Wendy McElroy’s article below on Lysander Spooner was very good but I did not think it was comprehensive. I say this because she failed to mention his most important essay, "Vices are not Crimes." It is the most important one because the greatest threat to human freedom in our era is governmental paternalism. In that work Spooner takes head on the modus operandi of such paternalism, turning vices into crimes. He strips the cloak of morality from those who would run other peoples lives.

It is no accident that someone with an abolitionist background wrote such a work because the modern paternalistic ethos, which infects all levels of government, has much in common with the ante-bellum pro-slavery ideology that Spooner so opposed.