CHARLES MURRAY: WIDESPREAD CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE CAN MAKE PETTY REGULATION UNENFORCEABLE

    

October 21, 2015

Photo credit: (c) Can Stock Photo

We’ve all heard the phrase “death by a thousand cuts,” which refers to how an array of slight, incremental damage can add up to substantial harm. Modern regulatory bureaucracies certainly fit this pattern, filling countless pages and volumes with rules that encroach on nearly every aspect of life and business — and stifling economic activity in the process. In a new analysis for London business daily newspaper City A.M., renowned scholar Charles Murray suggests that widespread, collective civil disobedience may be the key to making this thicket of “petty” regulations unenforceable.

“In the United States, taking regulations off the books through the political process is unrealistic — the regulatory agencies have too much statutory independence,” Murray writes. “But regulators everywhere, including Britain, have a common vulnerability: they can’t possibly enforce the thousands of rules that apply to every business and every piece of property. Their inspection and prosecutorial capacity relative to their mandate is pathetically small. The regulatory state is the Wizard of Oz: fearsome when its booming voice is directed against any single target but, when the curtain is pulled aside, revealed as impotent to enforce its thousands of rules against widespread refusal to comply. And so my modest proposal: let’s withhold that compliance through systematic civil disobedience. Not for all regulations, but for the stupid and pointless ones that have no place in a free society.”

Murray, who was selected by Atlas Network as this year’s Templeton Leadership Fellow, and who will be providing the keynote address at Liberty Forum & Freedom Dinner on Nov. 11–12 in New York City, points out that there are so many regulations and so few enforcers, that some kind of insurance mechanism for regulatory victims — including a legal defense fund, perhaps — could more than make up for the rule-flouters that bureaucrats actually take the time and effort to punish.

“The objective is to create a disincentive for overzealous regulators,” Murray explains. “My core message is simple: it is possible for we the people to pull aside the curtain, expose the Wizard’s impotence, and reclaim some of our freedom to live our lives as we see fit.”