simple, few, and constant.............?

Laws are made now chiefly by regulatory agencies that combine in themselves all three powers of government.  The popular or elected branches may overturn these regulations only when they unite to do so, and this is increasingly rare.  So every institution in society is in principle subject to comprehensive regulation.  Every employer, every school, many clubs, and family life itself are now the subject of rules too complex for the lay person to grasp.  Those rules are not always enforced, nor can they be, but Americans sense that they better be looking over their shoulders, careful of what they say.
     This has changed the way we live.  Compliance increasingly replaces law-abidingness as the public goal.  Laws, the Founders held, must be simple, few, and constant.  Then we may all know what they are, live under them, and help enforce them.  This makes us equal, ruler and ruled.  It means that we do not quail before the forces of the law.  We are the forces of the law.  Compliance, by contrast, means adapting constantly to changing and complex instructions from central authorities, and it means the employment of specialists to interpret the regulations and make sure others conform.  In addition to this, whole populations, and not only in the inner city, live in long-term dependence on the government.  It means that the government is separate from the people, and it means that the government grows.

-Larry Arnn, as culled from this essay