Dimensions: 8.5'' x 5.75'' 191 pages Broadway Books  (New York) Publication Date: January 1997 Paperback ISBN: 0767900391 Hardcover ISBN: 0553069284

For the Legions of Americans expressing or exploring libertarian beliefs, Charles Murray has created a radical, compassionate blueprint for solving today's most urgent social and political problems.

Murray believes that America's founders had it right--that strict limits on the power of the central government and strict protection of the individual are the keys to a genuinely free society. In What It Means to Be a Libertarian, he proposes a government reduced to the barest essentials: an executive branch consisting only of the White House and trimmed-down departments of state, defense, justice, and environmental protection; a Congress so limited in power that it meets only a few months each year; and a federal code stripped of all but a handful of regulations. Combining the tenets of classical libertarian philosophy with his own provocative thinking, Murray shows why less government advances individual happiness and promotes more vital communities and a richer culture.

Charles Murray is the author of Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, and, with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, the controversial national bestseller, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. The Bradley Fellow at AEI, Murray lives with his family near Washington, D.C.