At a certain point, why bother? As fast as you climb the ladder, you’ll be taxed and regulated down the chute back to the bottom rung. You’ll be frantically peddling the treadmill seven days a week so that the statist succubus squatting on your belly as you sleep can sluice the fruits of your labors to untold millions of bureaucrats from the Bureau of Compliance microregulating you till your pips squeak while they enjoy a lifestyle you never will. “The business of America is business,” said Calvin Coolidge. Now the business of America is regulation. It is necessary for once free people to take back responsibility for their own affairs. Ultimately, judge-made law and bureaucrat-made regulations and dancing with the czars strike at the compact between citizen and state. By sidestepping the consent of the governed, as regulators do, or expressing open contempt for it, as judges do, the governing class delegitimizes itself. When government is demanding the right to determine every aspect of your life, those on the receiving end should at least demand back that our betters have the guts to do so by passing laws in legislatures of the people’s representatives. Micro-regulation is micro-tyranny, a slithering, serpentine network of insinuating Ceaucescu and Kim Jong-Il mini-me’s. It’s time for mass rejection of their diktats. A political order that subjects you to the caprices of faceless bureaucrats or crusading “judges” merits no respect. To counter the Bureau of Compliance, we need an Alliance of Non-Compliance to help once free people roll back the regulatory state.
We also need a new trust-busting movement to bust the dominant trust of our time—the Big Government monopoly that monopolizes more and more of life. It is depressing that the government monopoly is now so taken for granted that much of our public discourse simply assumes the virtues of collectivism. For example, it’s often argued that, as a proportion of GDP, America spends more on health care than countries with government medical systems.9 As a point of fact, pre-ObamaCare “America” doesn’t spend anything on health care: hundreds of millions of people make hundreds of millions of individual decisions about what they’re going to spend on health care. Whereas up north a handful of bureaucrats determine what Canada will spend on health care—and that’s that: health care is a government budget item. If Joe Hoser in Moose Jaw wants to increase Canada’s health-care spending by $500 drawn from his savings account, he can’t. The law prevents it. Unless, as many Canadians do, he drives south and spends it in a U.S. hospital for treatment he can’t get in a timely manner in his own country.
While we’re on the subject, why is our higher per capita health spending by definition a bad thing? We spend more per capita on public education than any advanced nation except Luxembourg, and at least the Luxem-bourgers have something to show for it.10 But no one says we need to bring our education spending down closer to the OECD average.
America spends more on vacations than North Korea. America spends more on lap-dancing than Saudi Arabia (well, officially). America spends more per capita on health than Canada, but Canada spends more per capita on doughnuts than America. Yet the Canadian Parliament doesn’t say, well, that shows that we need to control costs so we’ve drawn up a 2,000-page doughnut-reform bill, which would allow children to charge their doughnuts to their parents until they’re twenty-six years old. Ottawa would introduce a National Doughnut Licensing Agency. You’d still see your general dispenser for simple procedures like a lightly sugared cruller, but he’d refer you to a specialist if you needed, say, a maple-frosted custard—and it would only be a six-month wait, at the end of which you’d receive a stale cinnamon roll.
