“Innovation is the source of our progress. It is the cutting edge of the ever larger fulfillment of our aspirations. By attacking innovation, Regulation Man attacks tomorrow’s range of choice as well as today’s. By attacking an expanding technology, he attacks our capacity to solve tomorrow’s problems. All of this is done in the name of maintaining standards. We also lose choice when we surrender to bureaucratic agencies the power to make law. Our ability to influence legislation and to exercise some choice in it is very small even when laws are made by our representatives in open debate. This, by itself, is a powerful argument for minimizing the intervention of law into our lives. “The liberty of the subject.” said Thomas Hobbes, “depends upon the silence of the law.” By giving regulatory agencies the power to make detailed rules at will under very broad guidelines, we are surrendering even that vestigial element of control.
Of all of the laws to which we are subjected each year, only a very few are now made openly by our representatives, subject to some degree of public influence. Most emerge from the regulatory agencies as rules which have the full force and sanction of law. This is not only undemocratic; it is uncontrollable. Each agency rolls forward under its acquired momentum, propelled no longer by the will of the people but by the whim of the bureaucrat. The rules and innovations are not subject to full debate and Congressional approval: we are left with the rare and occasional power of specific Congressional veto, a power which can only be exercised after a vast time-consuming and heroic effort.
In many of the works of Regulation Man, the attention given to visible victims leaves the plight of the invisible victims unknown and unlamented. But when we add to all of those consequences the loss of our power as citizens to influence the rules which confine our behavior and restrict our choices, we can finally see the shape and the name of two of those previously unseen. The lesser of them is called democracy, and the greater one is called liberty.”
From: Regulation Man and the Invisible Victim By: Madsen Pirie