Dangers of intrusive government

Many people go into it because they enjoy bossing people around. Surely this is why a court had to overturn a decision by the government of Glendale, Ohio, when it threatened a man with fines and jail because he put a “for sale” sign in his car parked in front of his house. The city said that people might be distracted by the sign and walk into traffic. . . . The alderman’s horror of uncontrolled... [more]

Many people go into it because they enjoy bossing people around. Surely this is why a court had to overturn a decision by the government of Glendale, Ohio, when it threatened a man with fines and jail because he put a “for sale” sign in his car parked in front of his house. The city said that people might be distracted by the sign and walk into traffic. . . . The alderman’s horror of uncontrolled speech is an example of what Elizabeth Price Foley, law professor at Florida International University, calls “an ineluctable byproduct of disregarding the morality of American law.” In her book “Liberty for All” (2006, Yale), she says that the growing exercise of legislative power “in the name of majoritarian whims” has eroded America’s “twin foundational presumptions” — limited government and residual individual sovereignty. The original constitutional structure has, she says, been inverted: Citizens are required to convince the courts that laws restricting liberty are “irrational”; government should be required to articulate justifications for limiting liberty. The Founders’ goal — in John Adams’s formulation, a nation of “laws, and not of men” — has, Foley believes, “been taken much too far.” She thinks that we have become a nation of laws and not of liberty. We are, she notes, a nation with local laws prohibiting the wearing of hats in theaters or courtrooms, catching fish with one’s bare hands, carrying a slingshot, teaching others about polygamy, having a garage sale for more than two days a year, serving alcohol within a mile of a religious camp meeting. . . . - George Will [less]