I have argued before that the unelected “fourth branch” of
government, the federal agencies, are out of control. Here is an interesting statistic.
A recent project went through all federal criminal law and counted them. There are
about 4,500 federal criminal laws, all passed by Congress.
Professor John Coffee of Columbia Law School has tried to
estimate how many federal criminal regulations
there are. His work leads him to estimate more than 300,000 federal regulations that carry criminal penalties
– regulations that were never approved by congress and penalties that are
applied outside of any court.
I rest my case.
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