One needs a liberal definition to consider them “new” and an even more liberal definition to consider all of them “threats,” but the 30 issues addressed in the book New Threats To Freedom cover a wide range of ways in which individual liberty faces barriers ? and occasional outright attacks ? in the United States and around the world.

Thirty different writers from the left and right of the political center take aim at the 30 “threats.” Among the more interesting essays is North Carolinian (and Shaftesbury Society speaker) Max Borders‘ take on “The Urge to Regulate.” Borders credits the urge to a combination of paternalism, utopianism, linear thinking, greed, and moralistic self-promotion:

With different people motivated by different facets of the urge running around loose in society, things get interesting. Alliances form. The regulatory state grows and grows.

This human propensity probably lives in our DNA somewhere, forged in the evolutionary fires by ancestors trying to bring order to their clans. Hunting and foraging out on the steppe must have been a chaotic affair. And still we rage for order. So what’s new about the urge as a threat to liberty? It’s not so much the urge itself, but the extent to which the state can now interfere with every aspect of our lives. And this is not sustainable. The ecosystems of contemporary life are not designed to be fixed or regulated like machines from a bank of rheostats in Washington. Indeed, they’re not “designed” at all. That’s what ultimately makes control by a central authority a fool’s errand.

Later in the book, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds outlines the threat to liberty inherent in complacency:

It is the natural tendency of human beings to grow complacent, to focus on their own lives, to disregard threats to liberty, and to ignore politics whenever possible. … Most of the the business of government is, frankly, boring ? and government officials are often at pains to make it more so, in order to discourage public involvement. But, of course, to those officials, and to special-interest groups, the boredom is relieved by their direct stakes in the outcome, in the form of increases in wealth and personal power, which ordinary voters do not possess.

But complacency is also bred by good government. To the extent that people think of the government as working for them, and trust it to do so in a fairly honest fashion, they are likely to pay less attention to its doings. Trusting the government, people fail to see it as something dangerous, in need of close watching, as the framers did.