Another great dickh**d of history

The state's duty - its only duty - is “to protect - to enforce the law of equal freedom; to maintain men’s rights, or, as we commonly express it - to administer justice”. (Chapter XXI).Beyond this it should not go (Chapter XXII). In particular, it should not infringe on trade by regulating commerce (Chapter XXIII), support an established religion (Chapter XXIV), provide relief for the poor (Chapter XXV http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/273/6384), Run schools (Chapter XXVI http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/273/6394), establish and administer colonies (Chapter XXVII), come between charlatans and their dupes (Chapter XXVIII) regulate the currency, run a post office, or build lighthouses and other public works (Chapter XXIX).

All these activities are prohibited by “the law of equal freedom”. They also interfere in the natural process which punishes the immoral and unreasonable for their moral and intellectual deficiencies and weeds them out of the population bringing us ever closer to the perfect society of perfect men. Here's Spencer's argument against preventing the sale of quack medicines (“empirics”):

Inconvenience, suffering, and death, are the penalties attached by nature to ignorance, as well as to incompetence - are also the means of remedying these. And whoso thinks he can mend matters by dissociating ignorance and its penalties, lays claim to more than Divine wisdom, and more than Divine benevolence. If there seems harshness in those ordinations of things, which ... visit a slip of the foot with a broken limb - which send lingering agonies to follow the inadvertent swallowing of a noxious herb - which go on quietly, age after age, giving fevers and agues to dwellers in marshes - and which, now and then, sweep away by pestilence tens of thousands of unhealthy livers ... be sure it is apparent only, and not real.

Partly by weeding out those of lowest development, and partly by subjecting those who remain to the never-ceasing discipline of experience, nature secures the growth of a race who shall both understand the conditions of existence, and be able to act up to them. It is impossible in any degree to suspend this discipline by stepping in between ignorance and its consequences, without ... suspending the progress.

If to be ignorant were as safe as to be wise, no one would become wise. And all measures which tend to put ignorance upon a par with wisdom, inevitably check the growth of wisdom. Acts of parliament to save silly people from the evils which putting faith in empirics may entail upon them, do this, and are therefore bad. Unpitying as it looks, it is best to let the foolish man suffer the appointed penalty of his foolishness ... [T]o guard ignorant men against the evils of their ignorance - to divorce a cause and consequence which God has joined together - to render needless the intellect put into us for our guidance ... must necessarily entail nothing but disasters. (Social Statics, Chapter XXVIII: “Sanitary Supervision".)

It's thanks to passages such as that one, that Spencer is quite justly regarded as the founding father of Social Darwinism. As remarkable as the fact that he wrote this book in earnest is that he still has his earnest defenders. That they should be on the internet isn't so remarkable.