Legitimacy Does Not Come from the State

You heard it here first:  On Rush Limbaugh today, Mark Steyn joked that he will soon have a new imminently soon-to-be-imminently-released book.  It will be all about the over-burdening of America with regulations, such as in the case of the lemonade stand shut down by police in Georgia, or the banning of homemade goods at bake sales in Pennsylvania.  (As the Wall Street Journal article’s subtitle puts it, “Inspector Nabs Homemade Desserts At St. Cecilia Church’s Lenten Fish Fry.”  The tag and URL on the first story put it very succinctly: “strange” and “bizarre”.) 

When government gets this big, it sucks up all the oxygen in the room; there’s less and less left for the rest of us to do anything else.  Or, as Steyn put it, it’s very bad for our culture to get the idea that government is the source of all legitimacy—in such a world, people are still allowed to do things outside of government, but only if the government blesses their endeavors with the required permits and licenses.  Even a little lemonade stand cannot be allowed to stand unless it has the blessing of the almighty Leviathan.

It should be possible for Americans to grasp this; Steyn points out that de Tocqueville understood it almost two hundred years ago.

To fight the Leviathan, Steyn (joking but also not joking?) recommends a campaign of widespread civil disobedience, with more and more citizens opening unlicensed lemonade stands on their lawns, until the regulation becomes unenforceable.