Want me to mail you a copy of Government Project?
It is a profound book that holds lessons for our times.
The Wall Street Journal deemed it a “best politics book of the year.”
I’ll mail you a copy if you click here and switch to an annual subscription, which I am temporarily discounting to $30!
After Substack tells me you have signed up, I’ll email you to get your mailing address and then I will ship your copy pronto. Thank you for your support!
Note: This offer is only for subscribers with mailing addresses in the United States.
Government Project tells the story of the US government’s noble attempt to remake the lives of some of its citizens by establishing a cooperative farm in Pinal County, Arizona, in 1937. These individuals were among the most desperately poor and disadvantaged in the nation. The government farm financially succeeded for a time, but collapsed in its seventh year of operation. Many of them walked away with hardly anything, to the shock and dismay of the government officials overseeing it. Government Project deftly explains what went wrong at Casa Grande. In telling this story, Banfield illuminates larger truths about human nature and the limits of governance.
Reviews
“The story Banfield tells is more provocative and fuller of wisdom than a dozen recent articles in top social science journals.”
-Prof. Daniel DiSalvo, University of North Carolina, City Journal
“Despite its age, the book is remarkably timely. Its major conclusion was that government-sponsored social programs, however well-intentioned, face such daunting challenges that achieving their goals is almost impossible and doing even a little good is difficult.”
-Prof. Les. Lenkowsky, Indiana University Bloomington, Wall Street Journal
“For sheer authenticity, precision, and evidence, Government Project has always stood out.”
-Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man, National Review
“Banfield’s careful case study of the Casa Grande project, based on his review of the detailed government records (including extensive interviews with the participants) and his own experience as a “public information officer” for the FSA, is a sobering critique of government planning and social engineering.”
-Mark Pulliam, The Daily Economy
there were people from that world of people who went to do disasters. I really believe that the only actually large scale enough so as to be institutional (theres always small stuff, unfortunately) clear war crime (in the moral sense, there may be one more) that can be said to be for sure a war crime, was the various sub-projects (not every project fits, most done, but huge numbers of humans were exposed to the one that did) of the Mekong Delta Project in Vietnam