[FEE.org] Nobody but a fool or an impostor pretends that he, as an individual, has a right to punish other men for their vices."
Over the years, Americans’ power to make their own decisions has been increasingly displaced by governments. That trend has been justified in part by the desire to control what government views as vice (including an increasing tendency to find vice in environmental effects). Unfortunately, that approach violates citizens’ inalienable self-ownership, unlike deterring crime, which better protects citizens’ self-ownership. It has made government a hyperactive nanny-state bully rather than a protector against bullying.
This externally-enforced "self-control" justifies reconsidering Lysander Spooner, whose birthday is January 19. Spooner laid out why our natural right of self-ownership, combined with the right to enter into voluntary arrangements with other self-owners, made government coercion of peaceful people illegitimate, a moral principle not to be overridden just because someone with political power considers others’ choices to be vices. Since we are now far from that ethical standard, we need to rediscover his vision, spelled out in his 1875 Vices Are Not Crimes; A Vindication of Moral Liberty: |