Lost Rights
The Destruction of American Liberty
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From Justice Department officials seizing people's homes based on mere rumors to the IRS and its master plan to prohibit the nation's self-employed from working for themselves to the perpetrators of the Waco siege, government officials are tearing the Bill of Rights to pieces. Today's citizen is now more likely than ever to violate some unknown law or regulation and be placed at the mercy of an administrator or politician hungering for publicity. Unfortunately, the only way many government agencies can measure their "public service" is by the number of citizens they harass, hinder, restrain, or jail.
James Bovard's Lost Rights provides a highly entertaining analysis of the bloated excess of government and the plight of contemporary Americans beaten into submission by a horrible parody of the Founding Fathers' dream.
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A critic of governmental hypocrisy in his exposes The Fair Trade Fraud and The Farm Fiasco , Bovard over-extends himself in this libertarian broadside against government interventions such as school condom-giveaway programs and the minimum wage. He makes worthy points, however, arguing, for example, that only those who can afford to sue can protect their property rights and that the need for drunk-driving checkpoints results from police incompetence in controlling previously convicted drunken drivers. But Bovard proffers sweeping statements like ``Civil rights law has gone from letting black people sit at luncheon counters to entitling people with infectious diseases to prepare and serve them lunch.'' Another shocker: ``The federal tax system has turned individuals into sharecroppers of their own lives .'' A bit less bluster and more discretion would have produced a more effective polemic.
