The Torrent of Laws; H. Hazlitt

ALL OVER the United States, if you are reading this in a day light hour, there is a ceaseless downpour of new laws. Every day some of us, some where, are being encumbered or shackled by still more restrictions. There are just too many laws. But how do we tell how many laws are too many, and which ones are pernicious? Let us begin with some elemen tary considerations. A law may be defined as an edict which either for bids you to do something or compels you·to do something. Sometimes, it is true, it may be merely a guiding rule which tells you how to do some thing, or defines procedures or stanHenry Hazlltt, noted economist, author, editor, re viewer and columnist, Is well known to readers of the New York Times, Newsweek, The Freeman, Bar ron's, Human Events and many others. The most recent of his numerous books Is The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It. dards, like weights and measures.

But such standard-setting laws are few in number. Most laws are prohi bitions or compulsions-in short, commands. Why are laws necessary? They are necessary, first of all, to prevent people from injuring or aggressing against their neighbors; to prevent theft and fraud, vandalism and vio lence. On the more positive side, they are necessary to lay down rules of action, so that others may know what to expect of us and we of others, so that we may anticipate each other's actions, keep out of each other's way, and work and act so far as possible in cooperation and har mony. In a modern society, the traffic laws epitomize law in general. When they instruct us to keep on the right side, to drive within a specified 3 4 THE FREEMAN January speed limit on a given street or highway, to stop at a red light, to signal our intended turns, they may seem to an impatient driver to be restricting his liberty, to be prevent ing him from getting to his destina tion in minimum time. But because these restrictions apply to everyone else, they are, if they are well conceived, helping not only him but all of us to get to our multitudinous destinations in the minimum time in which this can be done smoothly and safely.

How many traffic laws do we need? That is a difficult question to answer numerically. A general traf fic code need consist only of a few simple rules, but they could all, it would seem, easily be embodied in a single statute. In any case, if the government confined itself to enact ing a code of laws simply intended to prevent mutual aggression and to maintain peace and order, it is hard to see how such a code would run into any great number of laws. England in 1854 Now let us look at the situation we actually face. In order to get an adequate picture, let us begin by comparing it with the situation as it existed more than a century ago in, for example, England. Let us take the year 1854, when the British philosopher, Herbert Spencer, wrote an essay on uOverlegislation." Some of us are apt to assume that the mid-nineteenth century in England was perhaps the time and place when a great nation came nearest to a laissez-faire regime. Spencer did not find it so. He found the country buried under needless legislation, and piling up more. With the change of a few details, his essay sounds as if it were written yesterday: cCTake up a daily newspaper and you will probably find a leader ex posing the corruption, negligence, or mismanagement of some State department. Cast your eye down the next column, and it is not unlikely that you will read proposals for an extension of State supervision. . . .

Thus, while every day chronicles a failure, there every day reappears the belief that it needs but an Act of Parliament and a staff of officers, to effect any end desired." Spencer went on to refer to mid nineteenth-century England's u20,OOO statutes, which it assumes all Englishmen to know, and which not one Englishman does know." He found officialdom systematically slow, stupid, extravagant, unadap tive, and corrupt; and yet given more and more duties to fulfill. In stead of being confined to its pri-, mary duty of protecting each individ ual against others, the State is asked in a hundred ways to protect each individual against himself cCagainsthis own stupidity, his own idleness, his own improvidence, rashness, or other defect."

1979 THE TORRENT OF LAWS 5 (1t is in the very nature of things," he continued, ((that an agency employed for two purposes must ful fill both imperfectly .... And if an institution undertakes, not two functions, but a score-if a govern ment, whose office it is to defend citizens against aggressors, foreign and domestic, engages also to dis seminate Christianity, to administer charity, to teach children their les sons, to adjust prices of food, to in spect coal mines, to regulate rail ways, to superintend housebuilding, to arrange cab-fares, to look into people's stink-traps, to vaccinate their children, to send out emi grants, to prescribe hours of labor, to examine lodging-houses, to test the knowledge of mercantile captains, to provide public libraries, to read and authorize dramas, to inspect pas senger-ships, to see that small dwell ings are supplied with water, to regulate endless things from a banker's issues down to the boat fares on the Serpentine-is it not manifest that its primary duty must be ill discharged in proportion to the multiplicity of affairs it busies itself with?"

L,et us now pass over a century and a quarter, and see how our situation today compares with England's then. It is the individual states that enact the laws that affect their citi zens most often and most intimately in their daily living. A figure averaging the number of laws passed each year in each of the fifty states would be hard to compile on a con tinuing basis and perhaps mean less than particular examples. Let us take our two most populous states, New York and California. During 1975, 1976 and 1977, the New York state legislature passed, respec tively, 870, 966 and 982 public laws. C(Private laws" are not included here, as these individually affect only a handful of people.) During these same three years the Califor nia state legislature passed ,1280, 1487 and 1261 public laws. Prohibitions or RUle-Changes 1\row let us look at the implica tions of this. What does a new law do? It either puts a new prohibition or a new compulsion on each of us (or a large number of us), or it changes the rules under which we have hitherto been acting. So on the basis of these figures the citizens of indi vidual states are being subjected to an average of about a thousand new prohibitions or rule-changes every year. Noone is excused from not knowing what everyone of these new laws commands. I leave it to the reader to picture what all this means in terms of human liberty.

But we have not even got to Fed eral laws. Supposedly, these are only needed to cover such matters as interstate commerce and are subject to severe limitations by the Con6 THE FREEMAN January stitution, so an innocent reader of that document might not see the need for many such laws. Though the Federal books were presumably blank when it started, the First Congress, which began on March 4, 1789, did not see the need for many Federal laws. It enacted only 94. But then, as more and more laws were piled up, succeeding Congres ses were convinced that more and more additional laws were neces sary. The 85th Congress, which opened in January, 1957, enacted 1,009 laws; the 94th, which began in January, 1975, enacted 588. The ten Congresses during that period enacted an average of 735 laws each, which means an average of 367 new Federal laws a year-or one new law every day. The reader should be re minded that individually many of these laws ran to well over 100 pages each.

Congressional Promises The mania for piling up additional laws-new compulsions or prohibi tions or changes of the rules-seems to be endemic in our democratic pro cess. Every two years, when a new Congress is chosen, the rival candi dates are eager to convince the vot ers that they can shower more bless ings upon them than their respec tive competitors. ~~There ought to be a law," they tell the voters, to forbid this or that, or to give you this or that. ~~If I am elected, I will introduce a bill" -to guarantee you this or that. So almost every Con gressman introduces at least one bill with his name attached to it. In the 94th Congress, which began in January, 1975, 3,899 bills were introduced in the Senate and 15,863 in the House-an average of 37 bills per member. These are by no means unusual figures. In the 93rd Congress, 4,260 bills were intro duced in the Senate and 17,690 bills in the House. It is at least one stroke of luck for the country that only about one in every thirty or more such bills survives to enactment.

But the individual Congressman who introduces it has made his point. He has ~~carried out his prom ise" to the voters. It has been estimated that Ameri can legislative bodies ranging from city councils to Congress pass 150,000 new laws every year. 1 This total does not mean too much, be cause only a small section of the total applies to the residents of any given town or state. But a very meaningful figure would be the total number of live laws that still do apply to American residents of any given city or state. Since its beginning Congress has enacted more than 40,000 laws. It is a fair assumption that most of these are still operative in some form. When we come to the individual lNewsweek, January 10, 1977.

1979 THE TORRENT OF' LAWS 7 states we get to some really formid able figures. For Connecticut I am officially informed that: ~~We do not have information on the ~live' laws now on the books, but it is our un derstanding that there are about 3,500,000 words in the eleven vol umes of the General Statutes."2 The legislative authorities of California regret that so far as the number of ~~presently operative statutes" ofthat state are concerned, ~~no such enumeration is readily ob tainable," though ~~most (but not all) enactments of the California legisla ture are codified in one of twenty eight codes." And the Department of State of New York informs me that so far as the total of live laws on the state's books are concerned, ~~unfor tunately, we don't have the answer to this question." So far as the ~~con solidated" (as distinguished from the uunconsolidated") laws are con cerned, however, these can be found in ~~six volumes covering 6,891 pages." Noone is allowed to plead ignorance of any of these state laws, of course, if he happens to violate one.

Local Ordinances When we come to the number of town and city ordinances to which each of us is subject, it is difficult to 2Letter, June 7, 1978, from Agnes L. Kerr, Director, Administrative-Legislative Division, Office of the Secretary of State, State of Con necticut. say precisely what would be an av erage figure. But in Boston, for exalmple, the Building Code alone contains about 500 pages; in addi tion, the City of Boston code consists of approximately 300 pages of ordi nances and 300 pages of statutes. The Administrative Code of New York City consists of ten volumes running to a total of 8000 pages. There are also 23 thick volumes of ring binder notebooks containing the rules and regulations of city agencies published since 1967. But on top of all of these laws Federal, state, and localis piled the greatest mountain of all-the endless orders, regulations and edicts issued by the Federal and state ~~independent agencies." There are eighty-nine separate Federal in dependent agencies listed in the Congressional Directory for 1977.

These are in addition to the innu merable commissions, uoffices,"~~ser vices," and ~~administrations" listed under the twelve cabinet depart ments. As lung ago as 1954 the Hoover Commission found that the Federal government embraced no fewer than 2,133 different function ing agencies, bureaus, departments, and divisions. And practically all of them were running ~~programs." It was ten years ago that Dela ware Congressman William V. Roth and his staff made an eight-month statistical study and came up with the finding that ~~no one, anywhere, 8 THE FREEMAN January knows exactly how many Federal programs there are" -or who is spending how ·much on what. Ac cording to the 1968 Roth study, the Federal government at that time had 1,571 identifiable programs. Questionnaires sent to various agencies drew spotty responses. In quiries were made as to the purpose of some 478 programs in Health, Education and Welfare; only 21 re sponded.

In August 1978, Congressman Gene Taylor from Missouri, going through stacks of the Code of Federal Regulations, found that the Code ran to 19,789 pages in 1938, to 20,643 in 1958, to 73,149 in 1976, and calcu lated it would top 120,000 pages by the end of 1978. Adding the Costs How can we add up the countless costs, penalties, discouragements, delays, hazards, impediments, obstructions, that these orders place in the way of production and com merce? Even if we give up the futile attempt to add up the government regulations numerically, we can still point to some of the costs and hardships that they impose on the taxpayer, the motorist, the busi nessman, the homeowner, the con sumer, the worker, the investor, and the nation as a whole. In the July Tax Review of 1978, published by the Tax Foundation of New York, Murray L. Weidenbaum, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, has detailed some of these costs: • The outlays of 41 regulatory agencies are estimated to have in creased from $2.2 billion in the fis cal year 1974 to $4.8 billion in fiscal 1979, a growth of 115 per cent over the five-year period.

• Federally mandated safety and environmental features increased the price of the average passenger automobile by $666 in 1978. • There are over 4,400 different Federal forms that the private sec tor must fill out each year. That takes 143 million man hours. The Federal Paperwork Commission re cently estimated that the total cost of Federal paperwork imposed on private industry ranges from $25 billion to $32 billion a year, and that tt a substantial portion of this cost is unnecessary." • Regulatory requirements im posed by Federal, state, and local governments are adding between $1,500 and $2,500 to the cost of a typical new house. • On the basis of a conservative estimating procedure, the aggregate cost of complying with Federal regu lation came to $62.9 billion in 1976, or over $300 for each man, woman and child in the United States. On the same basis, these costs may have reached $96.7 billion in the fiscal year ending September 30, 1978.

• The minimum wage law has 1979 THE TORRENT OF LAWS 9 priced hundreds of thousands of people out of the labor markets. One increase alone has been shown, on the basis of careful research, to have reduced teenage employment by 225,000 . • Approximately $10 billion of new private capital spending is de voted each year to meeting govern mentally-mandated environmental, safety, and similar regulations rather than being invested in profit-making projects. Edward Den ison of the Brookings Institution has estimated that in recent years these deflections of private invest ment from productive uses have re sulted in a loss of approximately one-fourth of the potential annual increase in productivity. • The nation as a whole feels the effect of government regulation in a reduced rate of innovation and in many other ways. The adverse con sequences of government interven tion in business decision-making range from a slowdown in the avail ability of new pharmaceutical products to the cancellation of numerous small pension plans.

Congressman Gene Taylor, whose figures on the extent of the Code of Federal Regulations I have previ ously cited, declares: ~~The cost im posed on the American economy by federal regulatory activity is now more than $60 billion per year.· This serves to. drive up the cost of con sumer items, harasses small businessmen, fuels inflation, and in creases the tax burden on the indi vidual citizen." An Ominous Trend Suppose we turn back, from our survey of the present enormous power and control now exercised by government, to a look at its growth since 1854 in England when Herbert Spencer was already expressing his alarm at the extent of that control. If the reader will glance down the list of the interferences that Spencer was then deploring, he will see that our own government is still engaged in all of them, or their equivalent (wi th the exception only of dis serninating Christianity and send ing out emigrants), but has added literally hundreds more.

In 1977 The Conference Board of New York was referring to some of that year's economic interventions: price and income controls; limita tions on profits; growing representa tion of workers and government on company boards of directors; statu tory wage hikes; credit limitations; foreign exchange and import con trols; limitations on foreign own ership; rent controls and subsidies; regulations on land-use planning; environmental, safety and consumer protection regulations; antitrust laws; direct and indirect taxes; and government ownership. But the list could have been indefinitely ex tended.

10 THE FREEMAN January There are two or three ways of trying to measure the size or growth of government quantitatively. One index is the number of people that it wholly or partly supports. In 1940 all American governments, Federal, state and local, were employing 4,474,000 people. In 1977, the num ber was 14,624,000. The Federal government alone, in 1978, employed 2,066,000 persons in its armed forces and 1,930,100 in full time permanent civilian employ ment. In addition, it was making Social Security payments to some 33 million persons, and the Congres sional Budget Office was estimating that about 44 million were receiving some form of welfare aid. The annual expenditures of the Federal government tell a succinct story. If we take them at ten-year intervals since 1929, we get the fol lowing result: Year Expenditures 1929 $ 3.1 billion 1939 8.8 1949 38.8 1959 92.1 1969 184.5 1979 487.5 If any forecaster had dared to pre dict in 1929 that fifty years later the Federal government would be spending nearly 160 times as much in dollars in a single year (or 43 times as much in ttreal" terms), nobody would have believed him. By such a comparison, we have had a 4,200 per cent growth in the Federal government since 1929.

A Bewildering Mass of Government Interventions Some readers may object that it is meaningless to complain about the mere number of laws; that we should carefully separate the ttgood" laws from the ttbad," and deplore only the latter. What this objection overlooks is that the mere multipli-, cation and proliferation of laws is itself a major evil. Every unneces sary law is itself bound to be per nicious. And almost all laws that interfere with the functioning of the free market tend to delay or prevent necessary readjustments in the bal ance of production and consumption and to have other consequences op posite to those that the framers in tended. When the rules of the game are being changed every day, when the totality of laws and regulations reaches the tens of thousands and the hundreds of thousands, the number of legislative blunders must multiply far more than proportion ately. How is it possible to talk of retaining our liberties, for example, when collectively we are subjected not only to thousands of prohibitions and compulsions but to daily in creasing prohibi tions and compul sions?

More than forty years ago the 1979 THE TORRENT OF LAWS 11 Swedish economist Gustav Cassell was warning: ~~The leadership of the state in economic affairs . . . is necessarily connected with a bewil dering mass of governmental inter ferences of a steadily cumulative na ture. The arbitrariness, the mis takes and the inevitable contradic tions of such a polity will, as daily experience shows, only strengthen the demand for a more rational co ordination of the different measures and, therefore, for unified leader ship. For this reason planned econ omy will always tend to develop into dictatorship." 'Nhatever the outcome may be, the future seems ominous. By what ever standard we measure it-the number of laws, the rate at which new ones are enacted, the multipli cation of bureaus and agencies, the number of officeholders, pensioners, and relief-recipients the taxpayer is forced to support, the total or rela tive tax load, the total or per-capita expenditures-there has been an ac celerative growth in the size, arbi trary power, and incursion of govern ment, and in the new prohibitions, compulsions, and costs it keeps im posing upon us all. ® II)l:,\S ();'\ L1BEHTY Self-Discipline As I GROW OLDER, it becomes increasingly distasteful to me to impose my will upon any being. With the passing of the years, I have discovered that I have quite enough to do in disciplining myself, my thoughts and emotions and impulses-in keeping my own house in order. Self discipline is the only kind that is of much worth. So long as we are self-disciplined we are free. When we must be disciplined by others, or are called upon to discipline others, we fall into one kind of bondage or another; in the first case we are held down by others, in the second case we are pulled down by others.

The lust for power is the most pernicious of human weaknesses, the cause of more misery than any other. Power through political position, power through social status, power through wealth, power over our children, power over our employees, power over our domestic animals is not the craving for any of these a manifestation of the same spiritual frailty? The enlightened man seeks to guide others by rational persua sion, by example; by the contagion of his enthusiasm; he shrinks in spiritual stature when he must resort t9 compulsion. Although we are sometimes forced to use force, we should for our spirit's sake avoid such occasions to the limit of our ability. Humility is a virtue difficult to define, and the attempt to cultivate it has led to some strange paradoxes. But if we mean by humility reluctance to impose our will upon others, it is one of the foremost among all of the moral virtues.

ALEXANDER F. SKUTCH, "Animal Friends, Dependent and Free," Nature Magazine, March 1952 Alejandro Chafuen War Without End EVERY DAY of the year acts of ter rorism are striking fear into the hearts of innocent people. Commer cial airliners are hijacked with hun dreds of people aboard, hostages are taken, private property is destroyed, and political foes are murdered. In the U.S. alone in 1975, a total of 1313 bombings were recorded, killing 69 people and injuring 326.1 Terrorism is threatening the so cial, political and economic order of Western societies. Terrorists attack the very system of peace that pro motes social cooperation and divi sion of labor, the system that offers the highest levels of comfort and wellbeing man has ever enjoyed. They strike in small groups like the Mr. Chafuen has been awarded a scholarship by the Centro de Estudlos sobre la Llbertad In Argentina for special study In economics under Dr. Hans Sennholz at Groye City College, Pennsyl yanla.