“Inurement” is one of those lesser-known but interesting words. It references the process of accustoming people to a thing, generally something unpleasant. And what’s scary for many to contemplate — freedom lovers particularly — is that man can become inured to most anything. This includes tyranny.
An ideal example was provided by a 1997 New York Times Magazine article on slavery in Muslim Mauritania. “God created me to be a slave, just as he created a camel to be a camel,” said a woman identified as Fatma. She’d been inured.
An activist named Boubacar Ould Messaoud, himself born a slave, expounded further. People such as his mother “think that there is nothing wrong with slavery,” he told the Times. “They have no other universe. After 15 or 20 generations, people become totally submissive.” Rebellion becomes, the paper added, “inconceivable among people who have lost their collective memory of freedom.”
This is a cautionary tale because, while Americans aren’t slaves in any literal sense, they’ve become inured, too. So warns commentator Mark C. Ross, who lamented Wednesday, “Sometimes I feel like a frog that’s getting boiled.”
Creeping Totalitarianism
This slow boil is a long-standing, generally unnoticed process. Note here that a law, regulation, or mandate is (perhaps with rare exception) by definition the removal of a freedom. For it states that there is something you must or mustn’t do. Therefore, the more laws, regulations, and mandates (LRM) you have, the less free you are all other things being equal.
And what happens every year? Our federal, state, and other governments enact more LRM, but hardly ever rescind any. This means that over time we become progressively less free.
Logic dictates that continuing this process long enough will eventually deliver totalitarianism or something approximating it. Our country already constrains us, considering all governmental levels, with a few hundred thousand to a few million LRM. No one even knows the exact figure. Maybe AI will eventually figure it out.
It’s not just LRM, though. Just get a load of what Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch writes in his 2024 book Overruled:
Our legal institutions have become so complicated and so numerous that even federal agencies cannot agree on how many federal agencies exist.
Who would’ve guessed that?
As for LRM, while we don’t know their precise number, the ones we do become aware of can be maddening. The aforementioned Ross provided some examples:
California has outlawed the buying and selling of gas-powered garden tools, such as lawnmowers, blowers, and hedge-trimmers. It’s still legal, however, to use them, while the equipment dealers of western Nevada are cleaning up big time. Some municipalities have also banned the use of blowers because of the noise…but still allow motorcycles. Just recently, California banned “non-compostable” plastic bags, which used to be commonly available in grocery stores for shoppers to put their green beans, mushrooms, etc. into prior to checkout. The acceptable bags now being offered are beyond fragile, making it problematic for them to make it all the way home without rupturing.
Unfortunately, too, these LRM don’t just cause inconvenience, but sometimes real damage. As Front Page Magazine wrote last year:
In California, blessed with abundant water from the snowmelt of the Sierra Nevada, EPA regulations are barriers to building new dams and reservoirs. So instead, billions of acre-feet of water are dumped into the Pacific –– in part to protect the Delta Smelt, a two-inch bait-fish supposedly threatened with extinction. As a result, during the recent virulent wildfires in the Los Angeles area, fire hydrants and storage tanks ran out of water, leaving thousands of homes to be burned to the ground.
Can’t Make a Move — Without Big Brother’s Approval
Excessive LRM also hinder productivity and job creation. Just consider gratuitous licensing requirements. As investigative reporter John Stossel stated in 2017:
Whether you’re a doctor, an electrician, a teacher, a cab driver, a hair stylist — even a tour guide! — the government increasingly demands that you get a license before you are allowed to work in your chosen profession. In the 1950s, only about one in 20 workers needed the government’s blessing to do their jobs. Today, that figure is more than one in three.
Because of safety issues and concerns about accountability, many people think occupational licensing is a good idea. Yet licensing doesn’t prevent fraud and incompetence (in some cases, it even provides protection from such claims). And all over America, people want to work but can’t because it’s often nearly impossible or too expensive to get the proper government permission.
One example is how New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission requires the purchase of a $100,000 “Medallion” to own a taxi. (And it once cost $700,000.) In contrast, entering the business in Washington, D.C., only runs you about $250 yearly. This explains why D.C. has more taxis relative to population, lower fares, and more black taxi ownership.
Of course, to echo Stossel, some assume governmental LRM are delivered by beneficent statesmen devoted to our betterment. Well, anyone believing that should consider New Jersey’s “single-use” plastic-bag ban, designed, ostensibly, to reduce plastic usage.
After it took effect in 2022, plastic use for bags increased almost 300 percent. Why?
The “reusable” bags replacing them comprise 15 times as much plastic, but they’re not used 15 times as much. Yet has this counterproductive stifling of freedom been repealed?
Nope, not yet. So do the politicians really care about the environment — or do they have ulterior motives?
Then there are high housing costs, a common gripe today and part of the impetus for socialism’s embrace. Yet unmentioned is that LRM created since 1978 can add 50-plus percent to housing’s costs in certain markets. Given this, wouldn’t it make sense to scrutinize these LRM to see if at least some can be eliminated? Not to politicians, apparently — good luck finding a candidate who even addresses the matter.
All this, not to mention truly tyrannical LRM, such as those leading to a child being seized from parents so he can be mutilated into an opposite-sex simulacrum.
Is There a Remedy?
So can creeping totalitarianism be arrested — or even reversed? As to this, there’s no substitute for having a virtuous, educated (not just schooled) electorate that cherishes legitimate liberty. Yet one idea is something I proposed a generation ago: The Defense Against Tyranny Amendment.
This measure would place a constitutionally mandated cap on the number of LRM that can exist. The precise ceiling would have to be determined. I would, however, favor a figure much lower than the total number of LRM extant. This, of course, would require lawmakers to finally become law-takers. For they would have to strike legislation from the books until they reached the amendment’s prescribed threshold.
Whatever the ceiling imposed, though, once reached, politicians couldn’t institute a new LRM without rescinding an old one. Though not foolproof — it wouldn’t address LRM’s qualitative character — this would help keep the total amount of freedom enjoyed more constant.
This could also, of course, be replicated on the state and local levels.
Unfortunately, this is not nearly as likely to happen as is inurement. For as the Mauritanian slaves prove, people are as adaptable as they are corruptible.
