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The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, by Stephen Holmes, Cass R. Sunstein, Cass Sunstein
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All legally enforceable rights cost money. This is a practical, common sense notion but one ignored by almost everyone. To "fight for your rights," or anyone else's, is not just to debate principles but to haggle over budgets. Most conservatives imagine that rights our exercised to property, speech, and religion "free" of government "interference". Yet such rights would not exist if the government could not collect taxes to codify, protect and enforce them. Meanwhile, most liberals prefer to avoid the harsh reality that spending resources on some rights means not spending them on other, perhaps more valuable, rights. The insights that rights are expensive is a reminder that freedom is not violated by a government that taxes and spends. Rather, freedom requires such government and requires a citizenry vigilant about how money is allocated. This work seeks to change the terms of the USA's critical and contentious political debates.
- Sales Rank: #1741657 in Books
- Published on: 1999-03-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .97" h x 5.74" w x 8.57" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 255 pages
Amazon.com Review
Whittle away the dense academic prose, and the message of The Cost of Rights is disarmingly simple: as Robert A. Heinlein once put it, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." If legal rights are to be considered meaningful, argue coauthors Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein, the existence of a government is required to first establish and then to enforce those rights. Running a government costs money; therefore, paying taxes is necessary in order to support the communal infrastructure that upholds individual rights. Each of the book's 14 chapters is essentially a variation on this theme, considering the proposition with regard to property rights, the effect of scarcity upon liberty, or the ways in which religious liberty contributes to social stability, all leading back to the conclusion that "government is still the most effective instrument available by which a politically charged society can pursue its common objectives, including the shared aim of securing the protection of legal rights for all."
From Publishers Weekly
Perhaps no subject has dominated American discourse in the past 200 years as much as the question of rights?what they are, who has them and under what circumstances. Holmes (Passions and Constraint), a political science professor at Princeton and NYU Law School, and Sunstein (Free Markets and Social Justice), a law professor at the University of Chicago, argue persuasively that all rights are political. That is, rights are not moral absolutes, independent of government constraints, but "public goods," funded by taxes, administered by government and subject to distributive justice. According to the authors, no right is costless. Even so-called "negative rights," such as the right to hold property free of government interference, must be supervised and maintained by tax-funded courtrooms, police and fire stations. The authors profess to be violating a "cultural taboo... against the 'costing out' of rights enforcement." While interesting and well argued, the book isn't that bold. It's a reply to free-lunch liberals and to law-and-economics libertarians such as Richard Epstein and Charles Murray, who, in the authors' view, delude themselves with 18th-century "double-think" about their "immaculate independence" from the government. But Sunstein and Holmes don't really address how the rights debate has evolved. Instead of considering workfare or the myriad other ways rights have expanded and contracted in the 1990s, their book merely restates?albeit concisely?the old terms of the debate.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Offering nuanced ideas, Holmes (Political Science/Princeton and New York Univ. Law School) and Sunstein (Law/Univ. of Chicago) defend modern liberalism in the attention-getting guise of arguing for taxation. Liberalism is at heart a system of rights designed to promote and protect individual welfare and self-development. Yet rights are also a ``public good.'' Their well-being is dependent upon the willingness of the community, through government, to protect and enforce them. In turn, the community must also be willing to give a portion of its collective assets in the form of taxes to the government so that government may carry out its enforcement responsibilities. In other words, rights cost money. A truism to be sure, but one, the authors argue, ignored by most everyone. Liberals, for instance, worry that focusing on the cost of rights may lead to further cuts in budgetary allocations for the protection of rights. Conservatives avoid looking at such costs as it may reveal how dependent private wealth is, in the form of myriad protections of private property, on government and taxpayers' contributions. Nevertheless, thinking of rights in terms of cost may reveal much. Arguments over competing rights are often arguments over money; spending more on one right may mean spending less on another. So how public resources are allocated can substantially affect the scope and value of rights. This leads to questions, all examined by the authors, of who decides what resources are spent to protect what rights for the benefit of what groups of individuals. We might want to examine if government spending on rights protection benefits society overall or too often only those groups with strong political influence. Holmes and Sunstein conclude with a call for greater democratic accountability in such spending and more public debate over the priority of rights. Sure to hearten some and irritate others, this work is a valuable contribution to our ongoing debate on rights and justice. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Fantastic articulation of a civic conception of freedom
By Michel
It's important to point out that the reason books like this get "Low" star ratings is not that they are bad - it's because they are so good. Libertarians and Tea Partiers along with like minded anti-government radicals often see these books come up and vote them down out of spite or annoyance. Cost of Rights is wonderful book for those looking for an argument against common Libertarian "Taxes are Theft" argument. How did they come to earn all this wealth? Aren't we said to deserve the wealth that we earn? Why however, are the nexus of public and civic goods that make our wealth creation possible, supposed to be free? They cannot be. Some things must be done by everyone if they are to be done at all, and we all owe the ability to create our wealth back into the system that made it possible. This book is a great articulation of the need for public goods. One of the best Anti-Libertarian books ever written.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Liberty, Taxation and Private Property
By Tea Drinker
Liberty depends on the institution of private property (PP). PP is not a known collection of specific things but an exclusionary right for managing limited resources in our society that requires an expensive, tax paid system for enforcing PP boundaries (preventing me from lying, cheating,stealing and/or using force to take your stuff) and for determining ambiguous PP boundaries, for example, determining through legislation, regulation, or the courts when your PP uses (uses are an essential legal right of PP) injure me and mine and regulating your uses. Liberty also depends on public investments in roads, education, and health, which are also expensive and require taxation. Finally, individual liberty depends upon political support from We the People because PP is justified as it promotes the "general welfare," as the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution suggests. These conclusions are not the the specific gist of The Cost of Rights, but are a general reduction of it.
All individual rights are exclusionary, and PP, which is a good summary of individual rights--as James Madison observed in his little essay "Property" in 1792--certainly is exclusionary. If I have PP in something, I can exclude others from interfering with it whether it is speech, religious practice, or land and bank accounts. John Locke championed PP as a natural right to contradict the view of Robert Filmer of the Monarchist Party that the monarch owned all land. But Locke never intended that land, income, or other resources of individual ownership (property) were not subject to taxation for the general welfare.
Because the private uses of resources are potentially unlimited, the boundaries of PP are often ambiguous. To serve the general welfare and prevent such things as excessive and harmful resource inequality, the fine-tuning of what people can and cannot do through private action with their resources is continually necessary, although at the same time there need be considerable certainty in the system so that people can plan their resource use most productively. Likewise, taxation to provide public investment for private production, including for such things as instituting public health care, is an important part of protecting PP and at the same time promoting the general welfare.
The authors of the Cost of Rights are brilliant legal scholars who provide us with a thoughtful understanding of individual liberty and the union of We the People.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Give Me Liberty, Taxes, and Government
By Edwin C. Pauzer
If you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, perhaps you should also not judge a book by its title. While this title seems like a natural cure for somnambulism, next to sex and death, I found the content very interesting.
Since our founding, many Americans have believed that taxes have robbed us of our freedom, that it is big government imposing its will on a grudging public, and that taxes and liberties are antithetical. Authors, Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein make a simple counter proposition: liberty depends on taxes. Liberty costs money. Without money their could be no freedom and without a government there would be no one to ensure that our rights were preserved. Government is not some outside force that dominates our political and social fabric. The authors contend that government is the most effective means for "a politically organized society [to] pursue its common objectives, including the shared aim of securing the protection of legal rights for all."
Even negative liberties, a term which means that the government imposes restraining forces upon itself in dealing with its citizens, cost money e.g. the recent ruling in which religious extremists are allowed to desecrate the funeral services and burial of our servicemen and women, required a government intervention such as the Supreme Court, and may still require government intervention, such as polic, in protecting mourners or those who taunt them out of misguided religious zeal. Again, all these liberties are costs that we accept. The authors find even negative rights are positive.
If the cost of certain liberties are too much as some citizens claim, then they are unwilling for their taxes to be used to pay for them, or the citizen-government will simply decide that these costs are too high. A case in point is the rich kid who gets into trouble, whose parents can retain topnotch lawyers for the defense of their son. This cannot be said of the kid from the ghetto who is arrested. Can the government pay for the each and every citizen getting a reputable lawyer for every defendant? Maybe, but do they want to? No. That liberty or right is a price government finds too much.
The citizen might object to paying taxes for healthcare for the poor, while already paying taxes for veterans, who are wounded, injured, or just old. In fact taxes for welfare actually began after the Civil War in providing prostheses and medical attention to the veterans.
Liberties are choices, and the choices depend on the money available to enforce them. Each tax does not have to be listed as a taxable item in the Constitution for the taxes to be valid and legal, as some misguided interpretations of the document suggest. That argument is most common on "hot button" issues such as prayer in public. One side might claim that it is freedom of speech demanding government support while the other side believes it is imposing a religious belief and violates their freedom.
The book is divided into four sections: why a penniless state cannot protect rights; why rights cannot be absolutes; why rights entail responsibilities, understanding rights as a bargain, and the public character of private freedoms. These sections have chapters of their own.
Twice now in a short time, I have found a valuable source for a segment of the public that needs it the most, will probably not because of one of the authors' name--Cass Sunstein. He is vilified on right wing radio and Fox TV even though his scholarship in the law is evident in his multiple publications. The authors are not advocating a particular political stance. They are dispassionate in their description of the relationship between liberties and taxes. Their simple claim is that liberty does not survive without a government or taxes.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "...to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men."
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