The latest issue of Imprimis featured commentary by Hillsdale College’s president, Larry Arnn. The subject matter, two ways of education and two ways of governing, made it sound like the reader was in for a torturous hodgepodge of jibberish, not unlike answers to lame essay questions prepared by teachers who didn’t want to think a whole lot when composing the test. Instead, Arnn delivered some well-considered points. Here’s one teaser:
Compare the Northwest Ordinance and the Homestead Act – perfect examples of the older, constitutional way of governing – with the new bureaucratic way of imposing central control through rules and processes that no one can understand. Compare them, for instance, to the Affordable Care Act, which when it was passed in 2010 – and this does not include the countless rules and regulations it has generated over the past three years – ran to 363,086 words. This law – and in the true sense of the word it wasn’t a law at all, but something different – was not readable or comprehensible to any member of Congress who voted for it or to the citizens whose lives it was aimed at manipulating in a detailed and intrusive way. Could anything be uglier? And is it surprising, being governed in this way, that the richest nation in human history is going broke?
