About this item
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.
About the Author
Timothy Sandefur is Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute. Before joining Goldwater, he served for 15 years as an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, where he led its Economic Liberty Project, to protect businesses and entrepreneurs against abusive government regulation. He has won important victories for free enterprise in California, Kentucky, Missouri, Oregon, and other states. His books include Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st Century America (coauthored with Christina Sandefur, 2016) , The Right to Earn A Living: Economic Freedom And The Law (2010) , The Conscience of The Constitution (2013) , and The Permission Society (forthcoming, 2016) , as well as some 45 scholarly articles on subjects ranging from eminent domain and economic liberty to copyright, evolution and creationism, slavery and the Civil War, and the political philosophy of Shakespeare, ancient Greek drama, and Star Trek. He is a graduate of Chapman University School of Law and Hillsdale College. He is an Adjunct Scholar with the Cato Institute, and his articles have appeared in Liberty, The Claremont Review of Books, National Review, Regulation, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other places. He is a frequent guest on radio and television programs, including John Stossel, Kennedy, The Armstrong and Getty Show, and CPSAN's Book TV.
