Prevent enforcement of ‘stupid, pointless regulations’ without changing the law?
Charles Murray appears on The Glenn Beck Program June 3, 2015. (Photo: TheBlaze TV)
Harvard University-educated political scientist Charles Murray says there is a way to prevent the enforcement of “stupid, pointless regulations” without changing the law. As he sees it, a large fund needs to be established to vigorously defend those who run afoul of the regulations, eventually creating an environment where bureaucrats are more selective in their enforcement.
“I call one version of it the Madison Fund,” Murray said on The Glenn Beck Program Wednesday. “It would be a couple hundred million bucks, I’m talking big money. The purpose of it would not be to defend the innocent. It would be to defend the guilty, people who are guilty of violating stupid, pointless regulations. And the idea is to overload the enforcement capacity of the regulatory agencies.”
Murray, author of “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission,” said the administrative state is essentially a legal system “which lies outside the rule of law” since most of the regulations were not written and passed by Congress.
“I want to have an incentive for the bureaucrats to back off,” Murray said. “Or as one of my friends put it, I want to pour sugar into the government’s gas tank. And once you establish that principle, I want the regulatory agencies to act like state troopers on interstate highways.”
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Murray said most people are technically going over the speed limit on interstate highways, but troopers tend to only pull you over if you are going “crazy fast.”
“They don’t go after us when we have a trivial violation that hasn’t harmed anybody,” he remarked. “They reserve their enforcement capabilities for people that cause some damage. … It doesn’t get the laws off the books. It doesn’t get regulations off the books. It changes the way they’re enforced to something much more reasonable. No harm, no foul.”
Beck said he believes the approach will work, in many ways because it is similar to the non-violent resistance of the Civil Rights Movement.
“I really truly believe this is part of the answer to save us, and it revolves around non-violent, civil disobedience,” Beck concluded.
This first published on The Blaze here.