Many years ago Friedrich Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in which he warned that we would lose our freedom by allowing government to control more

and more of the economic decision-making through a model of central planning. Arthur Brooks has now written about The Road to Freedom, which is described

as a book to help win the fight for free enterprise. He believes that it is going to take more than one election to get us off the road to serfdom.

Arthur Brooks believes we need to make the moral case for free enterprise. In his previous book, The Battle, he made the case that 70 percent of Americans

support free enterprise, but that the remaining 30 percent dominate the public arena. They are in positions of political power and intellectual influence. They

control the White House, the Congress, the media, and academia.

Although he is a former professor and think tank president, Brooks is very practical and helps us make the case in simple terms. He reminds us that the

U.S. Tax Code is 16,845 pages long. Why is it so long? It is a detailed document. There is, for example, a special provision for favorable tax treatment of

racehorses. But this does not apply to just any racehorse. Section 68(e)(3)a)(i)(I) applies a special investment depreciation for only racehorses that are two

years old or younger. This is what you could legitimately call a “tax loophole” that was written by a politician trying to benefit someone with young racehorses.

Do we need to reform the entitlement system? To date, most Americans withdraw more from the Social Security and Medicare systems than they ever paid

into them. The systems are going broke because benefit payments are exceeding the taxes to pay for them. The U.S. currently spends less the 10 percent of

GDP on entitlements, but if no reform takes place that percentage will rise to over 14 percent by 2030.

The premise of his book is simple. If we want to continue down the road to serfdom and collapse, do nothing. If we want to travel down the road to freedom,

we need to use his practical suggestions to make necessary changes. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.