The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice

A thousand years of legal protections against tyranny are being stolen right before our eyes. Under the guise of good intentions, personal liberties as old as the Magna Carta have become casualties in the wars being waged on pollution, drugs, white-collar crime, and all of the other real and imagined social ills. The result: innocent people caught up in a bureaucratic web that destroys lives and livelihoods; businesses shuttered because of victimless infractions; a justice system that values coerced pleas over the search for truth; bullying police agencies empowered to confiscate property without due process.

"A devastating indictment of our current system of justice." — Milton Friedman

In this provocative book, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton show how the law, which once shielded us from the government, has now become a powerful weapon in the hands of overzealous prosecutors and bureaucrats. Lost is the foundation upon which our freedom rest—the intricate framework of Constitutional limits that protect our property, our liberty, and our lives. Roberts and Stratton convincingly argue that this abuse of government power doesn't have ideological boundaries. Indeed, conservatives and liberals alike use prosecutors, regulators, and courts to chase after their own favorite "devils," to seek punishment over justice and expediency over freedom. The authors present harrowing accounts of people both rich and poor, of CEOs and blue-collar workers who have fallen victim to the tyranny of good intentions, who have lost possessions, careers, loved ones, and sometimes even their lives.

This book is a sobering wake-up call to reclaim that which is rightly ours—liberty protected by the rule of law.

Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A former government official and a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, he is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily.
Lawrence M. Stratton is the Robert Krieble Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and a member of the bar in Virginia and the District of Columbia. He has taught law at Georgetown University.