By Washington Examiner, Opinion, Apr. 18, 2014
Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Alexis de
Tocqueville, author of the classic Democracy in America, were born
in different times and places. But the French aristocrat and American think
tanker have the measure of the federal behemoth in the age of Obama. Writing in
1835, Tocqueville eloquently predicted how it would function, while Crews today
supplies in his annual compilation of federal rules and regulations, “10,000
Commandments,” the hard numbers that describe the behemoth's contemporary reach
and costs.
It is always worthwhile to revisit de Tocqueville’s
description of what he called the “soft despotism” of an America ruled by a
bureaucratic master:
After having thus successively taken each member of the
community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power
then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society
with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which
the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to
rise above the crowd.
The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and
guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained
from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does
not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a
people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and
industrious animals, of which the government is shepherd.
Crews’ new edition will appear later this month, but some of
the new data is available now. Federal departments and agencies, for example,
issued 3,659 “final” rules in 2013 and an additional 2,594 “proposed” rules. As
a result, there were 26,417 pages of new regulations published in the Federal
Register in 2013, a new record. The total of all pages published by the Federal
Register in 2013 came to 79,311, the fourth highest ever recorded.
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