Arguments For Liberty

In Arguments for Liberty, Lester emerges as the contemporary follow-up to Frederic Bastiat. As Bastiat so quotably said, "The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else." Lester picks up that ball and runs with it, to wonderful effect. What he has to say about a lot of currently hot topics - abortion, discrimination, AIDS, heroin, and several more - is bracing, always interesting, and generally, to my mind, convincing. What it convinces one of is what the liberal view implies about these things. There are plenty of illiberal people about - all supporters of government are more or less illiberal, after all - and whether it will convince them is another matter. But it is great to have the liberal view so pungently expounded on so many important topics; Professor Jan Narveson, author of The Libertarian Idea; Mainstream libertarianism involves the conflation of certain kinds of deontological rights, property rules, and 'supporting justifications'; and without an explicit theory of liberty to explain any of these. Lester has a radical new paradigm. A central pre-propertarian and non-normative abstract theory of liberty is 'the absence of interpersonal proactive constraints on want-satisfaction' (for short, 'no pro-active impositions'). Maximally applying this to the real world entails self-ownership, all other property rules, solutions to relevant philosophical problems, and compatibility with preference-utilitarian welfare. The theoretico-practical derivations (of what liberty entails) are in principle separate from their ideological advocation (that liberty is desirable). And both are put as conjectures for criticism rather than as 'justifications' that supposedly transcend the realm of assumptions; Professor Ray Scott Percival, author of The Myth of the Closed Mind