Unfortunately, the recent trend — embraced by a wide spectrum of advocates (with unimportant modifications) from President Nixon to Milton Friedman on the right to a large number on the left — is to abolish the current welfare system not in the direction of freedom but toward its very opposite. This new trend is the “guaranteed annual income” or “negative income tax,” or President Nixon’s “Family Assistance Plan.” Citing the inefficiencies, inequities, and red tape of the present [p.

Until the last few years there were few institutions in America that were held more sacred — especially by liberals — than the public school. Devotion to the public school had seized even those early Americans — such as Jeffersonians and Jacksonians — who were libertarian in most other respects. In recent years the public school was supposed to be a crucial ingredient of democracy, the fount of brotherhood, and the enemy of elitism and separateness in American life.

While current educationists do not go as far as the Ku Klux Klan, it is important to realize that the very nature of the public school requires the imposition of uniformity and the stamping out of diversity and individuality in education.

The very existence of the public school system, furthermore, involves a complex network of coerced levies and subsidies, all of which are difficult to justify on any ethical grounds whatever. In the first place, public schools force those parents who wish to send their children to private schools to shoulder a double burden: they are coerced into subsidizing public school children, and they also have to pay for their own children’s education.

With the exception of the effects of compulsory attendance laws, the same strictures we have levelled against public schools can also be directed against public higher education, with one noteworthy addition. There is increasing evidence that, certainly in the case of public higher education, the coerced subsidy is largely in the direction of forcing poorer citizens to subsidize the education of the wealthier!

The case for outlawing any product or activity is essentially the same twofold argument we have seen used to justify the compulsory commitment of mental patients: it will harm the person involved, or it will lead that person to commit crimes against others. It is curious that the general — and justified — horror of drugs has led the mass of the public to an irrational enthusiasm for outlawing them.

In the fall of 1971, the Knapp Commission focused public attention on the problem of widespread police corruption in New York City. Midst the drama of individual cases, there is a danger of overlooking what is clearly the central problem, a problem of which the Knapp Commission itself was perfectly aware. In virtually every case of corruption, the policemen were involved in regularly functioning businesses which, by government fiat, had been declared illegal.

For most of the activities in this chapter, liberals tend to favor freedom of trade and activity while conservatives yearn for rigorous enforcement and maximum crackdowns against violators of the law. Yet, mysteriously, in the drive for gun laws the positions tend to be reversed. Every time a gun is used in a violent crime, liberals redouble their agitation for the severe restriction, if not prohibition of private ownership of guns, while conservatives oppose such restrictions on behalf of individual freedom.