Charles Murray spoke at a NYC luncheon last week articulating the same logical and effective response to the tyranny of some government agencies….. Read his marvelous book.
By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without PermissionMay 12, 2015
by Charles Murray
The following remarks were delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on April 29, 2015 honoring Charles Murray with the third Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society.
“I am a little wary about receiving an award named for Edmund Burke two weeks before the publication of a book in which I advocate massive, systematic civil disobedience. I am not at all sure that Mr. Burke would approve. So let me try to placate Mr. Burke’s shade by talking for a few minutes about the roots of the book called By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.
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Twenty20 License
The operational plan I propose in the book is reasonably straightforward. The reasons that I think we are driven to that plan speak to some complex realities facing the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
First, the operational plan: to make large portions of the Federal Code of Regulations unenforceable. I want to make government into an insurable hazard, like flood, fire, or locusts. The way I want to do it is through massive civil disobedience underwritten by privately funded defense funds. Perhaps the best way to illustrate it is by telling you how I was inspired to write the book in the first place.
My wife knows a man in a town near us that I will call Bob. Bob operates one of the many kinds of businesses that use Latino workers. What makes Bob different from almost every other such employer in his line of work is that all of his workers are documented. He spends about $20,000 to $30,000 a year for the excruciatingly complicated visa process. He pays good wages, pays for his workers’ airfares, and is in other ways a model employer and member of his community.
My wife started to tell me stories about how Bob has come under relentless harassment by the government. Why pick on him, when his part of the country is full of employers who have 100 percent undocumented Latino workers? Because, by doing the right thing and documenting his workers, he opened himself up to easy inspection by government enforcers of regulations. He made himself a soft target.
The story that tipped me over the edge involved a stupid regulation that Bob could not comply with. He didn’t have enough American-born employees — and there’s no way he could get Americans to work for him. Bob became so frustrated that he told the bureaucrat that he would fight it in court — at which point the bureaucrat said to him, “You do that, and we’ll put you out of business.” And Bob knew that is exactly what would happen.
Out of my anger came a vision of a mystery man with a pinstriped suit and briefcase who appears from nowhere, taps the bureaucrat on the shoulder, and says: “We are taking over this man’s case. We will litigate it as long as it takes. We will publicize that litigation in ways that will embarrass you and your superiors. None of this will cost our client a penny, and we will reimburse him for any fine you are able to impose. And if you come back and bother him again, we will go through the whole process again.”
And that led to the idea of what I am calling the Madison Fund: a large foundation that funds legal services that will champion individual citizens against Goliath. Its longer-range point is to make clear to other Americans that they don’t have to take it any more. There are ways to force an intrusive government to back off. Specifically, the Madison Fund would have three goals:
To defend people who are innocent of the regulatory charges against them.
To defend people who are technically guilty of violating regulations that should not exist, drawing out that litigation as long as possible, making enforcement of the regulations more expensive to the regulatory agency than they’re worth, and reimbursing fines that are levied.
To generate as much publicity as possible, both to raise the public’s awareness of the government’s harassment of people like them and to bring the pressure of public opinion to bear on elected politicians and staffs of regulatory agencies.
The Madison fund is step one. But there’s no reason why individual professions can’t establish their own defense funds. Let’s take advantage of professional expertise and pride of vocation to drive standards of best practice. For example, the American Dental Association could form Dental Shield, with dentists across America paying a small annual fee. The bargain: dentists who are running practices that meet ADA’S professional standards will be defended when accused of violating a regulation that the ADA has deemed to be pointless, stupid, or tyrannical. The same kind of defense fund could be started by truckers, crafts unions, accountants, physicians, farmers, or almost any other occupation.
