When I took Constitutional Law in undergrad, my professor asserted something like:
Every law involves some restriction of freedom.
He challenged us to come up with a law that did not restrict citizens’ freedom in some way. I suggested that the Motor Voter Act may not have restricted anybody’s freedom, since the law made it mandatory for DMV offices to offer to register citizens to vote when they came to get their drivers licenses.
Later, I thought that he probably came to that conclusion because of libertarian anti-government influences. I tend to view the government in more positivist terms. I don’t think it is a necessary evil because I don’t think it is necessarily evil at all.
I understand the anti-government libertarian position in the abstract, and I have to respect it for being one of the most consistent modern political philosophies. But I really wonder if its adherents have thought about what their system would look like in reality.
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