The day may not be far off, I sometimes think, when this country will grind to a halt, will simply seize up, like an engine deprived of oil or coolant. The moving parts will no longer move. Smoke will billow out the tailpipe, followed by explosion and flames. The reason? In a word, "regulation." The machinery of society is getting so overloaded, so topheavy with controls, it works with ever-increasing difficulty. Logically the day will come when it won't work at all. Like a car so loaded with safety devices it can't move. All the power going into the bells and whistles, none left over for merely making the damned thing run. A recent personal experience made it no longer just a matter of amusing farfetched speculation. It left me fairly frothing at the mouth, a near-anarchist. I'd just executed a durable power of attorney, aimed chiefly at health care, in full accord with the Missouri law governing such matters. Ah, but that wasn't good enough! Laws, you see, aren't what they used to be. It's sort of law today, gone tomorrow. All my effort to comply with Missouri law, I soon learned, was set at naught by a new Federal law. Just what "hippa" stands for has been mercifully blanked out of my memory, no doubt in sheer self-defense; but that's the affectionate name of that "medical privacy act" most of us have lately met in the form of those bits of bumfodder shoved in our faces by our harassed health care folks, assuring us our privacy is being vigilantly looked after and demanding our signature attesting we've been told, and that we understand; which of course we don't. It's all well-meaning, if meaningless, bureaucratic routine. Health care givers and receivers alike submit to such impertinences in puzzled, longsuffering disgust. Why, why, we wonder, do our lawmakers inflict such things on us? Who suffered the delusion that "medical privacy" is a big worry, a Constitutional "right" yet? And above all, Cuibono? Who gains? We're actually supposed to be comforted to think our doctors, druggists, and hospitals are spending ever more of their time and energy caring, not for us, but for Uncle Sam's paperwork? It's a perfectly fine law, we're told. The health care industry just overreacted, construing it so strictly that even your spouse can't get a peek at your medical records. But why should such "overreaction" surprise us? Like most institutions today, the whole health care industry goes in terror of lawsuits, thanks to decades of similarly vague Federal laws, capable of being stretched by the courts to mean virtually anything. Your health-care durable power of attorney gives your attorney-in-fact full access to your medical records? No it don't, not unless it explicitly overrides "hippa"! Even then, who knows? We can only pray our real masters, the Federal judges, will soon sort out this clash of laws, state and Federal, in terms that don't just further muddy up the waters. It's a bit late in the day to ask it, but one asks the question anyway: Where in the Constitution is the Federal government given the power to pass such laws? Of course it's been merrily passing them whether or no, at least since the New Deal. The Supreme Court first tried to hold the line, ruling the more outrageous New Deal acts unconstitutional. But it soon lost its nerve under the assaults of shameless demagogy. "Nine old men" were holding the nation back, cried FDR, who proposed to "pack" the court. But it proved unnecessary. "The Supreme Court reads the election returns," cynics said after it caved in. So it was the populace itself, it was us, who voted to scrap Constitutional government. The true-believing liberal constructionist assures us such laws are rendered Constitutional by the clause authorizing the Federal government to "promote the general welfare." But this is simply a phrase in the Preamble, a general rhetorical statement of intent, to be defined in the body of the Constitution itself. The government is granted the power to "promote the general welfare" in ways specified in the Articles, and no other. And, says the Bill of Rights, all powers not explicitly granted are "reserved to the states, or to the people." As James Madison put it, "The two words 'general welfare' are qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators" (of whom Madison himself was perhaps foremost). Jefferson agreed: "Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated" (chiefly in Article 1, Section 8). A Federal government with the power to "promote the general welfare" without qualifications would be, as Madison said, a Federal government metamorphosed into something never in tended, a government of absolute, unlimited power, not of laws at all, for laws are limits, qualifications. For if "general welfare" is not qualified by specific enumerations, any earthly thing can be described as "promoting the general welfare." And this is exactly what we've wished on ourselves, of course: a government that can do absolutely anything. Liberals find the idea irresistible: a government with unlimited power to "do good"! The list of their flexings of that power is itself unlimited: The Legal Services Corp., the Endangered Species Act, the myriad Civil Rights Acts, the No Child Left Behind Act, the whole Department of Education, the Americans With Disabilities Act, etc. ad inf. For all these, as columnist Walter Williams points out, "There is no Constitutional authority whatsoever." What's more, they overlook the fact that in thousands of years men have never been able to agree what's "good" and what's not-so-good; that they inevitably come mixed up together, and that "doing good" to one means doing ill to somebody else, that the more the government can do for you, the more it can do to you. They even seem to have forgotten Lord Acton's warning that power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The power of courts and bureaucrats is becoming absolute, and one doesn't have to look far for the ill effects. Scarcely a day goes by without a court somewhere throwing out the results of an election, or the solemn decision of a jury, two of the supposed sacred pillars of democracy. One doesn't have to venture far into the swamps of modern bureaucracy to feel oneself miring in the quicksand, the natural element of those benign little Hitlers whose guiding principle seems to be "We must 'do good', though the world be lost, and the heavens fall!"