American politics has been hijacked. Over the past three decades, a fringe group of economic hucksters has corrupted and perverted our nation's policies. With dark, engaging wit, Jonathan Chait reveals how these canny zealots first took over the Republican Party and then gamed the political system and the media so that once unthinkable policies--without a shred of academic, expert, or even popular support--now drive the political agenda, regardless of which party is in power. Why have these ideas succeeded in Washington? How did a clique of extremists gain control of American economic policy and sell short the country's future? And why do their outlandish ideas still determine policy despite repeated electoral setbacks? Chait tells the outrageous and eye-opening story, expertly explaining just how politics and economics work in Washington. He has produced a riveting drama of greed and deceit that should be read by every concerned citizen, especially in an election year.

2009 Reprint of original 1956 edition. Paperback, 114pp. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on behalf of classical liberalism and is seen as one of the leaders of the Austrian School of economics. Mises introduced praxeology as a more general conceptual foundation of the social sciences and established that economic laws were only arrived at through the means of methodological individualism firmly rejecting positivism and materialism as a foundation for the social sciences. Many of his works were on two related economic themes:1. Monetary economics and inflation; 2. The differences between government controlled economies and free trade.

Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recounts the strategies used by the country's top economic policymakers to conceal their failure to recognize the housing bubble or take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings of tens o...