Are we less free now?

David Boaz asks the question riffing off a Washington Post review of my book.  Anita  Allen, the reviewer, says we were never “as free as Harsanyi imagines, and we are not now the “children” he peevishly fears we have become.” Well, of course not. The introduction clearly erects the parameters of what I am talking about. Overall we are as free as we have ever been. Government dependency is growing on every level, however, and that’s why we’re “turning” into a nation of children.

Open the newspaper on any random page, and you can find evidence of the growing tendency to meddle in our lives: seat-belt laws, smoking bans, trans-fat bans, potty parity and on and on. But are those things worse than the older laws that Allen cites? And if you go back further than she did, you can find worse indignities: established churches, slavery, married women denied property rights. So while we should deplore the deprivations of freedom that Harsanyi explores, we should not necessarily conclude that we’re progressively less free.

The review is written by a critic who disagrees with my underlying ideological take on the world, and that is something that doesn’t bother me. It’s 100 steps above the typical right-wingers-are-crazy attacks I see elsewhere.

Plus, Allen writes that, “To make this book work, it helps to read Harsanyi as a 21st-century John Stuart Mill. In “On Liberty ” (1859), Mill condemned laws prohibiting gambling, polygamy and the use of drugs and alcohol. The “only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others,” Mill wrote. “His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

Now, that is something I can live definitely with.