Permission Society
Subtitle: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges, and What We Can Do about It
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9781594038396
Subjects: Liberty; Political culture; United states, politics and government
Description: Throughout history, kings and emperors have promised "freedoms" to their people. Yet these freedoms were really only permissions handed down from on high. The American Revolution inaugurated a new vision: people have basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and government must ask permission from them. Sadly, today's increasingly bureaucratic society is beginning to turn back the clock and to transform America into a nation where our freedoms - the right to speak freely, to earn a living, to own a gun, to use private property, even the right to take medicine to save one's own life - are again treated as privileges the government may grant or withhold at will. Timothy Sandefur examines the history of the distinction between rights and privileges that played such an important role in the American experiment, and how we can fight to retain our freedoms against the growing power of government. Illustrated with dozens of real-life examples - including many cases he litigated himself - Sandefur shows how treating freedoms as government-creating privileges undermines our Constitution and betrays the basic princples of human dignity. -- from dust jacket.