John Stossel has made the libertarian case for personal freedom, even the freedom to do drugs and participate in prostitution, with his Fox special Illegal Everything.

He shows how the explosion of laws, rules, and regulations threatens to choke the life out of America’s cherished liberties and undo the past two and a half centuries of this country’s hallmark individualism.

In order to protect us from ourselves, the nanny state continually tries to supplant the laws of the universe with its own, despite the self-evident fact that, as one interviewee says, “Life is risky, and you can die from it.”

Stossel also speaks with people from all walks of life who, in exercising their personal freedoms, have collided with the regulatory state, didn’t enjoy the experience, and never even got a t-shirt to commemorate it — from the kid busted for trying to operate a lemonade stand to the family nearly destroyed by the EPA.

Whenever there’s a professional political class — especially those people who have no other
occupation except to pass laws all day long and year after year — it’s only reasonable to expect more regulation and less liberty.

Washington said, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”

But that is exactly where government has been left and not just for a moment, to irresponsible action on the part of generations of politicians of every political affiliation, principally for short-term gain at the expense of the citizenry.

A lawyer in Stossel’s special, who admits he doesn’t understand most of the laws on the books, characterizes the regulatory state this way: “It’s an implacable foe with an unlimited budget — and they wear you down.”

So, is it the government’s job to preempt the individual’s prerogatives and tell everybody what to do with their lives?

Milton Friedman didn’t think so. Like John Stossel, Friedman thought government has its proper sphere, but no part of it should be involved in disrupting society while suppressing freedom:

An appropriately privatized society would look like a society in which the total income of society about 10 to 12% is going through government. And it’s going through government to pay for certain really basic functions. To finance the judicial system, to provide for the defense of the country for armed forces. To provide for law and order, police, fire, not necessarily fire protection that can be done privately as it has been done. And to provide for truly hard cases – indigent — those would be the main functions.

We are far from achieving the kind of society in which government is engaging only in what I regard as a proper functions of government. In our present society government is spending not 10 or 15% of the national income but in the United States, 40% of the national income. In addition it is indirectly through regulation, rules, mandates directing the spending of about another 10% of national income.

So that the United States, which everybody regards as a freest society in the world is half, is 50% socialized. The reason we don’t realize that is because government spends its money so much more inefficiently than private enterprise does. That the 50% of our resources which are being spent by government or directed by government produces a lot less than 50% of our utility.

There are many great things about the world as it is now. We have a great deal of freedom, a great deal of prosperity. But there are enormous problems and the most important of those problems are produced by government, not by the private market. In the United States one of our, certainly one of our major social problems are the slum ghetto areas of our country. The inner cities. And those are a result of government policies. They are a result of the government policy on drug prohibition which largely plays a large part. Of government policies, of government schools which failed to school the children in those areas. Of government policy of welfare which is led to an increase in unwed mothers and illegitimacy.

Those have been the results of governmental policies. In a world in which government wasn’t doing all those things we would not have any inner cities. We would not have the kind of slums that disgrace our society. We would not have the spectacle of two million people, at the moment, in American prisons. That’s a disgrace. And they’re in prisons because government has made a crime of voluntary actions among individuals. Has made a crime of things that should not be a crime.

And in the process has done tremendous harm. In my ideal society that would not be there. Human beings would be free to spend their time, and their efforts and their energy as they wished.

Yes, I believe that victimless crime, what are designated as crimes, which are victimless, have an emotional appeal. Have an appeal to your ethical values. But that they are unenforceable and that trying to enforce, trying to prohibit them does far more harm than good. I think we had one attempt on that with alcoholic prohibition in the 1920’s and early 30’s; it was an enormous failure. I think our attempts to prohibit drugs have been an equally bad failure.

So whatever you think about the ethical value, the ethical appropriateness of government telling people what they should put in their mouth, what actions they should engage in, it doesn’t work. You cannot control people that way. And the results are worse than not doing it.

You can see Illegal Everything here (running time: 42 minutes 3 seconds). Stossel’s latest book is here.