Author: James Fitzjames Stephen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Equality
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description

Author: Richard A. Epstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674063058
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Following a vast expansion in the twentieth century, government is beginning to creak at the joints under its enormous weight. The signs are clear: a bloated civil service, low approval ratings for Congress and the President, increasing federal-state conflict, rampant distrust of politicians and government officials, record state deficits, and major unrest among public employees. In this compact, clearly written book, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein advocates a much smaller federal government, arguing that our over-regulated state allows too much discretion on the part of regulators, which results in arbitrary, unfair decisions, rent-seeking, and other abuses. Epstein bases his classical liberalism on the twin pillars of the rule of law and of private contracts and property rights—an overarching structure that allows private property to keep its form regardless of changes in population, tastes, technology, and wealth. This structure also makes possible a restrained public administration to implement limited objectives. Government continues to play a key role as night-watchman, but with the added flexibility in revenues and expenditures to attend to national defense and infrastructure formation. Although no legal system can eliminate the need for discretion in the management of both private and public affairs, predictable laws can cabin the zone of discretion and permit arbitrary decisions to be challenged. Joining a set of strong property rights with sound but limited public administration could strengthen the rule of law, with its virtues of neutrality, generality, clarity, consistency, and forward-lookingness, and reverse the contempt and cynicism that have overcome us.

Author: Elizabeth Price Foley
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300134991
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
divIn the opening chapter of this book, Elizabeth Price Foley writes, “The slow, steady, and silent subversion of the Constitution has been a revolution that Americans appear to have slept through, unaware that the blessings of liberty bestowed upon them by the founding generation were being eroded.” She proceeds to explain how, by abandoning the founding principles of limited government and individual liberty, we have become entangled in a labyrinth of laws that regulate virtually every aspect of behavior and limit what we can say, read, see, consume, and do. Foley contends that the United States has become a nation of too many laws where citizens retain precious few pockets of individual liberty. With a close analysis of urgent constitutional questions—abortion, physician-assisted suicide, medical marijuana, gay marriage, cloning, and U.S. drug policy—Foley shows how current constitutional interpretation has gone astray. Without the bias of any particular political agenda, she argues convincingly that we need to return to original conceptions of the Constitution and restore personal freedoms that have gradually diminished over time./DIV

Author: John Bona
Publisher: BroadStreet Publishing Group LLC
ISBN: 1424552907
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
News reports bring to our ears daily stories of further intrusion in our lives and increased regulations too many to number. America is losing its heritage of God-given freedoms, which were originally derived from biblical teaching. We sense that our well-sung liberties are being lost to a point of no return. The Liberty Book examines the Christian roots of liberty, idolatry, taxation, foundations for freedom, the right to bear arms, the great freedom documents in history, pro-life and liberty, land rights, social involvement, and more. With God’s help freedom can be revived. We must all work to pull America back from the cliffs-edge fall into tyranny. Our nation is again in search of genuine liberty under God. Discover what Bible-based liberty looks like and how it can be won for you and your children.

Author: John Stuart Mill
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781536930368
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
In his much quoted, seminal work, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill attempts to establish standards for the relationship between authority and liberty. He emphasizes the importance of individuality which he conceived as a prerequisite to the higher pleasures-the summum bonum of Utilitarianism. Published in 1859, On Liberty presents one of the most eloquent defenses of individual freedom and is perhaps the most widely-read liberal argument in support of the value of liberty.

Author: Benjamin Constant
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Book Description
This is an essay by Benjamin Constant. In this essay, Constant contrasted two views on freedom: one held by "the Ancients," particularly those in Classical Greece, and the other by members of modern societies. He investigates the dangers of attempting to impose ancient liberty in a modern context, as well as the risks associated with each type of liberty. The danger of ancient liberty was that men, preoccupied with securing their share of social power, might place too little value on individual rights and pleasures. The danger of modern liberty is that we will give up our right to participate in political power too easily, absorbed in the enjoyment of our independence and the pursuit of our particular interests." Constant believes that the two types of liberty must eventually be combined.

Author: Ron Paul
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1455504432
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In Liberty Defined, congressman and #1 New York Times bestselling author Ron Paul returns with his most provocative, comprehensive, and compelling arguments for personal freedom to date. The term "Liberty" is so commonly used in our country that it has become a mere cliche. But do we know what it means? What it promises? How it factors into our daily lives? And most importantly, can we recognize tyranny when it is sold to us disguised as a form of liberty? Dr. Paul writes that to believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions. It is the seed of America. This is a comprehensive guide to Dr. Paul's position on fifty of the most important issues of our times, from Abortion to Zionism. Accessible, easy to digest, and fearless in its discussion of controversial topics, Liberty Defined sheds new light on a word that is losing its shape.

Author: John Phillip Reid
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226708966
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
"Liberty was the most cherished right possessed by English-speaking people in the eighteenth century. It was both an ideal for the guidance of governors and a standard with which to measure the constitutionality of government; both a cause of the American Revolution and a purpose for drafting the United States Constitution; both an inheritance from Great Britain and a reason republican common lawyers continued to study the law of England." As John Philip Reid goes on to make clear, "liberty" did not mean to the eighteenth-century mind what it means today. In the twentieth century, we take for granted certain rights—such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press—with which the state is forbidden to interfere. To the revolutionary generation, liberty was preserved by curbing its excesses. The concept of liberty taught not what the individual was free to do but what the rule of law permitted. Ultimately, liberty was law—the rule of law and the legalism of custom. The British constitution was the charter of liberty because it provided for the rule of law. Drawing on an impressive command of the original materials, Reid traces the eighteenth-century notion of liberty to its source in the English common law. He goes on to show how previously problematic arguments involving the related concepts of licentiousness, slavery, arbitrary power, and property can also be fit into the common-law tradition. Throughout, he focuses on what liberty meant to the people who commented on and attempted to influence public affairs on both sides of the Atlantic. He shows the depth of pride in liberty—English liberty—that pervaded the age, and he also shows the extent—unmatched in any other era or among any other people—to which liberty both guided and motivated political and constitutional action.

Author: Nancy J. Hirschmann
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825369
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This book reconsiders the dominant Western understandings of freedom through the lens of women's real-life experiences of domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Nancy Hirschmann argues that the typical approach to freedom found in political philosophy severely reduces the concept's complexity, which is more fully revealed by taking such practical issues into account. Hirschmann begins by arguing that the dominant Western understanding of freedom does not provide a conceptual vocabulary for accurately characterizing women's experiences. Often, free choice is assumed when women are in fact coerced--as when a battered woman who stays with her abuser out of fear or economic necessity is said to make this choice because it must not be so bad--and coercion is assumed when free choices are made--such as when Westerners assume that all veiled women are oppressed, even though many Islamic women view veiling as an important symbol of cultural identity. Understanding the contexts in which choices arise and are made is central to understanding that freedom is socially constructed through systems of power such as patriarchy, capitalism, and race privilege. Social norms, practices, and language set the conditions within which choices are made, determine what options are available, and shape our individual subjectivity, desires, and self-understandings. Attending to the ways in which contexts construct us as "subjects" of liberty, Hirschmann argues, provides a firmer empirical and theoretical footing for understanding what freedom means and entails politically, intellectually, and socially.

Author: Estrelda Alexander
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Pentecostal churches
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This book shares the stories of four women - Florence Crawford, Mary Magdalena Lewis Tate, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Ida Robinson - who, despite their gender, pursued their freedom to preach and defend the Christian gospel. The author hopes clergywomen will find guidance and solutions in the stories of these courageous women.