Customer Reviews

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law

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This book is an incredibly informative read. It points out all the defects in regulatory, licensing AND even common law that inhibit our ability to make our living as we see fit and how applying these laws limit the ability of business, large and small, to employ new workers.

Unfortunately, the present political and cultural climate is deeply ignorant of how these regulations have secondary, ripple effects. Timothy Sandefur points out what those ripple effects are and how harmful they can be. In short, this regulatory regime caps everyones potential and is an impediment to pursuing our happiness. In more extreme language, the current system violates our human rights.

On a side note I found it refreshing that this book points to the fact that we cannot look to the past for some golden age of economic liberty because it never existed. The idea of economic freedom is indeed for the future.

The Right to Earn a Living provides interesting legal analysis and history. Sandefur deals effectively with the myth that free markets serve business interests. Freedom to trade translates directlyt into freedom to earn- and live. While this book is not primarily on economics, it is on solid ground. Modern prosperity coincided with the emergence of due process, secure proeprty rights, and economic freedom- by which I mean free choice in free markets. This is hardly coincidental. Sandefur explains how the movement towards the legal system of a free society broke the power of medieval monopolies, thus allowing a competitive and prosperous economy to emerge. The trend towards a politicized economy, where courts and politicians "regulate" entrepreneurs is a threat to freedom and prosperity. The examples in this book provide good lessons now that we are in the midst of yet another strong push towards politicizing commerce. We need more books like this one!