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Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You Hardcover – July 11, 2011

by Iain Murray (Author)

4.4 16 ratings

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They’re Stealing Us Blind

Remember when we used to call government employees public servants”? They’re servants no morenow they’re bureaucratic masters of the universe, claiming inflated salaries (up to two times as much as private sector employees) and early retirement with unparalleled pensions and benefits. And how do they spend their time? When they’re actually working, they spin red tape and regulations that make your life harder (and their lives easier), your taxes higher, and your share of the nation’s debt unsustainable.

Like true bureaucrats they like to scurry around in the dark, doing their mischief outside of public scrutiny. But no longer: Iain Murrayauthor of the rollicking exposé The Really Inconvenient Truthsknows all about bureaucrats and their lairs, because he used to be one himself. In Stealing You Blind he blows the whistle on the out-of-control bureaucracy whose greed could actually tip our country into a financial abyss.

In Stealing You Blind, you’ll discover:

Why the wealthiest congressional district in America is in a recession-proof suburb of Washington, D.C.
How the Department of Transportation went from having one employee making $170,000 or more to having nearly 1,700 making that muchduring the peak of the recession
Why even FDR thought federal workers shouldn’t be allowed to unionize
How state, local, and federal bankruptcy could be coming your way thanks to public employee union greed
Why bureaucrats regard taxpayers as sheep to be shornand how they do it
Ten steps to fight back and regain control of our government from the parasitic bureaucratic class

Filled with devastating facts about how government workers are living large off the rest of us and driving our country to financial ruin, Stealing You Blind is a rousing call to reclaim our rights as taxpayers and save our economy from the bureaucrats who are choking it to death for their own benefit.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Stealing You Blind

"Where do all your hard-earned tax dollars go? You don't know the half of it! . . . This must read manual takes you on a maddening tour that starts at Al Gore's mansion, winds through the ever-expanding empire of Nanny State busybodies in Washington, and dives into bloated municipal payrolls from the Big Apple to Bell, California. Murray outlines imperative reforms to rein in these new robber barons. If you believe public servants should serve the public and not themselves, get this book."
--Michelle Malkin, Fox News Contributor and author of Culture of Corruption

"A powerful government, the liberal myth goes, places a check on special interests and provides a counterbalance to the power of the wealthy. In truth, government growth instead creates a new class of Robber Barons--handsomely paid 'public servants' who soon monetize that service to become obscenely paid revolving-door lobbyists and 'consultants.' Recovered bureaucrat Iain Murray paints the unseemly picture of 'our new leisure class' in vivid--and often rage-inducing--detail."
--Tim Carney, author of Obamanomics and Senior Political Columnist, The Washington Examiner

"Iain Murray eviscerates what he calls the new robber barons, the great empire-builders of the public sector. It is a story of greed, arrogance, and power that would make even a domineering nineteenth-century industrialist blush. This isn't just a smart and entertaining take-down, but a call to action."
--Rich Lowry, editor of National Review

From the Inside Flap

DID YOU KNOW?

Before Obama's election, only one employee at the Federal Department of Transportation earned $170,000 or more; a year later, nearly 1,700 did
The average Federal worker is paid double what his private sector counterpart earns
One city administrator was paid $800,000 a year--and wrote himself a pension plan paying $1 million a year
Los Angeles spent $111 million in stimulus money--to create 55 jobs
And there's so much more...

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Regnery Publishing (July 11, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1596981539
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1596981539
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #7,250,847 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,508 in Labor & Industrial Relations (Books)
- #4,918 in Labor & Industrial Economic Relations (Books)
- #8,490 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism

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4.4 16 ratings

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Iain Murray

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Iain Murray is the Competitive Enterprise Institute's vice president of strategy. For the past decade with the Institute, he has written and researched on financial regulation, labor, employment and immigration regulation, and free market environmentalism.

Iain is married with two children and lives in Northern Virginia. He was born in the United Kingdom and worked for the Thatcher and Major governments before privatizing himself out of a job and coming to America to marry the love of his life. Iain is a member of the Church of England but his wife and children are Roman Catholic.

He also lectures regularly in Europe and the Mediterranean, in places as diverse as Belgium, France, Bulgaria, Germany, Cyprus, Israel, and Turkey. Iain considers himself a Europhile Euroskeptic, and was runner up (with Rory Broomfield) in the Institute of Economic Affairs 100,000 Euros "Brexit Prize" in 2014.

He writes short articles regularly for FEE.org, National Review, The American Spectator, and other commentary sites. Iain has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and on broadcast news such as the BBC, NBC Nightly News, Fox New Channel, CCTV, and Al-Jazeera.

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Anthony Kidd

This is absolutely a great read. Our federal government has been stealing its ...

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2017

Verified Purchase

This is absolutely a great read. Our federal government has been stealing its citizens blind as far back as FDR, and the striking this is, most of America's citizens have just chosen to lay down and allow the government to walk all over us. Republicans and Democrats alike have their greedy hands in the pot to enhance their fortunes; to heck with all the hard working taxpayers. I was told years ago that when Harry Reid entered the Senate, he didn't have a pot to pee in or a window to through it out of. Yet today, he is worth over $200 million dollars. Go Figure!!

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2011

Verified Purchase

Ian Murray is a British ex-patriate and a former member of the British Civil Service. With an unerring eye, he cleanly and decisively identifies how the ruling class in America is parrotting the disadvantages of the former ruling class in Britain, the aristocracy. The ruling class in America is composed of the politicians, the bureaucrats, the public sector union leaders, and the academics who live off of taxpayer funded compensation and funding for projects. This is an important book that should be read by all Americans who would like to reverse the trends of excessive government and the ruling class that it has spawned.

3 people found this helpful

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Janet

Stealing you blind

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2011

Verified Purchase

A 'must read' every voter and politician. This is truly a bipartisan narrative of the absolute and total abuse of taxpayers' dollars. As Mr. Young previously mentioned, it was a very difficult read. It left me frustrated, and even more so as I listen and watch our politicians making power plays with our lives, and knowing that they are either ignoring the obvious, or obviously ignorant. For those unsure of how to reduce our debt, Iain Murray provides the answers.

2 people found this helpful

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BC

Given our situation, the most IMPORTANT Book of the Year!

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2011

Verified Purchase

The media could not be loaded.

Stealing You Blind is an easy and educational read. It has to be one of the most important books of the year because it showcases how and why government is corrupting the economy. What makes this book special is that Murray also has a chapter which reveals how to get out of the situation we're in.

5 people found this helpful

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ALEJANDRO MORELOS

Stealing You Blind: no wonder the One percent controls the whole country, beginning with the politicians and the bureaucrats

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2014

Verified Purchase

Very informative. Good research. Comprehensive panorama of the real world behind the curtain of infotainment feeding to us by the controlled evening news of the american mass media.

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2013

Iain Murray has the statistics to back up the title; Stealing You Blind. Some people consider these statistics depressing, I on the other hand consider them fascinating. Truth must expose error, sometimes in the bloodiest fashion before people will wake up and say; I have had enough! Murray states, "Once we add in (today's totals) state and local government employees, another 19.5 million people (local bureaucrats, teachers firefighters, police officers, and so on), we reach the astonishing conclusion that close to 40 million Americans are employed in some way on government business, which means about 26 percent of the American labor force owes its living to the taxpayer. That's one in every four workers." "Columnist and former White House staffer Jim Pinkerton has pointed out, in the nineteenth century, 50 percent of Americans lived on farms and the United States Department of Agriculture had 2,000 employees. Today, only 2.5 percent of Americans live on farms but the USDA has more than 100,000 employees." No wonder the average Federal employee makes double the income of the private sector! Murray helps us clearly see there are really very few public servants, mostly those looking out for their own interests.
The ruling class in America, copying its European model, is composed of the politicians, corporate powerbrokers, bureaucrats and public sector union leaders who make their livings off of our tax dollars. Murray makes it clear that dismantleing our current tax system moving toward a fair tax would remove the lynchpin that keeps these tax feeders alive and return our country back toward sanity. I highly recommend this book, it fires a warning shot across the bow. Wake up America!

One person found this helpful

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Ryan Young

Excellent Introduction to Public Choice Theory

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2011

Disclosure: the author is a colleague.

Stealing You Blind is a depressing read, though a necessary one. Murray only uses the phrase once, but he has written an excellent introduction to the branch of economics called public choice theory. That alone makes this book a worthwhile (and surprisingly quick) read.

One of the basic lessons of economics is that people respond to incentives. The trouble is that many people forget that insight when it comes to government employees. Politicians, and bureaucrats, the thinking goes, are dispassionate, objective, and (usually) act in the public interest. The public choice theorist's job is to remind us that bureaucrats and politicians are people, too. They have incentives, and they respond to them.

Murray does a lot of reminding in this book. It contains story after depressing story of government officials responding to their incentives. A politician's incentive is to win re-election. A regulator's incentive is to expand his agency's turf and budget. A public sector labor union's incentive is to gain members -- usually by growing government and supporting allied politicians.

This has consequences. When regulators have the power to tilt the playing field, businesses have an incentive to come to Washington and see that the field is tilted their way. This is called regulatory capture, and it is a huge source of Washington corruption.

Another incentive that public sector employees share with the rest of us is to get paid. Murray gives many examples of pay-related corruption, such as a city manager in a small California city with an $800,000 salary. The sweetheart salaries, pensions, early retirements, and other perks have reached the point that bankruptcy will soon be the only option for some cities, and even some states.

Murray concludes with a list of suggested reforms. Everything is on the table, from outright abolishing the departments of Commerce and Education, to requiring Congress to vote on major regulations.

The only quibble I have is that Murray is less of a gradualist than I am. He would like to see as many reforms as possible enacted at once. I worry that they will fail to stick if that happens; one step at a time. We still agree very much on the problem, and what fixes are needed.

I also feel that the book's title, and especially its subtitle, are less than subtle. But if the publishers think that will sell more books, then I hope they are right. Stealing You Blind deserves to be widely read. Highly recommended.

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