Don Boudreaux measured the 2003-2004 CFR in the Library of Congress as 26 lineal feet of thin paper imprinted in small type. CFR is short of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. From the podcast transcript, Don said:
[I] Closed eyes, randomly grabbed a volume off the shelves, wanted to see if I knew what was in it. Turned out to be from the Department of Agriculture. Opened it at random, put finger on random page; regulation set up the Southwest Texas Lettuce Growers’ Association. That’s correcting a market failure–that’s what government does. Government does so much it’s impossible to know it all.
To help us visualize just how much regulatory burden the Americans carry, David P. Hayes has photographed the 2008 CFR for us. In 1925 the United States Code (USC) was a single volume. David measured the 2008 version of the USC at 6 feet of shelf. So to understand just what the current law of the land is we need to know 32 lineal feet of fine print.
For those wishing to know more about what their sprawling government has been up to, they can now study the entire CFR online. That is obviously a good thing — that at least voters can audit the prodigious output (in theory). I haven’t find Don’s section on the Southwest Texas Lettuce Growers’ Association, but I did find vast details regarding such as § 319.56-24 Lettuce and peppers from Israel.
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