- Barry, Max.
Jennifer Government.
New York: Vintage Books, 2003.
ISBN 1-4000-3092-7.
- When you try to explain personal liberty to under-thirty-fivers
indoctrinated in government schools, their general reaction is, “Well,
wouldn't the big corporations just take over and you'd end up with a
kind of corporate fascism which relegated individuals to the
rôle of passive consumers?” Of course, that's what they've been
taught is already the case—even as intrusive government hits
unprecedented new highs—but then logic was never a strong point of
collectivist kiddies. Max Barry has written the rarest of novels—a
persuasive libertarian dystopia—what it would look like if the
“big corporations” really did take over. In this world, individuals
take the surname of their employer, and hence the protagonist, Jennifer, is
an agent of what is left of the Government—get it? It is a useful exercise
for libertarians to figure out “what's wrong with this picture” and identify
why corporations self-size to that of the predominant government power: the
smaller the government, the more local the optimal enterprise. This is another
excellent recommendation by a visitor to this
page.
November 2004 