Freedom and the Lawmakers: A Book Review of Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze (Alberto Mingardi, EconLib)
Gorsuch and Nitze provide some figures of the paper blizzard sweeping over Washington, D.C. “Less than a hundred years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018 the U.S. Code encompasses 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the last decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to about 2 or 3 million words of new federal law each year.” Agencies “publish their proposals and final rules in the Federal Register; their final regulations can also be found in the Code of Federal Regulations. When the Federal Register started in 1936, it was 16 pages long. In recent years, that publication has grown by an average of more than 70,000 pages annually. Meanwhile, by 2021 the Code of Federal Regulations spanned about 200 volumes and over 188,000 pages.” And “not only have our laws grown rapidly in recent years… so have the punishments they carry.”