I’ve just done a posting at Samizdata about the phenomenon of excessive regulation, so excessive that even if an organisation wants to obey it, it can’t. It’s just too voluminous, too complicated, sometimes even too contradictory. (One of the Samizdata commenters told of how his encryption duties seemed to require some sort of infinite regress and were un-obeyable.)
The White Rose Relevance of this is, Cicero apparently said:
Excessive law is no law at all.
Which means that in practice the law becomes whatever those in charge decide to make it. And that is the point at which White Rosers should sit up and notice, because that is when people who make trouble for the authorities by saying things that the authorities disapprove of, get prosecuted not for their wicked sayings (which might be a rather hard charge to make stick and would anyway draw attention to the sayings) but for non-compliance with plumbing regulations, for failure to fill out the proper forms concerning employee sick-leave, for baking bread of the wrong size and shape, etc. The completely we are all likely to be breaking this or that law, the more completely they have us by the proverbials.
T. M. Lucas also commented as Samizdata, drawing the attention of its readers to a series of posts his blog has on these themes.
I don’t know who this Lucas fellow is but he sounds like he has a solid head on his shoulders B-)
On a more serious note, the fundamental problem of liberty in this modern age is the one way ratchet effect. There is a distinctly unequal pressure between adding regulations and subtracting them. Equalize the pressure so that the metric is functionality and the state will naturally wither away as we find better and more efficient private alternatives to most of the tasks it undertakes. But the pressure has to be equalized or liberty will always be in trouble.