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Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty | 
 enlarge | Author: James Bovard
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy Used: $2.60
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Avg. Customer Rating:  39 reviews
Sales Rank: 226697
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0312123337
Dewey Decimal Number: 323.0973
EAN: 9780312123338
ASIN: 0312123337
Publication Date: September 15, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Product 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. Already a major issue in the deliberations of the Congress that took office in January of 1995, the power and size of government is certain to be a prominent factor in the 1996 presidential elections. 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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| Customer Reviews: Read 34 more reviews...
 An ageless primer for those who love liberty. June 13, 2008
"Lost Rights" is as relevant today as it was when first published in 1994...perhaps even more relevant. It is a great asset for those who were either too young or not aware of these things when they happened. To understand where we are today we all need to know how we got here in the first place. Understanding the mistakes of the past will help lead the way to correcting those mistakes and insuring that we do not make them again.
Slow boiled frog February 6, 2008
Bovard will ignite a fire in your belly; a bottle of antacid will come in handy. I found myself shaking my head throughout: our government is out of control; it is growing exponentially; almost laughable if it weren't so serious. Bovard is not lacking in ammunition: there is extensive references and plenty of examples of abuses: "to a degree, most of the examples discussed in this book could be categorized as abuses of arbitrary power", "but nowadays laws increasingly exist to bind citizens, not government". He quotes from the Constitution, and The Bill of Rights, and he bases chapters on the amendments. You will come to realize we are not really free.
Some of the abuses covered: property rights (everyone has felt this pain), the inept public schools, entitlements----"Insofar as the coercive powers of government are to be used to insure that particular people get particular things, it requires a kind of discrimination between, and an unequal treatment of, different people which is irreconcilable with a free society", the drug war, gun controls, the tax tyranny----"the more power the IRS acquires, the more subjugated the citizen becomes", and "the federal tax system has turned individuals into share croppers of their own lives", government agencies censorship, and the laws that are violating our rights. Bovard states a few cases where there have been some reversals of government bureaucracies, but at a cost, and only to be proved advantageous much later.
When government is in the business of improving "quality" it ends in quantity and thus goes in the opposite direction. We are losing our Republic to fascism and socialism: laws are creating criminals overnight, our tax code is nothing less than legalized theft----extortion. We have become complacent, and have allowed our freedoms to slowly wither away; the boiling frog analogy fits well. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, yes, but there is hope: we can vote him out too, and we can start getting active.
A good accompaniment is "Men in black" by Mark Levin and "Constitutional Chaos" by Judge Andrew Napolitano.
Wish you well
Scott
Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty January 25, 2008
Great Book, good read and very thoughtfully written. Too bad the book will not elicit enough patriotism in the average American to stand up for their rights before it's too late.
Book arrived in condition described. Thank you.
Destruction of America June 9, 2007
Behind the scenes plans for the destruction of the United States and the men who are involved.
 A potent and well documented book. A must read for every citizen concerned about growing government March 6, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
With Lost Rights, James Bovard follows the increase in the size of the federal government in the 20th century and demonstrates how, with each successive layer of new laws and bigger government, the citizens are being coerced in ways that would make the Founders roll over in their graves.
With a style that masterfully intersperses meticulously documented incidents with his own dry, acerbic and often mocking wit, the author demonstrates how an overabundance of laws are increasingly written, not by Congress, but by bureaucrats and regulatory agencies, who see their jobs as a way to tyrannically impose their personal ideologoies on American citizens and business with little regard to the cost or burden. And all too often, the rules they write have the express intention of favoring one party or destroying another.
Bovard gets to the root of governmental expansion. Namely, overstating a problem is the fast track to more fame, more money, and more power for many politicians and bureaucrats. They have every incentive to exaggerate a problem, foster new legislation, and boast about being proactive. This goes on perpetually until nearly every area of life is subject to some kind of government oversight and regulation. And it's so pervasive, most have become immune and oblivious to it.
The author shows, in one frightening anecdote after another, how the government intends to prevail against the citizen one way or another. The outcome of bureacratic hearings are predetermined. Citizens going up against the IRS are presumed guilty and are subject to property forfeitures until they prove otherwise. Citizens who have property (especially cash) seized by police under the thinnest of pretexts stand little chance of ever getting it back, and the procedural cost of doing so negates the effort.
These are just a few of the injustices detailed in Lost Rights that will leave you shaking your head in disbelief and seething in anger. Others include the abuse of teachers unions and their disdain for parental involvement, the futility of the war on drugs and pornography, the failure of public housing, the subjugating effect of government subsidies, and the power to destroy that comes with the power to tax. To be fair, Bovard does inform the reader parenthetically that some of the most egregious abuses of government have been rejected by the courts.
Time after time, Bovard shows that the best governmental intentions go awry and the realities rarely live up to the promises. Government also has a knack for not anticipating the secondary (often negative) consequences of their policy proposals. Bovard calls for us to start judging government programs more by how effective they have been rather than the flowery rhetoric that always accompanies a new proposal.
For those who favor a more laissez faire government, and want to know just how corrupt, inept, and coercive our government has become, Bovard is a treasure. He convincingly makes the case that the more laws we have, the more injustice increases.
Bovard's one weakness is a flaw common among libertarian advocates and that is he weighs the benefit of every policy on a "net good" basis. If government intervention in a problem doesn't result in an appreciable postive change, the government program should be cast aside. But such a conclusion doesn't examine whether, in the absense of the program in question, would the problem be even worse? Such suggestions also ignore political reality. Right or wrong, people expect the government to "do something" about perceived problems whether it will be effective or not. The solution is obviously to have a more informed and skeptical populace. If everyone in America read this book, it would be a good start.
Bovard's style can be a little too bombastic and bellicose for some who might be of a more left/moderate persuasion. He opens himself up criticism by seeing the world in a very binary fashion with almost no shades of grey. Many will say he's throwing the baby out with the bathwater every time he sees injustice on the part of government. But for the most part, his outrage is justified, as well as infectious, and his anecdotes are faithfully documented.
One of the saddest, and all too real, insights Bovard comes to is about the drama that unfolded in Waco, Texas in 1993 at the Branch Davidian property. Bovard concludes, and I believe he is correct, that the show of force at Waco was intended primarily to send a message, "Obey the government or else." Only after the fact did the FBI admit most of the justifications made contemporaneously for raiding the compound were completely fabricated.
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