Michael Barone is the latest public policy prognosticator to take note of Charles Murray’s latest book. Barone’s column at Human Events ponders Murray’s recommendation of widespread civil disobedience as a tool to fight an overly large government.
What is to be done? Citizens, says Murray, should be willing to violate laws that the ordinary person would instantly recognize as ridiculous. And deep-pocketed citizens should set up a Madison Fund, to subsidize their legal defense and pay their fines.
Civil disobedience will stick in the craw of conservatives who revere law and order. Deep-pocketed donors may be repelled. And Murray admits that deciding what regulations civil disobeyers should disobey involves tricky judgment calls.
But he argues that his project might not be entirely quixotic, because the nation has changed in ways not envisioned by the Progressives and New Dealers, and contrary to the predilections of the regulators at agencies like OSHA and EPA.
The Progressives thought that the nation was becoming more uniform and that supposedly disinterested regulators could and should make it more so. Murray points out that the contrary is the case.
The cultural uniformity that people remember from the post-World War II decades is the exception rather than the rule in American history. We were a religiously, ethnically and regionally diverse nation in James Madison’s time, Murray says, and we are once again. The uniformity temporarily imposed by shared wartime and postwar experiences is no more.
In addition, the assumption that centralized regulators would have unique expertise has proven unfounded. Government bureaucracy is increasingly a kludgeocracy (a word coined by the liberal political scientist Steven Teles), mindlessly enforcing absurdly precise rules by threatening ruin upon anyone who resists.
