The Big Ripoff

Today, many major U.S. corporations have a dirty little secret: they would like to abandon the American tradition of free enterprise. Together with elected officials, some big businesses are doing everything possible to replace America's robust free market with a web of government handouts, stricter regulation, higher taxes, and other special favors to choke off competition-and all of this leaves consumers with higher prices and fewer options, while driving taxes skyward. The Big Ripoff offers a well-researched look at the recent upsurge of this very un-American trend. Why are Phillip Morris, the state attorneys general, and federal bureaucrats working together to regulate tobacco? Why does Warren Buffett support the death tax? Why were Enron and General Motors lobbying for stricter environmental regulations? The Big Ripoff digs up the answers. Author Timothy Carney gets behind the sensationalist ideological wars, and reveals how politicians from both the left and right are helping government and its agencies conspire with "capitalists" to get rid of capitalism. The Big Ripoff also covers other controversial topics such as: U.S. tax dollars funding a Chinese government agency that is a known nuclear weapons proliferator; oil companies profiting from environmental regulations; taxpayer money paying for the lights on the Vegas strip; big business support for the New Deal; and much more! Unless big business and big government are called to answer for their two-faced attitude towards the free market, the American people have no hope of saving the free enterprise system. The Big Ripoff puts this debate in perspective and sheds a glaring light on the dark underbelly of American business.

Timothy P. Carney (Washington, DC) is a freelance investigative reporter and a protégé of veteran political reporter Bob Novak, whose syndicated column appears in newspapers throughout the country. Before 2002, he was a reporter for the small conservative weekly Human Events. Carney has written for numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Sun, the Washington Times, the D.C. Examiner, and a handful of other magazines, newspapers, and Web sites.