Rule Makers! Are There Too Many or Not Enough Rules, Regulations, Laws, and Policies? Is Life Worse or Better Off With More Rules? Is Making a Rule to Protect A Few Good For the Many?

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Organizations are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits, but the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives. They have to be trained never to take initiative, lest they wander off into activities that are deemed by the authorities to be out of bounds. The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.” In his Liberties essay, Edmundson writes that this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data. He concludes: “They are using the terms of liberation to bring more and more free people closer to mental serfdom. Some day they will awaken in a cage of their own devising, so harshly confining that even they, drunk on their own virtue, will have to notice how their lives are the lives of snails tucked in their shells.” This essay comes from the New York Times. The essay is titled; "Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts." The author is David Brooks. You can read the full article here: Opinion | Administrators Will Be the End of Us - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Zac and Don talk about the rule makers who keep making more and more rules in our society. Do we have too many rules or not enough? Are the rules getting in the way of people being able to build anything?