Books in Brief

The Businessman’s Guide to Practical Politics, by J.J. Wuerthner Jr. (Regnery, $3.75). Just when American business is beginning to realize that its enemies are scant inches from its jugular, there appears this handy volume on how to fight back. The author, a General Electric official, avoids the usual nice-Nellie manner and gets down to the basic facts and some bare-knuckled advice. What is the AFL-CIO doing politically these days? What can a corporation do without breaking the law? What have various companies already done? Striving to keep his presentation simple, Mr. Wuerthner occasionally overdoes it (as when he defines “the political facts of life” alliteratively: Community, Committee, Candidate, Campaign, Cash and Continuity), but his primer nonetheless contains plenty of meat for politically undernourished executives. It is true that the basic Liberal assault on free enterprise can be smashed only by a systematic counterattack upon Liberalism’s poisonous philosophical premises. But businessmen who are too practical-minded, or just plain too dumb to oppose their critics at that fundamental level may nevertheless be willing and able to slug it out politically toe to toe, in their states and communities, with the eggheads’ snarling ADA and Big Labor’s brawny COPE. This book tells them how.

w. a. rusher

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The Businessman’s Guide to Practical Politics, by J.J. Wuerthner Jr. (Regnery, $3.75). Just when American business is beginning to realize that its enemies are scant inches from its jugular, there appears this handy volume on how to fight back. The author, a General Electric official, avoids the usual nice-Nellie manner and gets down to the basic facts and some bare-knuckled advice. What is the AFL-CIO doing politically these days? What can a corporation do without breaking the law? What have various companies already done? Striving to keep his presentation simple, Mr. Wuerthner occasionally overdoes it (as when he defines “the political facts of life” alliteratively: Community, Committee, Candidate, Campaign, Cash and Continuity), but his primer nonetheless contains plenty of meat for politically undernourished executives. It is true that the basic Liberal assault on free enterprise can be smashed only by a systematic counterattack upon Liberalism’s poisonous philosophical premises. But businessmen who are too practical-minded, or just plain too dumb to oppose their critics at that fundamental level may nevertheless be willing and able to slug it out politically toe to toe, in their states and communities, with the eggheads’ snarling ADA and Big Labor’s brawny COPE. This book tells them how.

w. a. rusher