WASHINGTON, DC, Feb 17 – What happened? Where did we go wrong? Our Founding Fathers gave us, as Thomas Jefferson put it in his First Inaugural address, “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
Americans are fed up with onerous government regulations. They are fed up with the intrusive demands on their lives imposed by politicians. And they want their freedoms reinstated.
The Policy Circle describes itself as “a non-partisan, grassroots organization that provides a framework to boost civil discourse and civic engagement.” Not long ago, it produced a comprehensive brief on the topic of government regulations. The brief noted that “The Administrative Procedure Act (APA), U.S. law, enacted in 1946, stipulates the ways in which federal agencies may make and enforce regulations. The APA was the product of concern about the rapid increase in the number of powerful federal agencies in the first half of the 20th century … The purposes of the act were: (1) to ensure that agencies keep the public informed of their organization, procedures, and rules, (2) to provide for public participation in the rulemaking process, (3) to prescribe uniform standards for the conduct of formal rulemaking and adjudicatory proceedings, and (4) to restate the law of judicial review.”
The first Code of Federal Regulations [CFR], which classifies federal regulations, was printed in 1938. It contained 18,193 pages. The 2020 edition of the CFR contains nearly 186,000 pages.
Indeed, a certain amount of regulation is necessary. I, for one, am reassured that the Food and Drug Administration regulates the safety and effectiveness of drugs. It makes me feel okay that the U.S. Department of Agriculture checks out the foods I eat. But it made me laugh out loud in 2012 when the city of Bethesda, MD, shut down children’s lemonade stands because they didn’t have licenses.
A new Gallup survey shows that I am not alone. Sixty percent of those who participated in that poll declared themselves to be dissatisfied with regulations. Just 28% — a new low- said they were okay with the way the government regulates our lives. What’s interesting is that the majority of Republicans [72%], Independents [59%], and Democrats [55%] are dissatisfied with the current state of government regulation.
Some regulations, past and present, seem to have been instituted in jest.
In 1969, Skamania County passed a law to protect Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch. If you found and killed one or the other, you could go to jail for five years. How about the law passed in the state of Utah. It reads: “Any person is guilty of causing a catastrophe if the person causes widespread injury or damage to persons or property.” And thank goodness South Carolina repealed a law in 2016 that was on its books, making a man guilty of a misdemeanor if he seduced an unmarried woman.
But my favorite law is the one passed in New Jersey that made it a crime for one to wear body armor while “engaged in the commission of, or an attempt to commit, or flight after committing or attempting to commit murder, manslaughter, robbery, sexual assault, burglary, kidnapping, criminal escape or assault.”
One can only wonder if some of our regulations and laws were written by some sarcastic, bureaucratic comedian. God help us; they were the work of real-life, officious civil servants.
As a resident of the PRNJ, you have to understand the level of “wokeness” that permeates all aspects of the so-called Democrat Party, America’s Socialist Party, that controls this state. Nothing is too absurd or insane to be legislated into law here. If some delusional leftist can think it up, it can be enacted into law with resounding applause from throngs of cheering idiots. The same can be said of all the surrounding Democrat run states in the tri-state area and the northeast in general.
This article reaffirmed what I already knew about the American people getting fed-up with government intrusion and overreach into our daily lives.
As a resident of the PRNJ, you have to understand the level of “wokeness” that permeates all aspects of the so-called Democrat Party, America’s Socialist Party, that controls this state. Nothing is too absurd or insane to be legislated into law here. If some delusional leftist can think it up, it can be enacted into law with resounding applause from throngs of cheering idiots. The same can be said of all the surrounding Democrat run states in the tri-state area and the northeast in general.
This article reaffirmed what I already knew about the American people getting fed-up with government intrusion and overreach into our daily lives.