The Price of Liberty: Paying for America's Wars [Paperback]

Admirably comprehensive . . .The Price of Libertyshows that [Hormats] knows his history. Niall Ferguson,The Wall Street Journal

America's first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, identified the Revolutionary War debt as a threat to the nation's very existence. Ever since, Hamilton's principles for securing the country through sound finances have guided leaders from Madison and Lincoln to FDR and George H. W. Bush as they have fought to protect the United Stateswith the invention of the greenback, a progressive income tax, Victory Bond campaigns, and cost-sharing with allies.

In this bracing work of history, Robert D. Hormats, one of America's leading experts on international finance, argues that the United States must realign its policies on taxes, defense spending, Social Security, Medicare, and oil dependency to safeguard the nation in the coming decades.

Bob Hormats has taken on the impossible: making lively history of the fiscal side of America's wars. Taxes and spending, economics and politics, all mixed up together in times of national crisis, from the Revolution and Alexander Hamilton to Iraq and both George Bushes. There are lessons to be learned and too often forgotten, even for the financing of the new 'War on Terror.' Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve

The Price of Libertyis both a superb history and an urgent call for appropriate fiscal policy in the current campaign against terrorism. Hormats shows that, time and again, how wars were paidl“