Law and Government

 

Laws and Big Government

     By William Samuel

Friday, June 2, 1995

What is the primary reason for big 

government? Population is certainly one of the 

problems, but not the main one. Government's 

growth is proportional to two things: 

population and the number of laws. 

Imagine a garden just hacked out of the 

 jungle. 

That garden is the original 13 colonies just 

after we threw off the burden of England. We 

were a brand new nation and free of British 

tyranny. Not a single law existed. There wasn't 

a law book in the whole land. We were totally 

free. By definition, a law is a restriction of 

human conduct. Freedom, by definition, 

means the absence of human restrictions. 

 

Now, this new garden is on rich soil and there 

are others in the world who would gladly 

 come and take our freedom from us. 

Realizing this, we quickly established 


the Declaration of Independence as the Law of 

our new land. This is the equivalent of putting 

a string around our garden to keep foreign 

armies out. A string isn't enough, so laws 

were passed allowing us to raise an army and 

navy for our common defense. This much law 

is the equivalent of a chain link fence around 

the garden. 

We live in this garden and make our living 

there. The cost of the army, navy, the 

president and all our representatives come 

from us, the people who live in the garden, 

from our produce and our labor there. All the 

offices for the politicians are located 

somewhere on the fence, built by us, paid for 

by us. The more laws we have, the thicker and 

taller grows our fence and the less sunshine 

hits the ground to grow our crops. 

We've had "lawmakers" for 200 years, so our 

fence has become a wall and grown so tall and 

thick that not enough sun hits the ground for the crops to grow as well as they did and it 

becomes more difficult to pay for the upkeep 

of the fence. Every time there is an injustice 

on the ground of the garden, some agency of 

government thinks the problem can be 

improved with more laws, more enforcement 

and more taxes, more expensive fence, more 

shadowy government. 

 

40 years ago when I first wrote this 

 over-simplified example of what's wrong with 

too much government, it would have cost too 

many government employees their jobs and 

their votes for a politician to advocate giving 

sunshine back to the garden by lessening the 

numbers of laws that were no longer 

necessary. Now, we hear people begging for 

government to become smaller and simplified. 

We hear of the desire for whole sections of the fence to be removed. Education, Labor and 

other entire programs could be eliminated, 

thus reducing the size of the government and 

reducing the demands made on us, the people 

who till the soil and run the factories. 

 

When this country was new, the founding 

fathers and mothers had many discussions 

about the form our government should take. 

Benjamin Franklin wrote in his journal that he 

imagined that our representatives would 

spend an equal time each year removing old 

laws that were no longer necessary! He also 

imagined that these people would spend half 

their time making new laws and repealing old 

ones, spending the other half of their time at 

home where the problems could be 

determined. 

 

As a boy, I remember the great pride a 

politician took when his name became 


attached to a new law. Now, before we all 

perish under the weight of the laws and 

lawbooks, I'd love to see legislators become 

just as proud of the laws they eliminated and 

the problems that might be solved by giving 


freedom back to the people. Problems can be 

solved by removing the restrictions that old 

laws represent. For instance, old laws add 

25% to the construction costs of all 
 
government buildings alone! 

Is it any wonder that many in the garden have 

grown paranoid and irrationally suspicious of 

a overnment that has a yearly budget over a 

trillion dollars? The shadow of the fence has 

grown to cover the entire garden now and 

only those things prosper that grow in 

subdued light, like greed, lust and rampant 

materialism. Nowadays, a business man can't 

move without breaking somebody's law. He 

needs legal advise to pay his taxes, for 

goodness sake.

It seems to me now, in these late years of my life, just the elimination of governmental duplication of services would save us enormously.

 I remember that as a business man, I would 


no longer get through a city or county 

inspection than I'd be faced with the same 

inspection from the state or the federal 

government. Little did our founding fathers 

realize how many laws we'd accumulate at the 

city, county, state and federal levels during the 

next 200 years. The time has come to simply 

remove some of this old weight and let the 

sunshine of freedom in again. I remember the 

illustration of 30 years ago concluded that we 

must reduce the fence around the garden the 

same way we built it. If we didn't, we people 

in the garden would angrily tear the fence 

down. Isn't that what happened in the 

Oklahoma City bombing? Someone tried to 

blow a hole in the wall. 

 

I also remember that the hula hoop craze had 

just spread across the nation. In exactly the 

same way, the thought of reducing the 

numbers of laws on the law books could also 

"catch on." It is only the slightest shift of 

thinking that we realize that a law is a 

restriction of human conduct and that freedom 

is the absence of too much law, not the burial 

under tons of it. With a little encouragement 

from high places, it could become fashionable 

to attempt the solution of problems by the 

unique act of removing old laws instead of 

making more. Law unmakers are freedom 

restorers. 

The more laws we have, the larger our 

government grows. After all, those laws have 

to be enforced and regulated. We must have

judges and lawyers, trials and prisons and 

enforcement people.