- Oct 31, 2012
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For those who have not read Mark Levin's book Liberty and Tyranny, this is for you.
"The Statist has constructed a Fourth Branch of government - and enormous administrative state - which exists to oversee and implement his policies. It is a massive yet amorphous bureaucracy that consists of a workforce of nearly 2 million civilian employees. It administers a budget of over $3 trillion a year. It churns out a mind-numbing number of rules that regulate energy, the environment, business, labor, employment, transportation, housing, agriculture, food, drugs, education, etc. Even the slightest human activity apparently requires its intervention: clothing labels on women's dress, cosmetics ingredients, and labeling. It even reaches into the bathroom, mandating shower head flow rates and allowable gallons per flush for toilets. It sets flammability standards for beds. There are nearly one thousand federal departments, agencies, and divisions that make laws and enforce them.
The official compilation of rules issued by the federal government, the federal Register, contained 74,937 pages of regulations in 2006. Tolstoy's War and Peace, only 1,400 pages in length, seems as light and airy as a romance novel by comparison. The rules in the Federal Register are written in a dense and confusing style, often confounding the lawyers, accountants, businessmen, and others required to digest them. The estimated cost of simply complying with these regulations was $1.14 trillion. The National Taxpayers Union estimated that in 2006, US businesses and individuals sent 6.65 billion hours struggling to comply with the complexities of the tax code, at a cost of $156.5 billion in lost productivity for businesses alone.
All branches of the federal government, elected and unelected, have consumed more and more of the governing authority of state and localities, leaving them less room to exercise their discretion. In doing so, the federal government is imposing its will directly on the communities and citizens in contravention of the Constitution. Consequently, there has been a fundamental breakdown of the federal system.
Having spent decades fighting and losing legal challenges to federal encroachment, states have for the most part accepted the role the Statist has assigned to them. Many governors have become politically expedient on the subject, arguing schizophrenically for federal intervention while defending state preeminence. Even worse, a type of crony federalism now exists whereby states lobby the federal government for advantage or relief. It works like this: States convince the federal government to fund projects within their own borders by taxing the citizens of other states. In the name of stimulating the economy, states, counties, cities, and towns have compiled long lists of pork projects they want paid for by the federal taxpayer. They are also asking the federal government to bail them out from their own deficits. For the Statist, the voluntary surrender of state and local authority to the federal government is to be encouraged. Moreover, states with more onerous regulatory standards often urge the federal government to impose those standards on other states to "level the playing field" Individuals, unions, and businesses also seek federal intervention to supplant state decisions that they do not like."
"The Statist has constructed a Fourth Branch of government - and enormous administrative state - which exists to oversee and implement his policies. It is a massive yet amorphous bureaucracy that consists of a workforce of nearly 2 million civilian employees. It administers a budget of over $3 trillion a year. It churns out a mind-numbing number of rules that regulate energy, the environment, business, labor, employment, transportation, housing, agriculture, food, drugs, education, etc. Even the slightest human activity apparently requires its intervention: clothing labels on women's dress, cosmetics ingredients, and labeling. It even reaches into the bathroom, mandating shower head flow rates and allowable gallons per flush for toilets. It sets flammability standards for beds. There are nearly one thousand federal departments, agencies, and divisions that make laws and enforce them.
The official compilation of rules issued by the federal government, the federal Register, contained 74,937 pages of regulations in 2006. Tolstoy's War and Peace, only 1,400 pages in length, seems as light and airy as a romance novel by comparison. The rules in the Federal Register are written in a dense and confusing style, often confounding the lawyers, accountants, businessmen, and others required to digest them. The estimated cost of simply complying with these regulations was $1.14 trillion. The National Taxpayers Union estimated that in 2006, US businesses and individuals sent 6.65 billion hours struggling to comply with the complexities of the tax code, at a cost of $156.5 billion in lost productivity for businesses alone.
All branches of the federal government, elected and unelected, have consumed more and more of the governing authority of state and localities, leaving them less room to exercise their discretion. In doing so, the federal government is imposing its will directly on the communities and citizens in contravention of the Constitution. Consequently, there has been a fundamental breakdown of the federal system.
Having spent decades fighting and losing legal challenges to federal encroachment, states have for the most part accepted the role the Statist has assigned to them. Many governors have become politically expedient on the subject, arguing schizophrenically for federal intervention while defending state preeminence. Even worse, a type of crony federalism now exists whereby states lobby the federal government for advantage or relief. It works like this: States convince the federal government to fund projects within their own borders by taxing the citizens of other states. In the name of stimulating the economy, states, counties, cities, and towns have compiled long lists of pork projects they want paid for by the federal taxpayer. They are also asking the federal government to bail them out from their own deficits. For the Statist, the voluntary surrender of state and local authority to the federal government is to be encouraged. Moreover, states with more onerous regulatory standards often urge the federal government to impose those standards on other states to "level the playing field" Individuals, unions, and businesses also seek federal intervention to supplant state decisions that they do not like."
