It is, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw, a recipe for a form of despotism peculiar to modern democracies. It does this, wrote Tocqueville, by enforcing “a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules” that reduces citizens “to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” The sobering thought is that we’re all complicit in that infantilization. After all, we keep voting for the politicians who put this leviathan in place.
via Roger Kimball: This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit – WSJ.com.