“Show me the man and I will show you the crime.”
Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s infamous secret police chief, uttered those words not as satire but as standard operating procedure. In the Soviet Union, guilt was not discovered but assigned. What mattered was not justice but control.
In the United States, we like to imagine we are safely removed from such arbitrary tyranny. We have due process, juries of peers and a Constitution. But the machinery of law, quietly and incrementally, has crept toward a state of affairs that would make even Beria nod in grim approval. Today, there are so many laws—federal, state, regulatory and interpretive—that no American can confidently say he is innocent. The result is a legal system so vast, so amorphous, that it empowers the state to punish at will and selectively. Consider the Biden Department of Justice’s decision to prosecute President Trump for retaining presidential records—a power explicitly granted to him by the Presidential Records Act—while simultaneously declining to prosecute Joe Biden for the unlawful retention of classified documents from his time as vice president and senator, which were not protected under any such law. One man is hauled into court, the other is given a press conference. This is not the rule of law; it is the rule of legalism. And legalism, unchecked, is tyranny in a powdered wig.
The Congressional Research Service acknowledges over 300,000 federal regulations that carry criminal penalties. That’s not a typo. These are not statutes passed by Congress but rules crafted by bureaucrats, then endowed with the force of law. In contrast, the number of federal crimes codified by Congress was estimated at 3,000 in the early 1980s. By 2019, that number had risen to over 5,000—and that’s not counting the hundreds of thousands of ancillary crimes buried in the Federal Register.
Even legal scholars have abandoned the task of counting them. The American Bar Association tried and gave up. The Department of Justice spent two years and still couldn’t complete the list. Ronald Gainer, the DOJ official in charge of the effort, concluded that “you will have died and resurrected three times before you ever figure out an answer.”
What this means in practice is simple and terrifying: the state can always find something. A man may believe himself law-abiding, but if his dog barks too loudly in a national park (36 CFR § 2.15(4)), or if he forgets to affix the proper sticker to a UPS package, he may have committed a federal offense. There are more ways to break the law than there are laws to obey.
Harvey Silverglate, in his appropriately titled Three Felonies a Day, argued that the average American inadvertently commits multiple federal crimes daily. Not because we are wicked, but because the system is rigged. The proliferation of criminal laws has outpaced not only common sense but also constitutional boundaries. Congress passes vague statutes. Agencies write thousands of rules to interpret them. Those rules are then clarified by “guidance documents” that exist in a bureaucratic twilight zone: not technically law, but often enforced as if they were.
Between 2008 and 2018, federal agencies issued more than 13,000 such guidance documents. Many are buried in obscure databases, memos or even speeches. When Congress demanded a list in 2018, nearly half of federal agencies couldn’t provide one, even after three months of notice. If the regulators themselves can’t locate the rules, how are citizens supposed to obey them?
The system isn’t merely incompetent. It is dangerous.
Consider the case of the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida. Federal agents launched a multi-year surveillance operation—complete with undercover personnel and over $17,000 of taxpayer funding—to determine whether the museum’s cats were being treated humanely. The Department of Agriculture eventually reinterpreted an anti-circus animal cruelty law to apply to the museum’s feline residents. The museum was dragged into federal court and spent over $200,000 in legal fees. One of the cats was even burned by an electric fence installed to meet federal “safety” standards. Thus did a law meant to prevent tiger abuse in traveling circuses become a tool for regulating a literary landmark’s house pets.
Or consider the fisherman in Florida who discarded undersized grouper back into the ocean. He was prosecuted under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act—a law passed in response to the Enron scandal—for “destroying evidence.” The evidence? Fish. Dead fish. He faced up to 30 years in prison.
In both cases, the problem wasn’t just prosecutorial zeal. It was the existence of the laws themselves—absurd, amorphous and misapplied. Laws that were vague in origin, unclear in application and ripe for abuse.
When everything is a crime, justice is no longer blind. It is capricious.
Even the government cannot keep up. The IRS hotline has given inaccurate advice to nearly half of its callers. The EPA set up a hotline for questions about new environmental regulations—then warned callers not to rely on the answers in court. If regulators do not understand the law, then citizens have no hope of complying with it. The rule of law collapses when no one, not even the enforcers, can articulate what it is.
The consequences are not merely theoretical. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. And while that statistic is often used to criticize law enforcement, a more accurate diagnosis points to legislative hyperactivity. We have built a legal regime that confuses error with evil, oversight with offense and intent with guilt. Many crimes carry no requirement of mens rea—criminal intent. One can be prosecuted without knowing he was breaking the law. This reverses centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition.
The original federal criminal code contained about 30 crimes. It focused on obvious and severe offenses: treason, piracy, counterfeiting. Today, by contrast, Congress churns out millions of words of new law every two years. Each statute births a brood of rules, each rule a nest of guidance. What we are left with is not a code, but a maze—a Gordian knot of obligations designed not for justice, but for entrapment.
So what is to be done?
The first step is restraint. Congress must stop criminalizing everything. The law should speak sparingly and clearly. Every criminal statute should include a mens rea requirement. If guilt is to mean anything, it must require intent.
Second, regulatory crimes must be curtailed. Agencies should not have the unilateral power to create crimes. Only Congress—the people’s branch—should wield that authority. And when Congress delegates, it must do so narrowly and transparently.
Third, we must repeal obsolete and absurd laws. Let the Hemingway cats roam. Let the fisherman fish. If a statute cannot be understood by an ordinary citizen, it should not exist.
Finally, we must embrace the constitutional principle that criminal law is an instrument of justice, not of control. A free people cannot live under secret law. They cannot live under infinite law. And they certainly cannot live under a regime in which every act, no matter how innocent, is potentially criminal.
To paraphrase Hayek, the state should be a framework within which individuals can pursue their own ends, not a web that ensnares them.
Until then, we remain a nation of felons, governed not by law, but by its grotesque excess.
And the cats, God help them, are still under surveillance.
Special thanks to Kite & Key Media who brought attention to this story and produced the video included above. Follow Venessa Mendoza (CEO) and Troy Senik (Co-Founder) @kiteandkeymedia.
Sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping independent journalists overcome formidable challenges in today’s media landscape and bring crucial stories to you.
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Democrats seem to take inspiration from Himmler and Beria.
Excellent article. I wish you would send this to all of the congressmen.
This looks like an obvious and critical target for DOGE and its AI capabilities.