This book presents the data and studies done to test policies and laws with a view to their effects. Radcliff studies happiness, and happiness studies. Like the great "father" of political economics, who hails from the land of Dixie itself, Professor V. O. Key, Radcliff uses actual data rather than ideology, to arrive at conclusions.

Radcliff suggests that the test of a solution to a political standoff is not whether it favors a Party, but whether it makes People happier or not.

Radcliff observes that Thomas Jefferson enshrined the concept of happiness – “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – in the Declaration of Independence. This was the first time in history, the happiness of all citizens was given such prominence, tied to the exercise of their own Governance. To Radcliff, this was a seminal moment in political history.

The concept of personal fulfillment as a collective goal for the great mass of citizens was furthered in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. As one of the experts on corporate management, Adolf Berle, cautioned Roosevelt during the 1932 campaigns about Herbert Hoover’s infatuation with “individualism”, most people never get to be individuals. “What Mr. Hoover means by individualism is letting economic units do what they please”.

Berle proposed a “truer individualism”. He focused on the concept of personal fulfillment, even in the midst of toil and poverty. Ubi bene, ibi patria - “where it is well with me, there is my country” – this concept has long abided and united us.

The market does not consist of free individuals making free choices about what’s best for them. The reality is that people do not face each other as equals, with complete access to real information. Many of the buyers and sellers have organized themselves into corporate entities owned by stockholders. Stock is almost exclusively interested in short-term profit. The inequality of wealth will further distort the “choices” which are actually available. Berle proposed “regulating the influence of market forces” to increase the ability of people to achieve personal fulfillment in their lives.

Hoover himself began as one of the most articulate spokespersons for laissez faire capitalism – and his eloquence has not been matched by any of the current apologists we hear today. However, after the 1929 Depression, Hoover apologized to the American people, and expressed bitterness over the acts of betrayal he witnessed on the part of the wealthy “trusts”. Private monopolists had destroyed the world for everyone. As Adam Smith warned us in “The Wealth of Nations”, private stock companies pose the greatest danger to prosperity –they can’t help but seek short-term profits and monopoly, ultimately impoverishing everyone. Private corporations will destroy the marketplace. We saw them do it in 1929, and in 2008.

Regulating the influence of private corporations will enable society to prosper. The private monopolization of the market must be prevented. In other words, the market is the regulator, but the market must be protected.

The pursuit of happiness is one of the founding principles of America, which is a Government owned by its People. It is the entity citizens have organized to protect themselves from “enemies” – foreign and domestic. The notion that government programs which protect the market are somehow “interferences” which place us on the “road to Serfdom” is a misreading of F. A. Hayek’s philosophy of freedom. He was not so naive. Serfdom is the result of plutocratic monopoly which eliminates the competition. The power is held by feudal lords who are forcing the rest of us into Serfdom. Hence the large-scale funding of the “war” against the middle class declared by the Koch Brothers in 2009.

Radcliffe’s research clearly vindicates the effort to provide social infrastructure to enable a middle class to flourish. Higher levels of social programs produce a happier population. Public policies such as insurance, and protections for Unions of laborers, are among the most important. Statistics bear him out. Working models in Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands and Sweden have existed for many years through many political and economic challenges. Countries with huge Governments consuming high levels of gross domestic product have higher levels of personal satisfaction.

Examples of low tax weak central governments with heavily-armed citizens are abundant, but they are not attractive: Syria/Arabia, Somalia, Haiti. Latin America was taken over by the plutocracy in the 18th century and experienced two centuries of wars and impoverishment.

Our own nation also provides abundant evidence. The Southern Confederacy in 1860 was home to the richest people on the planet– they enjoyed a world monopoly on raw cotton, and the economic power of monopolies on tobacco and rum. The Chesapeake Bay was the capital of the Golden Age of piracy – one of the few places where pirates could openly fence their pillaged goods with impunity. The entire economy of The South was built on an unprecedented inequality of wealth and the extremes of slavery. The feudal plantation owners hated taxation and were not willing to tax themselves even after they began military assaults on Federal facilities. If the cotton kings had simply paid (it was levied but few paid it), a very small tax on their raw cotton exports, the South could have outfitted an Army five times larger than the North. The feudal lords would have won the Civil War, but they just could not bear to pay any taxes to their own Confederate Government.

The purpose of the Government in the United States is expressed in the Preamble of the Constitution which “establishes” it. Although private stock corporations, which are never audited and give no accounting to anyone, have the right to conduct transactions in a Free Market, they do not have a right to destroy the market by achieving monopoly. They have no right to take public resources owned by the People, take all the profits, and leave the often toxic waste for the rest of us to clean up. No private or public entity should compromise the future by polluting air, water, or the land.

Our Government, owned by all of us as citizens, is our best means for protecting our markets and ourselves. Anywhere or anytime you hear an attack on Our Government, let your response be guided by a fresh reading of the Preamble:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” ( )