The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and
Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution
in the Name of Justice ...[2008]
The Tyranny of Good Intentions is replete with examples of how government treads on freedom through ill-willed prosecution and faceless bureaucracy.
The book's overpowering sense of disaffection sometimes leads to alarmist prose: "We the People have vanished. Our place has been taken by wise men and anointed elites."
The authors are swift to suggest that America, barring "an intellectual rebirth," may yet go the way of "German Nazis and Soviet communists."
Yet
The Tyranny of Good Intentions is nothing if not well intended; it is full of passion and always on the attack, whether the writers are taking on racial quotas, wetland regulations, or any number of policies they find objectionable.
In a jacket blurb, libertarian icon Milton Friedman calls it "a devastating indictment of our current system of justice."
Roberts and Stratton, although right-leaning in many of their political sympathies, will probably find plenty of fans on ACLU-left--and anybody who cringes at the thought of unbridled state power.
If the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions, consider this book an atlas.
--John J. Miller
5.0 out of 5 stars
Government an Obstacle to Freedom, Not a SourceOctober 17, 2001
By The Independent Review
Format:Hardcover
Excerpts from a book review by Nikos A. Leverenz in The Independent Review (Fall 2001) The Tyranny of Good Intentions should make those who participate in our political and legal systems uncomfortable, if not self-loathing.
Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M Stratton's principal argument is that what passes for "law" in the current civil climate is far removed from the "long struggle to establish the people's sovereignity" that dates back to pre-Norman England. Simply put, the law has been transformed from a shield that protects the people from the encroachments of government power into a sword that enables the government to lord over people.
Those who are weary of the ongoing government assault on Microsoft and the tobacco industry or of the continued evisceration of civil liberties under the tutelary banner of the drug war should immediately recognize this transformation.
The Tyranny of Good Intentions highlights two broad areas in which the content and enforcement of the law now serve as a sword against what is loosely termed "the Rights of Englishmen": namely, "prohibitions against crimes without intent, retroactive law, and self-incrimination."
First, the authors consider how government prosecutors, manifesting a win-at-all-costs mentality, sacrifice the quest for truth in order to advance their careers. Second, the adbication of legislative power to administrative agencies has eroded the Anglo-Saxon legal maxim "a delegated power cannot itself be delegated."
Those who are actively engaged in policymaking and law enforcement would do well to read The Tyranny of Good Intentions, even if it gives them only momentary pause in their assorted "public interest" crusades to leave hoof prints on the people's constitutional liberties.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Read this and weep for what has been lost. August 7, 2000
By Michael F. Zinn
Format:Hardcover
A fascinating analysis of the origins of the police state arising out of America's bureaucracy. As the authors present it, the Constitution has become an relic for the history books.
Ordinary people are routinely crushed by viciousness on the part of US Government employees who act with a sense of mission, and without a sense of proportion. This is not a first person account, but a well researched journalistic attempt to tie together disturbing trends that most people see as isolated events.
As one who has experienced a Mad Dog Prosecutor (and written a first-person account of it), I can state that this book is far from exaggerated in its description of the abuse of ordinary and honest people by our government.
The constitutional protections we were taught all about in school have become a fiction.
