformed heroes is in connection with NYPD cops convicted of rape. Did the NR suits read this before they did all those ads for it?

So far it sounds like something I'd enjoy, and I did like each chapter. Nothing particularly new in the philosophy for me or any regular reader of Reason mag but he wrote it well. It's probably a great introduction to libertarian philosophy for the National Review crowd.

So here's the book: "The current situation is totally unsustainable and will collapse. When we have a decentralized system letting people set up their own arrangements it's going to be awesome."

Notice the lack of anything describing how we get from point A to point B? Apparently Williamson is assuming that the collapse of the central-planning state will make the majority of the population realize that they shouldn't have been depending on the government so much. I find this . . . let's be polite . . . excessively optimistic.
(see rest of rant at http://libertarianhawk.livejournal.co...)

[Charles Berteau · Rating 5 out of 5]

I doubt that anyone who does not fancy themselves a libertarian, or at least is not willing to contemplate a philosophy of minimal government interference (in all domains: economic, social, etc), would like this book as much as I did.

But I wish those people would choose to read it anyway, because it presents a strong case for: (a) a libertarian philosophy; and (b) the inevitability that government WILL shrink, because we can't afford for it to do otherwise, at some point.

Much of the book is just a well-written summary reviewing that government exists because it has a monopoly on force; that government entities, even if staffed with benevolent and well-meaning people, perform very poorly over time when compared with the innovation and productivity of the private sector; that there ARE alternatives to using the government where it cannot be successful; etc. That all well-hashed ground, but this short and interesting book covers it well.

I found a few points particularly thought-provoking:

- That government stays small when people have a viable means of "opting out." The US government really began to grow when there was no "frontier" to escape to (i.e. the competition of "what else can I do" was removed)
- That what government agencies do particularly poorly, compared to the private sector, is getting "less bad" over time - instead, government targets a fixed, unachievably positive outcome, and feedback loops are poor
- That government is often judged by what it aspires to do (which is always wonderful - even if the reality of what happens as a result, sucks), while the "lack of government" (free association) is judged by the reality. So - a problem exists. Free association hasn't fixed it, because it happens to be a really hard problem. UNACCEPTABLE! Laws are passed, money is spent, government WILL ACT TO FIX IT! The problem persists unabated, or perhaps the problem is abated but a new - equally bad or worse - problem appears as a consequence. Government is not judged by this failure, but rather by the aspiration that it strove to "do the right thing" or pretended to.
- ...

I doubt anyone will read this who does not already believe they would resonate with it. But I read a lot of things that I think will resonate with me, that end up not doing so. That was not the case here, I heartily recommend this quick and engaging read.

[Curtis Edmonds · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that the book can be summarized more in terms of the first four words of its title than it can be by the rest of it. Is the end near? Well, the end has already happened in Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy--in part because it could not pay its bills, but in large part because it could not raise the taxes needed to pay its bills. Williamson argues that governments fail because they don't have enough information to be responsive to consumer needs, the way that big businesses are. (Not that big businesses are all that responsive, mind you - and if you think they are, try calling your cable company or your health insurance carrier.) But the leaders of Detroit obviously knew the basic facts--that the city's education system was failing, that the streetlights were going out, that police patrols were shrinking. They simply had other priorities that had little to do with governing.

The situation for Detroit, for many people, was easy--move to someplace else that was better governed. If the federal government fails--and given Williamson's grim view of our public fisc, it likely will at some point--where will we move to? And what will they have there for us?

Williamson argues that government services will be taken up by individuals banning together in community associations, including--but not limited to--the Catholic Church starting up its own HMO for parishioners. That might not be a terrible idea (there's already a large base of Catholic hospitals), but Williamson thinks it might extend to fraternal organizations, in an era where social media is killing the fraternal organizations deader then Julius Caesar.

This is a compelling book, and Williamson has a direct, no-BS style that is about as blunt as a cookie sheet. The main drawback is that he's embraced a thesis that can't be sustained. There's no guarantee that whatever replaces the failures of Big Government will be benevolent or responsive, much less awesome or secure, and Williamson doesn't come close to making the case that it will, or that it can.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accepting the premise that the United States is going to go broke sooner rather than later, causing it to default on many of its obligations, this book examines how other entities beside the federal government could do a better job of accomplishing the tasks that a insolvent government couldn't.

He begins by pointing out a simple fact: the difference between government and the Mafia is littler than you think. Both enforce their diktats ultimately at the endpoint of a gun. Both assumed power violently. Both are in the "protection racket." Both choose winners and losers. And so on and so forth. His argument is that legitimacy in government is a red herring. Talk about the "social contract" all you want, but who of us has actually signed it? So what does government do? It values the preferences of some (politicians) above those of others (everyone else), and forces you to accept them.

To put it shortly: there is very, very little that the government does that "cooperative enterprise" could not do better. The rest of the book illustrates examples. Social Security? Heck, if Americans earning $100K or more invested 5% of their income for 30 years, there's a $20T trust fund right there, which could generate $1T a year in income, which could be invested for every child under 17 in a way that would guarantee $2-3M at retirement. Sounds better than Social Security, eh?

With health care, he examines bill-sharing services, such as were common in the early part of the 20th century in organizations like the Moose Lodge or Masonic Temple. Education? Please. There's so many better, private options that it's not even funny.

His last chapter is the most radical: "competing legal codes." But it's not as radical as it seems. After all, we already have innumerable jurisdictions in this country (just ask the people trying to calculate sales tax for Amazon.com). Why not privately generated law? Chew on that a while.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Politics is broken. But you knew that. If you think about politics or follow politics or look at politics out of the corner of your eye, you might have gotten the impression that finding the right politics will somehow fix things, for various values of "fix" and "things." Williamson is here to say, "Not so much."

Not only is politics broken, Williamson writes, but the system and moreover, the metasystem, is broken and incapable if being fixed. Politics cannot learn and therefore will always do bad, wrong things. When something goes right, it is a matter of coincidence or team choice, for lack of a better term. America has a unique position in that it's a nation founded on the idea of politics, rather than rule by might or blood. But that also makes it unique in that it is going to keep swinging, and missing, until the system overwhelms itself, which should be any day now.

Williamson takes each big platform ticking point-- health care, welfare, etc., and does a quick and dirty number run (his signature "math for English majors") to point out just how deeply busted the whole system is. The analogy that sticks with me most is his idea to simplify healthcare. Imagine it's as simple as taking one pill a month, out of 50 possible pills. So that's 12 of 50 pills, calculated for about 300 million Americans. The resulting number is larger than the number of seconds that has passed since the beginning of the universe. The utter hubris involved in anybody trying to make your healthcare decisions for you, let alone the other 2,999,999 of us is flabbergasting.

And the book continues in that vein. Yet instead of being nihilistic or morose, it's actually pretty cheerful. Williamson seems like an upbeat kind of guy who is getting the ladders ready for when people stop digging the holes. It's a quick read, and entertaining even, given the subject matter. Recommended.

[Kevin Pace · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly sagacious book which from the very beginning wants to rack your brain with the question, "Just what do we need a government for anyways?" Williamson is by no means an anarchist but someone who wants people everywhere to sit back and think about why things are the way they are, and just how much better they would be if we just took care of our problems ourselves.

Regarding the title, Williamson is speaking primarily of the Social Security and Medicare systems whose combined liabilities are anywhere from 100 to 200 trillion dollars, an amount we never hear about in the news because our national debt figures include neither Social Security nor Medicare (see Chapter 4, "Social Insecurity"). The experts cited in the book all agree that these programs can only run for about 25 more years in their current state before they collapse under their own debts. When that happens we will have to come up with another way to ensure that we are taken care of. That is the whole pretext of this book. Williamson shows how the programs we have now were not going to last at all, and how we in our day and age could come up with new ways to promote healthcare, education, and retirement funds, all with only minimal government influence.

Don't look at this book as though it were only a critique. It is a hopeful book; the title is the first sign that Williamson wants to show us that there are better ways, and that once the undeserved perception that our welfare systems are somehow sacrosant and cannot be either removed nor improved upon we will be free to come up with newer, more dynamic methods to meet our needs. The only limit will be our imaginations and our willingness to work together.

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars, barely edging up to 3. If the book had delivered on what the title promised, it could well have been 4. They key promise of the title is "How", showing us how the end might come and how things might turn out better afterwards. Instead of that, we get long diatribes about why current systems are broken and descriptions of what *should* be done instead, presumably arising naturally somehow from the end. Although some effort is made to remain party neutral in these solutions, they are mostly standard political arguments. I was really hoping for something different.

The book touches on concepts of robustness by designing (health care, education, etc.) systems that can evolve and handle numerous little problems that might arise, and if it had explored that direction it would have been more similar to Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. In addition, it also mentions the impact of mobility, information, and wealth distribution on power similar to The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be. If it had gone in those directions, it would have been fresher and more worth reading, especially because those other two books don't go far in describing what might arise from those principles.

[Tim Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy reading Williamson's work, even though he often takes a bit of a condescending look at the opposition. He's also got a pretty good sense of humor to go along with that. I suppose that's something you have to develop as a defense mechanism when you get the same unfounded insults hurled at you again and again.

The last book I read from Williamson was about the failing of Socialism, kind of a Socialism 101. This one is designed more as to why Classical Liberalism is pretty darn decent.

His ideas have merit, his examples were timely and relevant. That said, I just didn't like this as much as I like reading his articles. It's not that it was bad, it was just a little too polished compared to that bulldog approach of his more spontaneous work.

He did end of a high note, though. We get caught up in the minutia of politics, but the underlying thesis of this work is that politics is violence. He qualifies that phraseology, but he has a good point: ultimately, the consequence with non-compliance to a law has to be the threat of violence. So when we're debating laws, the question is whether that particular law is important enough that we would be willing to put a gun to someone's head (or have someone else carry out the act for us) to enforce it.

Since we're a generally law abiding people in the US, it doesn't often come down to that, but it can. It doesn't take much looking to find someone who has lost time/possessions/family/etc over some ill conceived law that really shouldn't have been put into place in the first place.

Anyway, the book all gets us to that point, and it does a good job at it. It just wasn't what I was in the mood for at the moment.

[Jonathan Palfrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This readable and persuasive book makes a case that the provision of various services to the public by governments in general (and the US government in particular) is not merely inefficient, incompetent, and undesirable; but is destined to be drastically curtailed fairly soon, as these services become unsustainable.

The author believes this will be a Good Thing in the long run, because those services can then be provided in better ways.

He’s pretty good at describing the awfulness of the current services in the USA (even worse than I realized!); he outlines some of the possible alternatives rather more tentatively, although what he has to say about them is of some interest.

I think his position is that people will develop many competing alternatives to government services, and he can’t hope to predict which of them will be most successful. Fair enough.

He’s not a utopian and probably not an anarchist, just someone who believes (a) that we’d benefit from smaller government, and (b) that government is going to get smaller in the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not.

Although the book seems rather libertarian, the author clearly wants to distance himself from libertarians, which of course he’s free to do. As soon as an author allows himself to be categorized, he’s likely to lose potential readers who put themselves into other categories. And this book has a potentially wide audience.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good number of ideas, mostly conservative (i.e., free market, non-governmental) solutions to existing problems: health care, social security, education, and other things that have too much government interference are getting more expensive to the point of being unsustainable and less accessible to all but the elite (even while hi-tech items get cheaper and more egalitarian by the year). Indeed, it will be most interesting to see, not just *if* these doomsday scenarios (as the title implies) will happen, but rather how quickly they come about.

While some solutions, like home-schooling, have been discussed before, there are a few notable "new ideas" being promoted here. Probably the most intriguing is his idea of an "investment" in the education and retirement of future generations by the richest (i.e., one-percenters) of this generation. Definitely not a particularly "conservative" idea - and also laced with plenty of room for corruption (e.g., where to invest the money; who gets paid to do so; who is accountable whenever things go sideways) - but still a fun thought experiment nonetheless.

And that's essentially what this book is: a book of thought experiments around novel ideas. Unfortunately, many (if not all) of these ideas will find difficulty being adopted, even at the state or local level, given the lack of leadership in DC this decade.

[Kevin Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

The End is Near is an interesting book, written for popular consumption. It contained quite a bit of information I was unaware of, such as an early purpose of fraternal orders such as the Elks to provide a form of medical insurance for their members prior to WWII, or the percentage of public school teachers in large urban areas who prefer to put their own children into private schools. My only disappointment was in Williamson's conclusions, which, to be honest, I expected going into the book.

Williamson's premise is that, with a coming economic collapse, people will be left to provide for themselves many if not most of the things that government currently tries (and often fails) to provide for them - things not part of the original charter of the Constitution. We will do this because, basically, we're Americans, and that's what we do. And that's fine, as far as it goes. But I think he ignores a larger issue, and that is that power, once lost, is very, very hard to take back. Bureaucrats do not surrender their power or privilege easily. Ask any magician about Federal bunny inspectors. Ask parents who have seen their children bullied by public health officials over lemonade stands.

The End may be Near, but I don't think it's going to be so Awesome.

[Lee Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished a great book called The End is Near and It's Going to be Awesome by Kevin D. Williamson. You should check it out. It DID help me to look at things from a third perspective - not left or right, very much Constitutionally, but with ideas that need to be brought forward. We need to work harder to present these and other options - because lets face it - the Republican party has become Democrat Light. They have revealed themselves to be just as BIG GOVERNMENT as the other side. Williamson gives great examples of alternatives in the school choice, health care, law enforcement AND same sex marriage - which discusses the "marital contract" as the alternative - a contract between people not unlike the LLC or Corporate structure - that totally leaves the church alone and saves traditional marriage for those that want it.

Although I'm not sure the end is going to be awesome - and Williamson doesn't really explain that - I do feel that some sort of end is near and although it may be ugly for a time, I suspect we'll emerge from it better and more informed about what we agree to submit to each and every day.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yuck. This book is just rubbish. My favorite passage about libraries below from pgs. 90-91:

"Privately funded and volunteer-staffed public libraries were the norm fro many years, from magnificent ones such as the New York Public Library... to modest ones throughout suburbs and small towns across the country. At the apogee of WASP society-lady culture, volunteering at the local library was practically a rite of passage, an entrée into more prestigious charitable work... Somehow, as library budgets ballooned and volunteer society ladies were displaced by graduate-schooled, credentialed professionals in the faintly ridiculous field of "library science," our libraries were transformed from quiet places to read a book into psychiatric wards in which homeless men masturbate to Internet pornography. The San Francisco public libraries recently installed barriers to increase the level of privacy for this activity."

And yet, there is no mention of the privatization policies that led to the mentally ill and homeless being driven to seek refuge in the libraries in the first place. Bleh.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Williamson is one of my favorite columnists because he's smart, he knows a lot, and when he makes a point he uses a rapier. This book is full of content (the unfunded liabilities of the US are greater than all the wealth IN THE WORLD, the MEDIAN income in the Fabulous Fifties was $10,000 in today's dollars) and full of good stories and I wish I could get some of my nearest and dearest to read it, but like most people he's better at seeing the flaws in things than coming up with alternate approaches. Luckily, his theory is that left free of compulsion, human institutions evolve to become Less Bad, so it doesn't depend on any one expert or government to figure out what works best. Unluckily, compulsion abounds.