The Freedom Revolution

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 21, 1995 | by Lisa Leiter

Among Dick Armey's admirable qualities is his willingness to go out on a limb: the House majority leader confronts politically dangerous and volatile issues from abortion to Social Security -- unlike some of the GOP's moderates, who shy away from divisive topics.

Armey details his often-controversial views in The Freedom Revolution (Regnery, 318 pp), a text-book-like treatise that lambastes liberals while offering a plan to foster economic prosperity and moral idealism in the United States. He wrote it on a laptop computer last fall while jetting around the country to campaign for GOP candidates.

Homey axioms, analogies and anecdotes enhance Armey's proposals to dismantle big government and "free" Americans from it. The former economics professor also riddles his book with statistics, data and excerpts from economists' reports. Sometimes, however, he overlooks the obvious. While Armey boasts about freedom in the Reagan years -- citing job creation, lower interest rates and trust in government as resulting from the economic growth of the 1980s -- he neglects to discuss the concomitant increase in government spending during the same period.

In The Freedom Revolution, Armey wanted to convey a way of seeing the future. That he does. But the question is whether bold propositions such as the flat tax and the elimination of the Education Department could jump congressional hurdles. As one Armey Axiom puts it: "A bad idea can survive only if it need not stand the test of reality."