Good to be King: The Foundations of Our Constitutional Freedom

Michael Badnarik

I really wanted to be able to give this book five stars and declare it the first book I read this year likely to make my 25 Best of the Year list. Unfortunately, that's not going to be the case, but it is, for the most part, not Michael Badnarik's fault.

The book is solid. Well, mostly. Simple, logical, with short punchy chapters examining the Constitution itself, and showing some of the many ways in which the current United States government is involved in unconstitutional activity. (Oddly, he gives only a couple of sentences to the reason they're allowed to get away with this, as if the subject were less important than most.) His points and arguments are very easy to follow, though his confrontational attitude may put some on-the-fence readers off before they even get to the parts of the book where they're likely to be scared away. In fact, there's only one notable place in the book where logic takes a vacation for a page or so (during his discussion of the term "general Welfare"); I agree with his position, and understand how he got there, but those who don't are certainly not going to get it from reading this. A good editor could have pointed that out with ease.

And this is the book's major, overwhelming failure: it lacked both an editor and a proofreader. The vanity publishing company iUniverse doesn't employ proofreaders at all, trusting their authors to do the proofreading work. I've seen some stupid typos in iUniverse publications, but nothing that even comes close to this. Good to Be King has more typos than the infamous 1965 Lancer Books edition of Michael Moorcock's he Blood Red Game (which, toward the end, has two or three typos per page). It makes the book painful to read in places, especially in places where Badnarik's diction could have used just a touch of scrubbing here and there (his constant placement of a comma in the phrase "emphasis mine," for example).

Fixing the avalanche of typos, and some minor editorial work, would have turned this into a book that deserves space on the short shelf of sacred books. Perhaps a revised second edition will see light sometime in the future that commands such a place. Until then, if you can stand reading a book that resembles, typographically, a road that is more pothole than pavement, I cannot urge you strongly enough to pick this book up and read it.