In the political culture of the United States, individual liberty is frequently thought of as possessing intrinsic and overriding importance. The political right and the political left in the United States have long competed to be seen as the true champions of individual freedom, and each has tried to advance its own goals under the banner of liberty.

For the Right in recent decades, individual liberty has often meant the right of corporations and the wealthy to do whatever they want with their property, unconstrained by government regulation or obligations to pay taxes or collectively bargain with their workers. The Left, at its best, has stood up against state as well as employer tyranny and for the kind of economic security that enables people to live truly autonomous lives.

These questions of economic coercion and exploitation aside, greater individual liberty is clearly not always an unalloyed good. The consumer bounty of twenty-first-century America has included the invasion of smartphones, social media, and live streamed audiovisual content into more and more corners of our lives — with evidence mounting that these developments are causing significant harm to our well-being and cognitive capacities. The rise of sports betting apps, which allow users to gamble on their phones from anywhere at any time of day, is a scourge on young men’s finances and their mental health. Meanwhile, merchants of offline vices like kratom, a drug linked to addiction, overdose, and liver disease, are getting free rein from the Trump administration.