Bentham treated all coercive law, even liberty-creating regulation, as diminishing liberty.

Evidence

One source of respectability, of course, would have been Bentham himself. For as Bentham became more reformist and more progressive in his thinking, as he came to shape radical English political thought and as he came to think more positively of American independence, he retained his conception of liberty as just the absence of coercion; he may even be the one who did most to establish it as the modernist notion. As Douglas Long (1977: 43) notes, ‘Bentham was to argue that there was a sense in which a sovereign might enhance the value of subjects’ liberties by his acts of regulation, but he was never to lose sight of the fact that every act of regulation emanating from a sovereign was destructive of liberty.’ Bentham remained emphatic on the point. ‘As against the coercion applicable by individual to individual, no liberty can be given to one man but in proportion as it is taken from another. All coercive laws, therefore … and in particular all laws creative of liberty, are “as far as they go” abrogative of liberty’ (Bentham 1843: 503). — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 240