Federal Regulations - Cure for Economic Ills?

In 1949, after 150 years of Federal government, we had about 20,000 pages of federal regulations. By the year 2000, we had about 120,000 pages of federal regulations. Now, in 2008, we have over 200,000 pages of federal regulations. In the first 150 years this is an average of 133 pages a year of added regulations. In the next 51 years, the federal regulatory burden of pages was increased at the much higher rate of 1961 pages per year. In the eight years since 2000, the number of added pages per year has averaged 10,000 pages/year. I suppose that this means that our Congress is composed of men who are now 10,000/133 times or 75 times smarter than the Congressmen who started our republic! Isn't it good to be ruled by such supremely intelligent people?

Now of course, all of my readers, being much brighter people than the average person, know all of these regulations and are fully capable of living their lives in accordance with them. We know this because it would clearly make no sense to expect people to obey laws that they do not know. Since our Congressmen have never read the laws they have voted for, we can assume that they do not know these laws. We also are aware of this because they are constantly being found to be violators of the laws. But the people are held responsible for knowing these laws. Since the federal agencies can only offer the citizen contradictory advice on what the laws mean, we cannot turn to them. In many cases we could turn to the federal courts which have made many rulings on these regulations, but this means that we have a lot more reading to do and then we still have to figure out what that means too. But, we ordinary citizens have copious free time to devote to this exercise. Unlike our Congress, whose full time job is the making of laws, we somehow have the time to read all of these laws, agency documents, and court decisions. We the people are clearly all geniuses! Isn't it wonderful that our Congress thinks so highly of us!

Now, being geniuses, of course it dawns on us that those who do not read the laws they pass and do not know the law have no business forcing the rest of us to live by their rules. This is like being put back in high school where most of us had teachers who were no better than average students in high school who nonetheless set the rules. How fun was that? How great to be treated like children by teachers who had returned to the only place they ever felt comfortable, namely the over-controlled environment of high school.

Our ever-dependable Mainstream Media constantly barrages us genius citizens with injunctions to have Congress create still more laws and regulations. What does that say for their intelligence?

Our university professorial class agitate for more laws and regulations by eliminating free speech from the universities and using their class lecterns to issue socialist propaganda which it takes many of our youth 10 years of being in the real world before they can see how false it is. But what does this call by professors for more and more laws say about their intelligence?

In particular, Congress, the MSM, and a host of professors are all calling for still more regulations to deal with the slowdown in our economy brought on by endlessly invasive and foolish laws already on the books. Of course, these disparate calls for more interference in our complex economy and with the complex lives of those citizens we have already established to be geniuses, is sowing much confusion and uncertainty. Even our genius citizens cannot figure out how to proceed in growing our economy and investing for the future under these conditions.

How did we invert the pyramid of ability in which the few imbeciles rule the many geniuses? Is this way of governing odd or what? Perhaps some one of you MSM, Congressional, or professor types can actually provide some kind of rational explanation for your fascination with ruling the lives of geniuses with myriad one-size-fits-all life-recipes? This writer naively believes that if you would use the force of government to rule the lives of others, especially your betters in intelligence, you have a severe requirement to prove the wisdom of your laws. You should also be aware of what they are.