13. From "Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty" | Individualism: A Reader
Channel: Libertarianism.org
Date: 2015-06-30

Prohibition a Failure, or The True Solution of the Temperance Question, Dio Lewis (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1875)

Lysander Spooner (1808-87) was an American lawyer, abolitionist, and radical libertarian who maintained that governments should be strictly limited to protecting the natural rights of individuals. Here Spooner argues that vices "are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness," whereas crimes are actions that violate the rights of other people. He concludes that any effort to prohibit personal vices through the force of law is hypocritical, counter-productive, and profoundly unjust.

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