In “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law,” Gorsuch, with his co-author, Janie Nitze, notes that the Roman emperor Caligula posted new laws on columns so high, and written in a hand so small, that people could not read them, and hence lived in dread of committing criminal infractions. Gorsuch is too judicious to say so, but an ideological tendency is primarily responsible for the resemblance between Caligula’s Rome and this Republic. That tendency is progressivism.
Less than a century ago, Gorsuch notes, a single volume contained all federal statutes. By 2018, they filled 54 volumes — about 60,000 pages. In the past 10 years, Congress has enacted about 2 million to 3 million words of law each year. The average length of a bill is nine times what it was in the 1950s. Agencies publish their proposals and final rules in the Federal Register, which began at 16 pages in 1936, and now expands by an average of more than 70,000 pages annually. By 2021, the Code of Federal Regulations filled about 200 volumes. And in a recent 10-year span, federal agencies churned out approximately 13,000 guidance documents.
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Progressives think progress depends upon (that is, they sometimes define progress as) the concentration of power as high as possible in government’s regulatory apparatus. Hence, between 1960 and 2019, the 900 percent increase in federal grants to states — from $70 billion (adjusted for inflation) to $700 billion — came with strings, resembling chains, attached.
James Madison foresaw our current condition, in which laws are “so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood,” and “undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.” Hence, Madison’s paradox: The multiplication of laws undermines the rule of law. “Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”
What we have become is unbecoming of a free people. Caligula’s ghost is grinning.
Bryan Riley explains that tariffs raise the prices of back-to-school items.
The differences between the most and least productive companies can be startlingly high. By one estimate, in the US alone the most productive firms in a sector can be more than two to four times more cost-effective than the least productive ones. Given the size of those discrepancies, any expansion of trade or innovation that makes it possible to replace less efficient producers could help a sector economize a significant part of its production costs.
Stephanie Slade is correct: “Trump doubled down on authoritarianism by selecting J.D. Vance.” [DBx: Anticipating reactions from some readers, let me here say what shouldn’t, but does, need saying: To point out that party A is filled with ignorant authoritarians is not to endorse party B or to suggest that the mix of ignorance and authoritarianism of party B is less, or less toxic, than that of party A.]
At least one reason we need Hanlon’s razor in the first place is that many of the incompetents believe themselves conspiracists. It’s more flattering, at least by certain lights, to be malicious than to be idiotic.
