“In the theory of the state that John Stuart Mill sketched in On Liberty, the government’s role is to provide an unobtrusive framework for private activities. Government provides certain goods, such as national defense and (in some versions) education, that private markets will not provide in sufficient quantities. But beyond that it merely protects a handful of entitlements (property rights and some personal liberties) that are necessary to prevent markets from not working at all or from running off the rails, as would happen, for example, if there were no sanctions for theft. Limited government so conceived--the conception most commonly called ‘nineteenth-century liberalism,’ to distinguish it from modern welfare liberalism--has no ideology, no ‘projects,’ but is really just an association for mutual protection,” writes Richard Posner.
An Army of the Willing
