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Freedom, 'the default position'
...Q: What's the most important message of your book?

A: That rights are not guaranteed, even though the Constitution says they are. That government will labor mightily to make holes in the Constitution to avoid and evade it. And that a government that breaks its own laws in the act of prosecuting people is not your friend. It doesn't have a happy ending, this book. It's filled with horror stories!

I believe in the natural law, which is that our rights come from our humanity – they don't come from government – and our humanity comes from God. So we have the right to speak freely, to think freely, to travel and to associate -- whether or not it's written down and whether or not the government chooses to protect it, because those are natural rights that no government in a popular democracy can take away.

From that it follows that because the government has to respect those rights, the government itself can't violate them, thus it can't violate its own laws. But the government does break its own laws every day and this book is a catalogue of horror stories in which that occurs.

Q: You've described yourself as "a born-again individualist." What's that mean?

A: That means because individuals have immortal souls and the state does not, the individual is greater than the state. That means individual rights are guaranteed and can not be taken away by the legislative or executive branch, but only by a jury after an individual has been convicted of a crime. That also means to means that that government is best that governs least. That the Constitution means what it says.

But the default position is freedom. We are born in the state of freedom. Our natural yearnings and urgings are for freedom. It's natural and integral to all of us. Government is the negation of freedom. Therefore, government must be minimal, minimum, precise and certain. Not a government that thinks it can tax and regulate any aspect of our lives. ...

...Q: How did you come by these "radical" ideas?

A: After about a year and a half on the bench of trying criminal cases, I began to see that the Constitution does not mean what it says to the government. And that every single government lawyer who came before me, whether it was jaywalking or murder and everything in between, seemed to be spending all their time justifying ways around the Constitution, trying to pull the wool over my eyes, and claim that the things that the police did that were so obviously and patently illegal and unconstitutional were in fact condoned by higher courts.

I began to look at government not as the protector and preserver of the constitution, but only as advancing the careers of those in the government. Everyone who works in the government, from the president to a janitor, from the governor to a school teacher, takes the same oath: it's to preserve the Constitution and the rights guaranteed in it. It's not for victory in the courtroom. It's not for convicting the bad guys. It's for preserving the Constitution. I just did not see this in the hundreds, probably thousands of government lawyers that appeared me. It actually caused me to revisit some of the verities that I had accepted since I was a child.

Q: Such as?

A: Respect for authority. I now think all authority – I'm not talking about my bosses at Fox. I love them dearly. I'm talking about governmental authority – should be challenged, should be questioned. Because government is the negation of freedom, when it does anything, it shouldn't be presumed valid. It should be presumed invalid. It should have to justify its taking away of freedom in a constitutional context, rather than the challenger having to prove that its behavior is unconstitutional. ...