Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty by James Bovard (Libertarian Institute, 2023)

Read it and you will grasp the truth: government has far too much power and uses it for many despicable things.
[Click to Tweet]There are quite a few writers who are dedicated to exposing the harm that our leviathan state is doing to the American people, but no one outshines James Bovard. For decades, he has been indefatigable in his work to blow the whistle on the waste, folly, illegality, and sheer villainy of politicians, bureaucrats, and other government minions. Even regular readers of Future of Freedom may underestimate the frightening degree to which our liberty has been curtailed by government at all levels because so much of it happens in secret. The statists want to keep people in the dark as to their nefarious and unconstitutional actions. They want us to believe that we are still free, even though our freedom is constantly shrinking.

James Bovard is their implacable foe. In his latest book, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty, he surveys the American landscape, reporting on many, many attacks on our rights. He keeps track of the laws, regulations, and official misconduct that are turning us from free people into serfs of the government. The book is packed with facts that should have your blood boiling. In this review, I can only give you a sampling.

The leviathan state

Let’s start with the abominable practice of civil-asset forfeiture. Under civil-asset forfeiture, Americans can have their property taken by “law-enforcement” officials simply because someone in authority claims that the property might have been involved in illegality and is therefore “guilty.” After the seizure — of cash, a car, even a house — the owner has to go to court if he wants the property returned, with the burden of proving his innocence. That costs time and money that many people just don’t have.

How bad is this? Bovard tells us that between 2001 and 2014, more than $2.5 billion in cash was seized by law enforcement via civil-asset forfeiture. Often, this is done by pulling motorists over, finding some pretext for a search, and then confiscating cash that might be found. No matter if the money was to be used for some perfectly honest use and had been legitimately earned. The police will get to keep the money unless the individual manages to prevail in court. What’s worse, he may even have to pay a fee to be allowed to contest the seizure. It’s an appalling violation of the principles of due process of law.

The government would like to keep people in the dark about this, of course. Bovard writes, “The feds have gone to bizarre lengths to assure that forfeiture remains inscrutable. In 2004, the Justice Department ordered hundreds of federal depositary libraries to remove and destroy its publication entitled ‘Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedures’ because it might help victims to fight back.” Fortunately, librarians refused to go along with that directive.

Bovard also trains his sights on gun control, identifying many of the dishonest schemes politicians have used in recent years to take guns away from Americans in the belief that regular people cannot be trusted with them. Consider the uproar over “assault weapons,” a meaningless term invented simply to frighten clueless voters and get them to think that the politicians were intent on protecting them. Bovard quotes the late Charles Krauthammer, who observed “The only justification is not to reduce crime, but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.” Exactly — the goal of our statist overlords is a disarmed, obedient populace that will not and cannot challenge their control.

While the politicians do all they can to keep firearms out of the hands of the public, they have allowed and even encouraged appalling lawlessness by the police and other gun-toting government agencies. The last few decades have seen a frightening increase in violent raids by them. For no reason, our “law-enforcement” officials resort more and more to no-knock raids by SWAT teams who barge in throwing flash-bang grenades. Such raids, sometimes at wrong addresses, are usually authorized by sympathetic judges because the cops have said that firearms might be present. People and pets are often injured or killed. In one particularly horrible case, a Navy veteran and his wife were gunned down in a drug raid based on a lie by the officer who procured the warrant.

To make things worse, the trigger-happy officials are almost never held to account for their conduct due to the absurd doctrine of “qualified immunity,” a court-created rule that allows our “public servants” to escape liability for their wrongful conduct. Finally, Bovard shows how government officials conspire to keep records of police violence out of the public eye.

How about our public-education system? Bovard makes it clear that it’s deplorable, run by purported experts who push silly fads and think that “equity” requires equally poor educational outcomes for all racial groups. Public schools are run by and for the benefit of the administrators and teachers, not the students. During the COVID mania, teachers unions demanded and got school lockdowns for “safety” despite the fact that children were at very low risk of contracting the disease. Thus, taxpayers had to pay for extended vacations for teachers who went through the motions of holding classes online. Students learned even less than usual, but at least the teachers were protected.

But maybe we shouldn’t be too upset over the closing of public schools, since much of what the students are taught is “progressive” propaganda. The schools have fallen completely under the control of aggressive leftist zealots who use them to shape how people will think. Bovard quotes from a paper by the National Council of Teachers of English that declares, “students should learn to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice.” Due to their “training” in politicized education school programs, most teachers are far better prepared to indoctrinate children with leftist beliefs than to teach them the skills they need. To the statists, ideological programming is far more important than teaching educational basics.

Oh — and these so-called educators do all they can to keep students from escaping from their clutches. Home schooling especially horrifies them. They denounce it as “dangerous” because parents might fail to imbue their children with the right “public values,” which of course means that the kids won’t be learning the collectivist clichés so beloved of our rulers. They want them to be, Bovard writes, “pliable for propaganda.”

Another big set of topics for Bovard’s sharp pen is the assortment of governmental programs that are supposed to keep us safe. There is the Transportation Security Administration, a multibillion dollar boondoggle providing cushy jobs for hordes of people who hassle and delay travelers in our airports. TSA abuses are legion but almost never called to account because the courts have taken the approach that “it’s not an assault when federal agents do it.” A few individuals have tried to blow the whistle, but they’ve been silenced or ignored.

We also have government snooping thanks to the Patriot Act, which “treats every citizen like a suspected terrorist and every federal agent like a proven angel.” Never mind that in 1978 Congress passed a law meant to keep the feds from spying on American citizens, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It set up a secret court, the FISA court, to oversee federal surveillance and say “no” when it was unwarranted. But it has turned out to be nothing but a useless formality, allowing government snooping in virtually all instances. And still, President George W. Bush’s attorney general stated that the president has “inherent authority” to authorize electronic surveillance without any judicial approval at all. That sums up the trend in America toward omnipotent government.

The government’s response to COVID was a relentless assault on the liberties of the people. There was no law allowing officials to take the actions they did, such as requiring that “nonessential” businesses close and that people must take the “vaccine” jabs or lose their jobs. Nor was there any science behind the decrees, although that was the pretext. The orders were given because that’s what authoritarians like to do — give orders. And to shore up support for their actions, the politicians conspired with tech companies to suppress dissent by people who doubted that the government was acting in the public interest but instead trying to justify its array of mandates and prohibitions. Keeping the people ignorant and compliant was crucial, and it spawned what Bovard calls “one of the most brazen coverups in U.S. history” — namely, the government’s role in creating the virus in the first place.

Bovard also exposes the utter corruption of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue Service, Centers for Disease Control, and other arms of the state that now work not for the public but for the power-mad coalition that wants an ever-growing federal leviathan.

Never trust the state

These days, we hear almost incessantly that “our democracy” is in danger, when the fact of the matter is that democracy has been crumbling for decades, as politicians, bureaucrats, and judges trample all over our rights. In his concluding chapter, Bovard seeks to awaken us to the looming disaster.  He writes, “Americans must never forget that the most dangerous inequality is that between the rulers and the ruled. No private citizen has a prerogative to forcibly accost, wrongly shoot, and wantonly plunder their neighbors. Laws against torturing pets are better enforced than laws prohibiting government agents from tormenting private citizens. Once government is irrevocably presumed benevolent, curbing politicians’ power is almost impossible. The endless appeals to government as a ‘force for good’ camouflage the evils that politicians regularly commit.” That is exactly what Last Rights seeks to counter — the idea that we should trust government to do good things with power. Read it and you will grasp the truth: government has far too much power and uses it for many despicable things.

This article was originally published in the September 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.