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Do you speak
canine? How to
understand dogs’
sniffs, stares
and smiles
Einstein=Who?
Evaluating a
new biography
and its many
predecessors
C3
BOOKS
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C5
CULTURE
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SCIENCE
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COMMERCE
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HUMOR
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POLITICS
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
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LANGUAGE
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TECHNOLOGY
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ART
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IDEAS
Saturday/Sunday, May 9 - 10, 2015 | C1
Fifty Shades of Red
A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR REJECTING RULES
Too many government
regulations serve no end
and keep us from doing our
jobs as well as we could.
We should ignore them,
argues Charles Murray.
A
MERICA IS NO LONGER the land of the
free. We are still free in the sense that
Norwegians, Germans and Italians
are free. But that’s not what Americans used to mean by freedom.
It was our boast that in America, unlike in any other country,
you could live your life as you
saw fit as long as you accorded the same liberty to everyone else. The “sum of good government,” as Thomas
Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, was one
“which shall restrain men from injuring one another”
and “shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their
own pursuits of industry and improvement.” Americans
were to live under a presumption of freedom.
The federal government remained remarkably true
to that ideal—for white male Americans, at any rate—
for the first 150 years of our history. Then, with FDR’s
New Deal and the rise of the modern regulatory state,
our founding principle was subordinated to other priorities and agendas. What made America unique first
blurred, then faded, and today is almost gone.
We now live under a presumption of constraint. Put
aside all the ways in which city and state governments
require us to march to their drummers and consider just
the federal government. The number of federal crimes
you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were
tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980.
A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in
se”—bad in themselves. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves.
The laws setting out these crimes are often so complicated that only lawyers, working in teams, know everything that the law requires. Everyone knows how to
obey the laws against robbery. No individual can know
how to “obey” laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley (810
pages), the Affordable Care Act (1,024 pages) or DoddFrank (2,300 pages). We submit to them.
The laws passed by Congress are just the beginning. In
2013, the Code of Federal Regulations numbered over
175,000 pages. Only a fraction
of those pages involved regulations based on something
spelled out in legislation. Since
the early 1940s, Congress has
been permitted by the Supreme
Court to tell regulatory agencies to create rules that are
“generally fair and equitable”
or “just and reasonable” or
that prohibit “unfair methods
of competition” or “excessive
profits,” and leave it to the regulators to make up whatever
rules they think serve those lofty goals.
It gets worse. If a regulatory agency comes after
you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that
are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies
impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies
themselves, much as if the police department could
make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.
I’m not complaining about regulations that require,
say, sturdy structural supports for tunnels in coal
mines. But too often a sensible idea behind a set of
regulations—for example, that exposed stairway floor
openings with precipitous drops should have railings—
is made ridiculous by their detail: If said railings are
not 42 inches high, you can be fined, as per OSHA regulation 1910.23(e)(3)(v)(a).
Other regulations could be written only by bureaucrats
with way too much time on their hands, such as ones that
mandate a certain sort of latch for a bakery’s flour bins
or the proper way to describe flower bulbs to customers,
or the kind of registration form to be attached to a toddler’s folding chair, while also prescribing an option for
registering the product through the Internet.
Regulations that waste our time and money are bad
enough. Worse are the regulations that prevent us from
doing our jobs as well as we could—regulations that
Please turn to the next page
ILLUSTRATION BY ASAF HANUKA
In 2013,
the Code
of Federal
Regulations
was over
175,000
pages.
This essay is adapted from Mr. Murray’s new book,
“By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without
Permission,” which will be published May 12 by
Crown Forum. He is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute.
INSIDE
MOVING TARGETS
Lots of museums own lousy art.
Joe Queenan says: Sell the trash,
use the cash and fix the leaky roof.
C11
BOOKS
From spinach shakshuka (above)
to pomegranate meatballs in a
Jewish cookbook. Who knew?
C9
WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL
Gen. Stanley McChrystal on
modern warfare, Islamic State
and his new book on teamwork.
C11
EXHIBIT
ESSAY
David Cameron stunned the
pollsters, but millions of Britons
still aren’t sure what he believes.
C3
STEPHEN VOSS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (MCCHRYSTAL); KRISTY WIGGLESWORTH/AP (CAMERON)
The
line king:
A celebration
of Al
Hirschfeld’s
many
decades
of stage
and
screen
caricatures.
C12
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