In Purchasing Submission, Professor Philip Hamburger takes aim at the myriad ways in which many statutes and regulations trade the Constitution’s structural protections of liberty for rule by condition. What is rule by condition? An example illustrates. Let’s assume that you are a non-profit organization. The government will not tax your organization’s income on the condition that you do not exercise speech that endorses candidates for political office. This is just one example of the conditions attached by government Hamburger outlines in the book that implicates a core right, in this case free speech, of all Americans.
