DEATH IS EASY by Russell Madden   Softcover, $14.95 Hardcover, $24.95     (Preview. Also available in a digital edition, $4.81.)	FREEDOM, As If It Mattered by Russell Madden   Softcover, $24.95 Hardcover, $34.95   (Preview. Also available in a digital edition, $5.63.)

The desire to act in accordance with our visions of what constitutes the good is deeply rooted in human nature and society. Despite all the inconsistencies evidenced by particular individuals in failing to live up to their ideals, the average person does his best to struggle to fulfill the standards and values he has adopted.

When discussing issues of "the good" and acting to obtain that good, we are, in essence, dealing with ethical or moral matters. For anyone who desires to live, ethics are not an option. Each of us operates according to some ethical system. Those ethics may be consciously chosen after long research and evaluation. They may be implicitly adopted from our parents or social network. They may be consistent, a mishmash of contradictory notions, rational, irrational, or (for many people) a blending of the two.

Regardless of the particular morality they look to for guidance in daily life, people will (more or less) work towards whatever goals and by whatever means their ethics suggests to them. In general, this creates no problem in terms of retaining our freedoms. If an individual's morality is faulty, if the values selected or the means used to obtain those values are, in reality, destructive, only he and those who voluntarily associate with him will suffer the negative consequences of his erroneous actions.

The danger comes when a desire to do good crosses the line from the personal to the political. While there are any number of reasons to explain the erosion of our liberty, the behavior of would-be moralists who seek to impose their vision of the good upon the rest of us must rank highly on any such list.

Enlisting the aid of the state to ensure that others behave in an ethical fashion is, itself, unethical. Even if we grant that the particular actions sought are objectively positive, there is no justification for one person or group of persons to petition the coercive institutions of the government to force benighted malefactors to act in their own self-interest.

• If my neighbor observed that I was a spend-thrift and squandered my money on frivolities and had no savings to live on when I retire, he would be doing me a harm if he asked the government to withhold part of my income and to establish a social security program to ensure I had at least a modest amount of money available for my old age.
• If my neighbor discerned that I endangered my health by drinking too much beer, smoking too many cigarettes, and consuming too many recreational drugs, he would be doing a bad thing should he get the state to tax or prohibit such products in order to inhibit or prevent me from using them. A drug enforcement agency or a bureau which regulated the alcohol and cigarettes I desired would be unjustified, even if my health drastically improved.
• If my neighbor noticed that I watched too many movies filled with violence, gratuitous sex, and foul language, he would be injuring me if he sought to found a federal commission charged with the responsibility of increasing the amount of uplifting and serious entertainment and educational programming available to me.
• If my neighbor caught me remodeling my basement without installing a larger window for easier egress in case of fire, he would be doing violence to me if he called on the city to institute a mandatory building code even if those guidelines might save my life.
• If my neighbor realized that I rode my motorcycle without a helmet or drove my car without wearing a seat belt, he would be wrong to have the national government blackmail my state government demanding that I correct my behavior even if I thus increased my odds of surviving a crash.
• If my neighbor visited my store and realized I employed no one who was handicapped, from an ethnic minority, or obese, and I refused to sell my goods to individuals of various races, he would be unethical in having a federal office of affirmative action insist I hire certain numbers of workers from particular groups and provide service to anyone who ventures through my doors.
• If my neighbor recognized that my locally based business teetered on the brink of financial ruin, he would be doing me no favor should he get our city council to forbid any mega-stores from locating nearby, even if doing so would ensure that customers continued to frequent my establishment.

The label "do-gooders" carries a negative connotation for many, not because it is bad to do good but because those called do-gooders are usually perceived as intrusive busybodies more concerned with running other peoples' lives than attending to their own. A do-gooder is frequently seen as patronizing, condescending, and annoyingly self-righteous.

Under ordinary circumstances, we can simply tell such aggravating persons to mind their own business and leave us alone. If they persist in their ministrations to save us from ourselves, we can walk away and leave them lecturing to the air.

Unfortunately, the do-gooders long ago trampled down the invisible boundaries separating one citizen from another. Property rights -- individual rights -- have been battered into unrecognizable, ineffectual blobs as the do-gooders shifted from private exhortation to public incarceration of anyone rash enough to oppose their state-backed edicts and directives.

A defender of the do-gooders might complain that if the purpose of ethics is to accomplish the good, then how can anyone object if the do-gooder activists truly and objectively seek and obtain values for us which we should and would, if better informed, endeavor to reach by ourselves?

Such an objection would be answered by the observation that the ends never justify the means. A "good" reached by unethical means is, in fact, not a good, at all. To attempt to separate an "end" from a "means" and judge them by different standards results in a moral morass. It is to create the political mess which passes for statesmanship in the modern world. It leads inexorably to the worst abuses imaginable of human life and freedom.

There is no hard and fast distinction between a "means" and an "end." Every end potentially becomes the means to another end, and that goal a means to yet further objectives. Stated another way, every cause leads to an effect, and every effect becomes the cause to still other effects. For any individual, this process never ceases to operate as long as he is alive.

If, by definition, an ethical system provides guidelines showing individuals how they should conduct their lives, then those persons must be able to make choices among alternatives. They must have the ability to pick a course of action for good or ill. For them to be morally responsible people, it is not sufficient that they merely perform the correct behavior. To do what they should do, it is necessary that they make their selections freely. Otherwise, anything they do has -- in terms of their own perspective -- no moral status.

Calling upon the government to force people to act in a certain fashion -- to "protect them from themselves" -- is not to aid them but to harm them. Such coercion subverts the very basis of morality -- free will choices among alternatives -- by denying individuals the right to act according to the independent judgment of their own minds. It destroys a person's "sphere of autonomy," as the philosopher Tibor Machan might say, and subordinates it to the wishes and dictates of another.

No matter what ethics a person adopts, if that ethics cannot meet the conditions outlined above, then it is disqualified from any consideration as a valid moral system.

The proper purpose of a government cannot then be to impose an ethical standard on its citizens. Any such proposal results in a self-contradiction and must therefore be rejected. A legitimate government can only provide the basic conditions -- the fundamental foundation -- necessary and sufficient to allow each individual to practice whatever morality he desires. Venturing beyond that fence restricting its powers, the state trespasses on forbidden ground. Its natural role can only be to safeguard our rights, not to violate them. In doing the former, it acts not as a "necessary evil" (evil is never necessary) but as a positive good.

As Thomas Jefferson stated two centuries ago, a good government "...shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."

That insight is no less true today than when this nation was founded. The do-gooders seeking to help us would do well to remember that injunction and truly do good for us all by first and foremost defending our freedom to do wrong.