New at Reason: John Stossel on Government Attacks on Freedom.
Something’s happened to America, writes John
Stossel, and it isn’t good. It’s become easier to get into trouble.
We’ve become a nation of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom-up
rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those
are fine. The problem is top-down rules formed in the brains of
meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to
manage our lives.
View this article.
[Hit and Run]
Here’s another quote from the end of the article:
Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more—so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible.
This is a bad trend. As Lao Tsu said, “The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”
I remember when I was a kid there was a saying: “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” but I haven’t heard anyone say that in years (another one from the same time that’s also now dead was “it’s a free country”). Today ignorance of the law is still no excuse from a legal standpoint, but at the same time knowledge of the law is an impossibility.
