St. Martin’s Press • 1994 • 408 pages • $24.95
“The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers- on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government.”
So wrote John Stuart Mill in 1859. Concurring is policy analyst James Bovard who has written a whale of a book, at once courageous, entertaining, and thoroughly documented. Bovard, author of The Fair Trade Fraud (1991) and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, holds that Americans pay dearly for idolizing the State and treating its interventionist laws as gospel.
He argues that the more we glorify government, the more liberties we lose, that the central issue of our times is between letting people build their own lives and compelling them to build their lives as the state dictates, that people are drowning in a flood of legislative and administrative law, that the American government wars on private property rights which are at the very heart of liberty, and that the vast effort of government intervention to improve society is “a dismal failure.”
In the war on property, Bovard cites the case of St. Bartholomew’s Church on New York’s Park Avenue. The parish tried to sell its community house next to the church and replace it with a high-rise office building which would have netted $100 million. But the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission denied the church’s petition because of its historic designation. The church sued that the designation amounted to an illegal seizure under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, only to face an adverse federal appeals court ruling in 1991: “The church has failed to prove that it cannot continue its religious practice in its existing facilities . . . . So long as the church can continue to use its property in the way that it has been using it—to house its charitable and religious activities—there is no unconstitutional taking.” In other words, bye-bye $100 million. Bovard sees the ruling as effectively handing over to local governments almost unlimited power to selectively place private property—and human freedom—in limbo.
As evidence of the flood of legislative and administrative law, the author points out that the Federal Register publishes each year some 70,000 pages of fine print of new laws, rulings, regulations, and proposals. The average citizen could hardly read this legal outpouring, let alone understand it; but it nonetheless silently gnaws at his life, liberty, and property as presumably enunciated by the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
Bovard wonders how liberty fares when Equal Employment Opportunity Commission officials can levy a fine of $145,000 on an owner of a small business in Chicago because he did not have 8.45 African-Americans on his payroll, when U.S. Agriculture Department agents can prohibit Arizona farmers from selling 58 percent of their lemon crop to other Americans, when government subsidies become a major factor in squeezing out unsubsidized developers, schools, theater producers, and farmers, when total federal spending has jumped in nominal terms, from $100 billion in 1963 to over $1.5 trillion in 1994. And this jump is before enactment of a Clintonlike health plan which would federalize (read socialize) one-seventh of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product.
Clearly, government in America overreaches, overtaxes, overgoverns—with abysmal results. James Bovard closes with an apt quotation from Henry David Thoreau: “If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, run for your life.”
Dr. Peterson, Distinguished Lundy Professor of Business Philosophy Emeritus at Campbell University in North Carolina and a Freeman Contributing Editor, is completing a book manuscript entitled Peterson’s Law: Why Things Go Wrong.
