The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (2007)

Holmes, Stephen and Sunstein, Cass R. (2000). The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes. W.W. Norton, 255 pp., $14.95, paperback, ISBN 0-393-32033-2; hardcover (1999), ISBN 0-393-04670-2. Law professors write on such a broad variety of subjects that other disciplines sometimes miss law-related publications that would also be relevant to them. Given the broad breadth of Public Administration, this is a particularly regular event. In this case, two law school faculty members from New York University and the University of Chicago have written a book that needs to be flagged for the attention of Public Administration. Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein, have, unintentionally, written a landmark justification for public administration in American society. Their fresh, innovative and clear-eyed review of the need for the administrative state ought to be required reading in every PA theory seminar as well as for every MPA training program. If ever a book explained the rationale for public administration, it is this one. Casting stale political cliches aside, Holmes and Sunstein make the compelling argument that the basic liberties and freedoms associated with the American constitutional system require the existence of a competent and well-financed administrative apparatus to implement them. The basic argument of the book is this: Americans seem easily to forget that individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action. Without effective government, American citizens would not be able to enjoy their private property in the way they do. Indeed, they would enjoy few of none of their constitutionally guaranteed individual rights. Personal liberty, as Americans value and experience it, presupposes social cooperation managed by government officials. The private realm we rightly prize is sustained, indeed created, by public action. (pp. 14-5) They convincingly argue that, for example, freedom of speech is not - administratively - free. It cannot exist without an effective system of courts, prosecutors, law enforcement and publicly subsidized legal aid attorneys. It even requires the assistance of municipal parks and public works departments to help cover the costs of assuring the exercise of free speech in public places. Contrary to the claims of the political right, there can be no 'natural' freedoms and liberties that are truly costless. For a conservative to argue that the best government is one that stays out of people's lives is, essentially, an argument not for personal liberty but for anarchy. A systematic analysis of the freedoms listed in the Bill of Rights demonstrates that they are not and can never be free. Nor can they be self-enforcing. Rather, all liberties require a governmental system to assure their implementation. Public administration is civilization. It brings order out of anarchy, including personal freedoms to individuals. Another example from the First Amendment would be more relevant to public administration's 'sister' field of nonprofit management. Is freedom of religion truly free? No, the authors point out. The polity has agreed to give many governmental services to religious congregations (which almost universally are constituted in the US as nonprofit corporations) for free or below cost. Exemptions from property taxes, tax deductibility of donations and other benefits mean that the taxpayers as a whole have to pay for such tax expenditures and subsidies. This entails the creation of a complex bureaucracy to administer these privileges we associate with freedom of religion: income tax departments, property tax assessors, judicial appeal processes and so on. Similarly, the authors debunk the artificial differentiation between personal freedoms and entitlements of the modern state. …