The Objective Standard reviews The Right to Earn A Living

December 20, 2011 | By TIMOTHY SANDEFUR

The latest review of my book The Right to Earn A Living appears in the Winter issue of The Objective Standard. Subscribers can access it here. Here’s an excerpt:

Parents in America typically tell their children that they can be anything they want to be when they grow up, and children tend to believe it and explore the countless possibilities…. Unfortunately, in today’s America, a child cannot be whatever he wants to be…. In today’s America, it is increasingly difficult to enter various professions, near impossible to enter some, and, whatever one’s profession, it is likely saddled with regulations that severely limit the ways in which one can produce and trade. Timothy Sandefur explores and explains these developments in The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law…in the most comprehensive manner I’ve seen, surveying the history of economic liberty from 17th-century England through the Progressive era in America and up to the present day. He shows how the freedom to earn a living has been eroded in multiple ways throughout the legal system, from unreasonable rules, to licensing schemes, to limitations on advertising, to restrictions on contracts. In The Right to Earn a Living, we see how these and other factors combine to create a system in which it is more and more difficult to support oneself and one’s family in the manner one chooses.

Don’t forget to check out PLF’s Right to Earn A Living page for more.