Living French

... the sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations - complicated, minute, and uniform - through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way past the crowd and emerge into the light of day. It does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting on one's own; it does not destroy; it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way, it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

These are the words of Tocqueville, a Frenchman who became America's most famous chronicler. He offered these words as a description of French society both before and after its revolution, describing America as a different type of country where he hoped this fate might be avoided; where the spirit of liberty, individualism and self-reliance would keep the authoritarian streak in man at bay. Unfortunately, we have softened and now we face the kind of soft tyranny that must be turned back if we are to avoid the hard kind.

We have obsessed on regulating everything, thereby slowly curtailing, enervating and extinguishing the entrepreneurial culture that has made us great. We pretend we can compensate and correct for this self-destructive behavior by promoting affordable housing, while simultaneously raising the cost of it by requiring absurdly large minimum lot sizes. We subsidize economic development while smothering it with environmental mandates that know no bounds and are subject to no tests of reasonableness. We promote smart growth while throwing up every obstacle to any growth. We admonish the landowner to exercise care of his land and the species that inhabit it while depriving him of every right to use it, thereby encouraging the destruction of that which seek to protect. We promote the saving of farmland while restricting the farmer with what he can do to raise the capital and produce the income needed to sustain it.

We have, in short, lost all sense of balance. We have become stupified, as Tocqueville predicted; ourselves no more than "herds of timid and industrious animals" on the same order as those we regulate. It's time for a new direction. We need to throw off unnecessary regulations and restore the power of regulation to the lowest levels of government where it can be done with the modesty, reasonableness and balance demanded of all law. We need to change our focus from expanding the scope of land use regulation to streamlining it and stripping it down to the essentials; from what the gentry desires, to what the common man requires to protect his rights and his liberty under the law. We have the tools of science and information to equip the least of governments, the ones closest to the people with the power to regulate themselves. Let's stop building up higher and higher levels of regulation and go precisely in the opposite way; toward self-government and individual liberty. It's the American way and it's superior to anything the French have ever done, with the possible exception of the Notre Dame Cathedral.