Is American Liberty Imperiled?

If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, then it is necessary to take a step back from the transient issues of the day, which so often transfix our capital city, and assess the state of liberty in America. According to two new books, liberty in America has been under a relentless, though often subtle, assault. In Constitutional Chaos, Judge Andrew Napolitano maintains that most Americans take their constitutional rights and liberties for granted and are largely ignorant of how the government breaks its own laws and gets away with it. In Go Directly to Jail, Cato Institute senior editor Gene Healy shows how the government has been criminalizing more and more citizen conduct. With more than 4,000 federal offenses on the statute books and thousands more buried in the Code of Federal Regulations, Healy points out that there are good reasons to be alarmed by the government’s perfectly “legal” restrictions, investigations, and prosecutions. Please join us for a discussion of these disturbing trends and what might be done about them.