The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome

This very readable and persuasive book makes a case that the provision of various services to the public by governments in general (and the US government in particular) is not merely inefficient, incompetent, and undesirable; but is destined to be drastically curtailed fairly soon, as these services become unsustainable.

The author believes this will be a Good Thing in the long run, because those services can then be provided in better ways.

He's pretty good at describing the awfulness of the current services in the USA (even worse than I realized!); he outlines some of the possible alternatives rather more tentatively, although what he has to say about them is of some interest.

I think his position is that people will develop many competing alternatives to government services, and he can't hope to predict which of them will be most successful. Fair enough.

He's not a utopian and probably not an anarchist, just someone who believes (a) that we'd benefit from smaller government, and (b) that government is going to get smaller in the foreseeable future, whether you like it or not.

Although the book is thoroughly congenial to me as a libertarian, the author clearly wants to distance himself from libertarians, which of course he's free to do. As soon as an author allows himself to be categorized, he's likely to lose potential readers who put themselves into other categories. And this book has a potentially wide audience.