The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do about It.

• Author: Thierer, Adam D.
• Position: Book review

The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our

Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do about It

By Timothy Sandefur

New York: Encounter Books, 2016.

Pp. xi, 267. $25 hardcover.

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." That saying--most commonly attributed to Grace M. Hopper, a computer scientist who was a rear admiral in the United States Navy--has become the mantra motivating an entire generation of Silicon Valley technology entrepreneurs to go out and do bold things. America's information technology powerhouses--Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Uber, Airbnb, and others--are now household names around the globe because they didn't first seek out anyone's blessing to launch the next great gadget or service; they just did it.

Of course, even as this sort of "permissionless innovation" was helping fuel the explosive growth of the U.S. tech sector, it was also rankling the feathers of plenty of policy makers, both domestically and internationally. In particular, sharing- economy pioneers Uber and Airbnb currently find themselves in the midst of a veritable "empire strikes back" moment with legislators and regulators across the world who are trying to pigeonhole these firms into their old regulatory regimes. But plenty of other companies and consumers are faced with a growing avalanche of red tape that makes new life-enriching innovation harder than ever to create or enjoy.

It is repressive behavior like this that has Timothy Sandefur worried. In his new book, The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do about It, Sandefer hopes to inspire a "return of the Jedi" movement that pushes back against the ever-expanding Nanny State and its many permission slips.

Sandefur, who serves as vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute, argues that the problem with excessive government permissioning is that it "conflicts with the principle of equality, the basis of our Constitution, by regarding people not as equals to be respected but as subjects to be punished or rewarded--as children, not as mature citizens ultimately responsible for their own actions" (p. 49). We should enjoy the "presumption of freedom," he says, because "the cost of having too much freedom is far smaller than the cost of having too little" (p. 9).

At least in the United States, we have come to see how problematic permissioning schemes are for freedom of speech, so much so...