The Birth of Liberty-Day 3

Did you know that nobody really knows exactly how many federal criminal laws/regulations there are on the books? And that each day the average person is breaking at least 3 of them without even knowing it?  And that every year Congress continues to criminalize a new crime each week?

Photo Credit: oll.libertyfund.org/quote/177

This surely was not the case when Founding Father James Madison was alive, but he certainly could have predicted it.  Madison helped write the U.S. Constitution and Federalist Papers and eventually became president himself in 1808.  He was very keen to this type of danger saying:

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow.”

Well today there are over 5,000 federal criminal laws and somewhere between 300,000-500,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally. Even if just a misdemeanor or an arrest that doesn’t result in a conviction, the end result can still be disastrous in terms of lost money, time and reputation.

A large and powerful government enforcing Increasingly complex and incoherent laws that its citizens may or may not know they are breaking, takes us far, far away from the concept of individual liberty so cherished by our Founders. In fact it is a form of tyranny that’s leading us down a bad path that someday will be impossible to get off of.

Will we wise up before it’s too late?

This is part of a multi day series of quotes from our Founding Fathers. Here are links to days 1, and 2 respectively.