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The Land of the
(Formerly) Free
By Kate Burch
Americans today live under a burden of laws and regulations so complex,
convoluted, and contrary to common sense, that it is probably
impossible for anyone not confined to bed, unconscious, in a nursing
home to get through the day without breaking laws, even without the
knowledge or intention of doing so. The huge expansion of the
regulatory state has been accompanied by a corresponding explosion of
statutes and regulations including, just at the federal level, 4,500
criminal laws and 300,000 criminally punishable regulations written by
unelected bureaucrats (such as the head of the EPA.) The Heritage
Foundation describes some shocking examples of unwitting lawbreaking,
including the story of an eleven-year-old girl who saved a woodpecker
from being eaten by a cat. Her mother agreed that she could keep
the bird at home and nurse it back to health, thus running afoul of the
Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The mother was fined $535.00 and faced
up to one year in prison until public outcry forced the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Services to drop the criminal charges.
We have strayed quite far from the ideal, expressed by Thomas Jefferson
in his first inaugural address, that “good government...shall restrain
men from injuring one another” and “shall leave them otherwise free to
regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” It used
to be that criminal law dealt with acts that anyone who had attained
the age of reason would know were wrong, and also that one must be
shown to have had “mens rea,” or criminal intent, to be found
guilty. Today, in many cases, a person’s ignorance of the statute
or regulation, or even accidental violation, will not protect him from
a criminal conviction. The government acts to constrain behavior
that, in some bureaucrat’s mind, may possibly have bad consequences,
rather than acting to address, after the fact, behavior that has
actually resulted in harm to another.
The regulatory laws also frequently cause real harm, most often
economic, but sometimes affecting health or even life. You have
probably read about how the rash and short-sighted action to totally
ban the insecticide DDT has directly caused the deaths of millions
around the world from malaria. A newly-proposed regulation
(championed, of course by Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren) would
subject financial retirement advisors to new standards that, if
implemented, will put the advisors’ services out of reach for many
seniors because the compliance costs will force them to charge more for
their help. As a personal example of heavy handed and ridiculous
implementation of regulations: my husband once ran a company that
did, among other things, electroplating. The EPA inspector said
that the effluent from the plant contained an unacceptably high level
of copper, and the company must correct it. Puzzling was the fact
that the electroplating process involved no copper. It turned out
that the amount of copper in the plant’s effluent was exactly the same
as the amount of copper in the water coming into the plant from the
city’s water supply. That did not matter to the EPA! The
ensuing “fix” of a non-problem, certainly cost the company money that
could have been much better spent.
Licensing laws are another example of regulations that, while touted as
protecting the public, actually bar millions of people from performing
jobs, such as hairdressing, manicuring, locksmithing, interior design,
and others, because they must pay for unnecessary “training” and stiff
fees to obtain licensure. These laws are clearly meant to protect
entrenched interests by keeping out the “riffraff,” as well as
providing yet another revenue stream for the government.
How far must the Leviathan state go before people decide that enough is
enough?
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