Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [90]
The workplace is subject to a web of federal regulations. Where “public accommodation” is involved, such as a retail store or doctor’s office, there must be ramps, special bathrooms, widened doors, and curb cuts in the sidewalks. Even carpeting is scrutinized to make sure it is accessible.39 There are rules involving wages, taxes, health benefits, pension benefits, working conditions, environmental conditions, human resources, union elections, financial practices, and record keeping. The vending machine on the premises is regulated. It must have a “sign close to each article of food or selection button disclosing the amount of calories in a clear and conspicuous manner.”40
As I said earlier, the universe of federal regulations and their interpretations are too far-reaching and wide-ranging to catalogue and decipher here. Indeed, left unsaid are federal rules aimed at regulating so-called man-made global warming and carbon dioxide, which would engulf the private sector in one grand sweep; and the federal directives and mandates involving education at all levels, including instruction, funding, etc. Instead, these relatively few examples are intended to provide perspective and make tangible the extent to which the individual lives under increasingly burdensome controls imposed by a federal government that determines its own authority. Private interests, including property rights, are of little regard and nearly impossible to safeguard. Moreover, private citizens on whom the government imposes the duty to institute federal regulations are overwhelmed by the coercive powers of the administrative state, including audits, fines, penalties, confiscation of licenses and property, and prosecution. The hugely detrimental effects on human progress—including preventing, sabotaging, and discouraging the development of new lifesaving and life-improving technologies, processes, and products; wealth and job creation; and individual industriousness and self-sufficiency—are fatal to societal vitality.
There are those who blindly accept if not demand federal intrusion whenever and wherever it is said to improve “health, safety, education, and the environment.” For them, it is enough for the masterminds and their experts to claim their intention to improve man’s condition. These individuals, it seems, are the type of citizens More had in mind in Utopia, where the Prince “will declare how the citizens use themselves one towards another; what familiar occupying and entertainment there is among the people; and what fashion they use in the distribution of every thing” (76). However, even in the smothering atmosphere of Leviathan, where the liberty of the subject (the citizen) is regulated by the all-powerful sovereign, Hobbes acknowledged its practical limits. “For seeing there is no commonwealth in the world wherein there be rules enough set down for the regulating of all kinds of actions and words of men (as being a thing impossible), it followeth necessarily that in all kinds of actions by the laws praetermitted, men have the liberty of doing what their own reasons shall suggest for the most profitable of themselves.…” (138) But do they? It is the endless pursuit of the utopian abstraction that tyrannizes the individual and society. As Charles de Montesquieu observed, “Countries which have been made inhabitable by the industry of men and which need that same industry in order to exist call for moderate government” (43, 18, 6).
How did we Americans cope before the advent of such a massive and intrusive administrative state? How did we feed, clothe, transport, and house ourselves? How did we make decisions about our health, safety, and well-being, and consumer items large and small? How did we raise our children and educate them, and manage our finances and retirement?
During his travels in America, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled that “[t]he secondary affairs of society have never been regulated by [the central government’s] authority; and nothing has hitherto betrayed its desire of even interfering in