“Few would wish to live in a completely lawless land. (Whether we need ‘government’ is a different question.) But our ancestors seemed to understand that laws were best kept simple, few and clear, maintained primarily by a voluntary consensus among the governed. It was left to the perverted genius of our modern era to invent the career of ‘lawmaker,’ and to adopt the weird notion that the quality of our elected representatives is best judged not by their efforts to keep us FREE of entangling new skeins of regulations, but rather by how energetically they weave new webs to ensnare us. Take the state Legislature in neighboring Sacramento. Please.” (01/08/09)