If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill
"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero
In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, one of her characters muses: "One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
Every Man a Criminal :: SteynOnline
National Review's Happy Warrior
February 13, 2013 Mark Steyn
For Chris Matthews, the sob-sister sap who hosts MSNBC's hilariously misnamed Hardball, President Obama's inaugural address bore comparison to Lincoln at Gettysburg. Whether Lincoln would have felt the same is doubtful. "He talked about the government that we want," enthused Chris, "which is infrastructure, education, regulation, all the good things . . ." [what a damn fool! m/r]
... In economic terms, around one-tenth of America's GDP is consumed by federal regulation alone. But there are psychological costs, too. John Moulton was a distinguished judge, a man of science, and a chap who held the splendid title during the Great War of Britain's "director-general of explosive supplies," a job he did brilliantly. Lord Moulton divided society into three sectors, of which he considered the most important to be the "middle land" between law and absolute freedom — the domain of manners, in which the individual has to be "trusted to obey self-imposed law." "To my mind," wrote Moulton, "the real greatness of a nation, its true civilization, is measured by the extent of this land." By that measure, our greatness is shriveling fast: The land of self-regulation has been encroached on remorselessly, to the point where we increasingly accept that everything is either legal or illegal, and therefore to render any judgment of our own upon the merits of this or that would be presumptuous.
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