Alexis de Toqueville’s writings in the early 1800s about America’s wonderful freedoms cautioned about the danger of what could happen if we ever allowed government to “bureaucratize” the nation, creating a French-like maze of day-to-day regulations to follow in every industry, destroying the ingenuity and imagination that made this country great.  He wrote:

“This power extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born.;

It does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”

As you see today President Barack Obama’s attempt to pass one regulatory deform after another, please think about de Toqueville’s revelations almost 200 years ago, and don’t let us all become slaves to our government.

William W. Watson

St. Joseph