The country is at a crossroads, a different kind of place from where we've been before. The special interests seem more reactionary and entrenched than ever, the bureaucracies much larger. We need to marshal the courage to change, and we need to understand what needs changing.

Washington now is like the corrupt Tory England that the Whigs reformed. Whig liberalism brought growth. Our own Jeffersonian forerunners, the Founding Fathers, also rejected the Crown and understood the importance of small government.

Newt Gingrich praises a book which got howls from John Updike:

Where the words “new history” appear, revisionism will follow.

Shlaes’s story line proposes instead that the nineteen-twenties, far from “a period of false growth and low morals,” were “a great decade of true economic gains” whose “faith in laissez-faire” was justified.

Shlaes hails his decision to leave the Presidency after five and a half years (thus ducking the crash and its consequences) as “another of Coolidge’s acts of refraining, his last and greatest.”

Sarkozy's Lesson for America