The Tyranny of Equality

Part 1: Liberty, Law, and the Common Good

In the essay, Freedom vs. Liberty, I explained the difference between the two (as I see it).  I wrote that Liberty “is the environment in which a person may act in freedom without restraint or coercion of law and the consequence of its enforcement.”  I also wrote: 

“It is a paradox that the institutions created to secure the right of Liberty, do so by passing, executing, and adjudicating Laws, and every law by its very nature attenuates Liberty. Therefore, there is an indirect relationship between Law and Liberty, that is, the more laws the less liberty. This diminution of Liberty is justified as necessary for the Common Good. Libertarians seek to minimize the scope and number of laws to maximize personal liberty while preserving the Good that is Common between all of its citizens.”

We might visualize this relationship as follows:

Several questions come to mind: (1) Has there been an increase in the number of laws and regulations in our country? (2) If so, has there been a change in our understanding of the Common Good that has precipitated this change? (3) Are we, as Americans, okay with this?  In other words, how much of our Liberty are we willing to sacrifice for the Common Good?

Let us consider the first question: Has there been an increase in the number of laws and regulations in our country?  That’s a simple question—the answer is an obvious, Yes!  Consider the illustration below that show the increase in the cumulative Rules and Regulations in the Federal Register:

The graph above depicts the cumulative growth of the Rules and Regulations published in the Federal Register.  These are rules and regulations issued by the various federal bureaucracies over the past 21 years.  That has lead to an enormous growth in the circle of the Common Good.  Should we assume this has the blessing of the America people?  Not necessarily.  During the same 21-year period our elected representatives in Congress passed “only” 4,224 public laws, that represents only 5% of the laws, rules, and regulations that ultimate limit our liberty. 

These laws, rules, and regulations not only have a direct limiting effect on liberty they have a cost in dollars.  The Office of Budget and Management has estimated the cumulative cost of 115 selected regulations during the decade of 2002 to 2012 at between $57 and $84 billion.  The Small Business Association included the cost on the private side of compliance with the multitude of laws, rules, and regulations and came up with a staggering $1.86 trillion (https://cei.org/blog/red-tapeworm-2014-reckoning-dollar-cost-federal-regulation).  Liberty is further attenuated when private individuals and corporations have to spend an enormous amount of their resources to simply comply with the myriad of rules and regulations created by the federal government (and this does not take into account State and Municipal rules and regulations).

This expansion of the Common Good into the sphere of Personal Liberty must be a good thing—right?  If it were not, the American voter surely wouldn’t be voting for politicians that would passed so many laws, or created so many Agencies of Government with so many bureaucrats that created so many rules and regulations—right?  I don’t think so.  And I would go so far as to say that the values that led Patrick Henry to exclaim, “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” are no longer the values held perhaps by the majority of Americans and the people of the West in general.

The change that has occurred in the West did not happen overnight, but in a historical context, I believe the change happened very quickly.  If I am correct that our conception of the Common Good has changed (particularly in regard to how expansive it is allowed to intrude into the sphere Personal Liberty) and that it can be measured by the increase in rules and regulations then I believe we can identify when this seismic change in our culture began to occur.

Consider the graph below that shows the increase in the number of pages in the Federal Register over the past 75 years.

A near exponential growth in the Federal Register occurred in the seventies.  It only makes sense that the new rules and regulations were deemed necessary to address new realities (or old realities that would no longer wait) that made themselves known during the preceding decade.  The continued growth the Federal Register suggests that this was not a one time flurry of new legislation and regulation but there had and continued to be changes in the American consciousness and conscience that altered our understanding of the value of Personal Liberty with respect to the Common Good.  In order to examine this extraordinary transformation we need to understand the values of the West prior to this upheaval so that we can compare and contrast it with the changes that occurred during the sixties and seventies and which continue to the present.