What if there were no government regulations? What if there were no public schools, public libraries, or public parks? What if there were no labor laws, minimum wage laws, or prohibitions on discrimination? How would government function if it did not force you to pay for its services?
If you are like most Americans, you believe that without regulations, public goods, and taxation, society would quickly decay into chaos and anarchy. You believe that businesses would market dangerous and unsafe products, that the poor would be locked into a cycle of ignorance and poverty, that employees would be left to the mercy of employers. And, if financing government were voluntary, you believe that nobody would volunteer. Despite the widespread acceptance of these views, they are false in theory and in practice.
Both history and the contemporary world provide an abundance of evidence that government coercion—in the form of controls, regulations, and edicts—does not accomplish its stated goals. Whether it is mail delivery, education, infrastructure, land-use, or energy, government intervention is impractical. It is impractical because it is immoral; it violates an individual’s moral right to act according to his own judgment in the pursuit of his own values.
Individual Rights and Government Wrongs examines more than a dozen different issues, from mail delivery to education, from energy to land-use, from labor laws to discrimination, and in each instance we find the same thing. In each instance, we find that government intervention kills jobs, raises costs, limits opportunities, and destroys lives. And, in each instance, we also find that freedom—the absence of coercion—leads to progress, new and better products and services, lower costs, and good will towards fellow citizens.
The examples cited span the globe, from America to France, from Great Britain to India. They cover centuries, from colonial America to the contemporary world. They demonstrate that the recognition of individual rights is not a “luxury” for developed nations, or a passing fad, or something that happened to work for a short period of history. Individual rights are universally true and applicable. They are moral and practical, for all men, in all nations, at all times.
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