“The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law”
Grant Gilmore

Recently the governor of California signed nine hundred new laws into being. Each law will carry various civil and/or criminal penalties and will be further clarified by various rules as determined by the various agencies which will enforce the new laws and rules. Do you know how these new laws will impact you, your life, your family, or business? How many of them will make your life better or easier? Yet, you will be expected to abide by these laws; ignorance of the law is no longer a defense.
In this excellent book, Justice Gorsuch gives numerous examples of how federal laws and rules can be abused by the authorities and how naked we stand before the power of the State. An example is the fisherman who was charged with violating the Sarbanes-Osley Act (instituted after the housing crash of 2007 and aimed at financial institutions) when two federal officials miscounted how many fish he had caught with the result that he lost his business, home, and retirement savings. In the end, the Supreme Court found that he was innocent, but he lived a twenty-year nightmare and received no restitution.
That ex-fisherman was fortunate for he had the nerve and outside help to fight the system, while others often charged with multiple “crimes” from multiple agencies simply plead down their “crimes” in order to try to get on with their lives. And what chance does the average person have when you take the example of new laws in California, multiply it by fifty states and then add on and average of fifty-six new federal crimes every year. In reality, no one knows exactly how many federal laws and regulations carry a criminal punishment, but it is at least three-hundred thousand and growing.

How did this type of system develop? The Founding Fathers were very fearful of a powerful centralized state for they knew from their life experiences the helplessness of the individual. Thus, they created a system of checks and balances in order to limit the power of the central government. They believed that if laws were made, it would be better to have them created at the state level where there was a better opportunity for the average citizen to see, understand and give voice to their concerns.
The system began to change under the administration of President Woodrow Wilson who believed that what was needed was a “science of administration” where “experts” could “straighten the paths of government.” What this meant was that far too much time was spent thinking about the relationship between government and the constitution, and not enough time spent looking for government “efficiency.” And what better model than the Prussian bureaucracy? The Constitution stood in the way of “efficient” government with all of those annoying checks and balances. Better to let expert bureaucrats take the reins of government so that a living, breathing constitution could be created. Despite the failure of “expert” government from the times of Plato and Aristotle, Wilson believed that this time it would be different.

The result is a system where Americans spend 9.78 billion hours to complete federal (not counting state and local) paperwork. To put it another way, “Suppose that we assembled every resident of Chicago and insisted that for the entirety of 2019, each one must work forty house a week engaged in just one task; fill out federal forms. By the end of 2019, the 2.7 million citizens of Chicago will not have come within four billion houses of the annual paperwork burden placed on Americans.”
How do we change a system where the average citizen is lost in a maze of laws and rules drawn up by bureaucrats who are not judged on their service, but rather who have a vested interest in creating new rules in order to expand the bureaucracy? The answer is not simple and must come in large measure from the average American. Justice Gorsuch points out the woefully inadequate amount of time and money spent in educating children on civics. In fact, while the federal government spends about $.54/student on education for STEM, it only spends about $0.05 on civics. The result is that only about thirty-two percent of millennials believe that it is “absolutely essential” that “civil rights protect people’s liberty.”

A more encouraging step is Proposition 315 in Arizona. Under that law, any new rule from the bureaucracy which would cost $500,000 over a five-year period would have to be examined and agreed to by the state assembly. In other words, the law makers would have to realize the impact of their laws (which unfortunately Congress gave up years ago). This proposition is strongly opposed by the League of Women Voters as it would give lawmakers a tool to block rules with which they do not agree!

In the end, we face a lopsided battle; the bureaucracy which cannot be fired nor held to account vs. the average citizen who has no idea what laws and rules they face every day. We can only thank those few strong individuals and those who support them for showing us with their struggles the leviathan we face every day.