"A land of hyper-regulation is not the same as a land of law."

Is it possible to live without breaking some law? Mark Steyn writes,

A land of hyper-regulation is not the same as a land of law. The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled on two cases of British women whose employers forbade them to wear crucifixes — one an NHS nurse, the other a British Airways baggage handler. The court ruled against the nurse but in favor of the baggage handler. Why? What particular legal principle illuminated both cases? Don't ask the jurists. Re the BA employee, they declared that "the court has reached the conclusion in the present case that a fair balance was not struck." How is BA or any other employer to know what constitutes a "fair balance"? They can't — or not reliably. Only the state and the courts can definitively establish that, by colonizing Moulton's "middle land" unto policing dress codes, religious expression, social habits, and even casual conversational exchanges.

Or, as we now know, policing the kinds of cakes one is compelled to bake.

As that Shaw's sign suggests, a kind of civic paralysis sets in: It is a small step from a citizenry that no longer knows how it should act to a citizenry that no longer knows whether or if it can act, and from there to a citizenry that can no longer act. When everything is the domain of law, everyone is potentially a criminal. Over the decades, National Review has been famously antipathetic to Ayn Rand, but she called this one a long time ago. In Atlas Shrugged, one of her characters muses: "One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

Which is about where we are.

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