Is Politics Insoluble?

The Torrent ofLaws I 51
ance of production and consumption and to have other consequences
opposite to those that the Framers intended. 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 proportionately. How is
it possible to talk of retaining our liberties, for example, when
collectively we are subjected not only to thousands of prohibi-
tions and compulsions but to daily increasing prohibitions and
compulsions?
More than 40 years ago the Swedish economist Gustav
Cassell was warning: "The leadership of the state in economic
affairs ... is necessarily connected with a bewildering mass of
governmental interferences of a steadily cumulative nature.
The arbitrariness, the mistakes and the inevitable contradic-
tions of such a polity will, as daily experience shows, only
strengthen the demand for a more rational coordination of the
different measures and, therefore, for unified leadership. For
this reason planned economy will always tend to develop into
dictatorship."
Whatever the outcome may be, the future seems ominous.
By whatever standard we measure it—the number of laws, the
rate at which new ones are enacted, the multiplication of
bureaus and agencies, the number of officeholders, pensioners,
and relief-recipients the taxpayer is forced to support, the total
or relative tax load, the total or per capita expenditures—there
has been an accelerative growth in the size, arbitrary power,
and incursion of government, and in the new prohibitions,
compulsions, and costs it keeps imposing upon us all.
1. Newsweek, January 10, 1977.
2. Letter, June 7, 1978, from Agnes L. Kerr, Director, Administrative-
Legislative Division, Office of the Secretary of State, State of Connecticut.